Dance Dance Revolution

This weekend was dominated by going to and preparing for the kids' dance recital. For the girl this is old hat. She has done three previous to this one and where as she gets excited for it every year, she doesn't get noticeably nervous. For my son, this was a first and nerves were high. This also marked the first time that I had to go to a dressing room and help prepare.

The recital is split into two acts, each 2 1/2 hours long. We had the pleasure this year of having kids' performances in both acts. For the mathematically challenged that means that we endured five hours of dance. Plus the intermission. This might seem like a long time, but compared to the dress rehearsal which moves at a much slower rate, it's not so bad. The dress rehearsal went a good 8/9 hours. Normally I would duck out for hours at a time, but thanks to my sons participation that wasn't going to happen this year.

The recital went reasonably well. My ass hurts from all the sitting, but other than that all makor disasters were diverted. The girl looked good in tap and ballet, but looked lost in the jazz routine. She admitted that she got confused. Oh well.

The boy looked good in his tap routine, much better than in dress rehearsal. Except for his refusal to look at the audience he looked pretty decent for a first year dancer. The jazz dance looked better in the dress rehearsal, but he didn't have any huge gaffs. His Penguin costume was a big hit. He handled himself well through out. He asked for a little extra encouragement from me backstage befoer he went on, and I gave him the old, "Nut up and be a man" speech.

The biggest stressor for us for the day was that we (I) managed to forget to bring the boys dance shoes. I told you I wasn't used to having to be responsible for this stuff. We didn't notice that they were missing until about 30 minutes before he was to go on. So we did some frantic searching and were able to borrow some tap shoes and jazz shoes from other dancers.

I hope this post wasn't as long for you to read as it was for me to live through. The result yesterday was that the kids were both totally hyped afterwards yesterday and had enough adrenaline pumping through them to stun a wild boar. I think the boy is going to sign up for dance again as he said that had lots of fun.