Save the last dance for me

By Peter Chianca
My earliest dance recital memories involve the time I was in elementary school and went to see one that featured my sister and about a dozen other 4-year-olds in royal blue tutus, standing in a line and … well, I’m not sure you could call it dancing, but they were certainly moving. This lasted for about three minutes, after which we watched as the rest of the show dragged on until sometime in the next decade; I may be wrong, but I think I might have hit puberty before it ended.
 

My sister thankfully moved on to soccer, thus ending my exposure to youth dance recitals — until a few years ago when my own daughter took up dancing. I think I realized I was in for it the first time I went to pick up recital tickets; they went on sale at 7 p.m., so I stupidly showed up at 6:45 to find hundreds of parents who had clearly been camping out there for hours, possibly in tents. Every time I turned a corner in the school building, the line continued on as far as the eye could see, until it finally seemed to turn back in on itself at the horizon point, like an M.C. Escher painting.
 

Once I finally got up to the front at 9:30 or so, I realized what was holding up the process: Parents got to pick their seats off an elaborate seating chart — sort of the dance recital equivalent of choosing your own lobster. Personally I would have settled for “best available” if it meant getting those three hours of my life back, but try telling that to the dance mothers at the front of the line, on their marks to sprint up to the seating chart like greyhounds chasing a decoy rabbit.
 

Of course, getting the recital tickets isn’t the only wild goose chase dance parents have to put up with — there’s also the hunt for the right leotard, and just last week we had a momentary panic when the straps broke on my daughter’s tap shoes just days before her recital. We were told in no uncertain terms to find a cobbler, and fast; this prompted a somewhat frantic search, since Google Maps doesn’t offer directions to the 1950s.
 

All of this is part and parcel of making sure the dancers are ready for the recital, which, as the school will remind you at every turn, is “fast approaching.” To dance schools the recital is always “fast approaching,” even if the last recital just ended; if they could they’d collect the next year’s costume deposit as you shuffled out after the final encore.
 

Speaking of those costumes: While it’s true that parents have to pay for them themselves — at upwards of $75 a pop for each number your kid is in (ballet, jazz, tap, hip-hop and whatever other styles they invent to justify another tuition fee) — you do get to keep them after the recital. That should come in handy if your daughter ever wants to go to a Halloween party as a hooker.
 

(Incidentally, you do save money on underwear — apparently, dancers don’t wear any. Suddenly, “Swan Lake” just got that much more disturbing.)
 

So after all this buildup to the “big night” — the months of rehearsals, the hundreds of dollars in tuition and costume costs, the hours spent sewing hats and hair clips onto giant afro wigs — you can imagine my surprise last weekend when we got to the auditorium at 6:55 for the 7 p.m. show (having barely managed to corral the gaggle of relatives and out-of-town guests) only to find they’d shut the doors on the hundred-plus people who’d yet to take their seats. Judging from the reaction of the crowd trapped in the foyer as the first dancers took the stage, I think I can imagine how a Colombian soccer riot gets started.
 

It probably didn’t help that the duo barring the door seemed to be taking their customer service cues from Dick Cheney. One of them actually declared to the now-frothing crowd that “At the Wang Center they don’t let you in late!”, apparently forgetting that they’d actually shut the doors early, and that this wasn’t the Wang Center but rather a suburban dance school featuring a good number of performers who were already up past their bedtimes.
 

They finally let us in after the first number, just as my daughter’s class was taking the stage. And I’m embarrassed to admit — as they tried to stop us again at the top of the stairs to wait for her number to end — I found myself grabbing as many of my party as I could and barreling through the barricade toward our front-row seats, with one of the Cheneys galumphing after me, yelling about fire codes as if I were charging the stage with a blowtorch. It wasn’t pretty, but apparently there’s no stopping that front-of-the-line rabid dance mother inside all of us when she chooses to come out.
 

Of course, as we sat down in our seats just in time to see my daughter nail all her cartwheels without losing her afro, all of the expense and frustration faded away. The world of youth dancing may be a strange and disturbing one, but in the end it is all about the kids — and when she came off that stage wearing a huge smile, I’ll admit I was a happy parent.

Although not as happy as I was afterwards, when she decided that next year she’d rather just play soccer.
 

Peter Chianca is a CNC managing editor and the brains behind the “The At Large Blog” (chianca-at-large.blogspot.com), which offers his observations on modern life, pop culture and parenting. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”