You Can Dance, You Can Jive, Having the Time of Your Life

Observations from a Dance Recital:

**One of the best parts of being in a recital is getting lots of flowers. Claire started receiving flowers before we even left for the show (thanks, Grandad and Mimi!) and ended up with so many flowers and sparkly wands and cookies that she couldn't even hold it all. Thank goodness her assistant (me) was there to keep up with it all.





**Another great thing about dance recitals is that you get to put on makeup and if you decide you want your hair curly, it's going to be curly (even if it takes over half an hour with a curling iron) because it's your recital, after all.



**Aside from being on stage, Claire's favorite part of the recital was hanging out backstage in one of the dressing rooms. Given that the recital was two hours long and Claire was only onstage for maybe five minutes total, you couldn't have paid me enough to be the one entertaining 20 four-year-olds in tutus and lipstick for an hour and 55 minutes.

General Observations:

**White, preteen girls + sideways hats + hip hop dancing = hysterical laughter

**If you have a young boy and insist on putting him in a hip hop class full of young girls, please also insist that he be excused from wearing a gold lame' shirt.

**If you have a young girl who is in said hip hop class, please exert your parental rights by refusing to make her dance to "Ice, Ice, Baby" (or any other song by Vanilla Ice) while wearing gold lame' shirts and gold dollar sign necklaces.

**If you have a young girl in the tap/ballet combination class, she will automatically assume that the hip hop girls are "cool". She will tell you, as you're tucking her in at night, that she, too, wants a gold dollar sign necklace.

**Fathers of young girls (and grown up girls, for that matter) will comment excessively on the inappropriateness of some of the dance moves. They will vow that their daughters will never participate in such a bawdy display of hip shaking.

**There is nothing cuter than watching your sweet girl be excited to sing on stage. Wait, did I just say sing? Wasn't this supposed to be a dance recital? Well, don't tell Claire, because you could hear her singing along as she was tapping and arabesque-ing her way across the stage.