If dance was any easier.....

My daughter has her annual dance recital this weekend. She has been dancing for about six years at Debbie Felton’s Academy of Dance (D*FAD) in Livonia MI. Being the involved parent I am, I try very hard to get involved as much as a man can with her dancing interests.

I have sponsored classes, attended car washes, helped with fund raisers, etc. I even participate in the yearly Daddy / Daughter dance. This is NOT what you think. There are no tuxedos (well there was one year), no corsages, no fox trots or waltzes. The dance starts in February with the initial meeting and the fathers learn the steps as best they can and the daughters watch, seemingly in horror. We attend class about every other week until June and then we transform into the comic relief in front of our friends and families who get to laugh hysterically at what we were supposed to have learned while the girls perform flawlessly for the captivated audience.

My daughter also dances competitively in the Troupe. Having watched the girls for the last few years I have noticed that they seriously bust their collective asses each year. Sure football players and hockey players stretch and flex and get bumps, bruises, broken fingers etc. But honestly they never get any of those injuries and smile while doing so. The dancers jump, leap, turn, make pyramids, stand in shoes on their tip toes (which has to hurt like hell) on stage during a competition and have to smile all the time. “The show must go on.” If they jump and get hurt they don’t stop, they keep going. They are strong mentally as well as physically. And then after they’ve performed, they get judged subjectively on various categories and are awarded ribbons/trophies (typically platinum, high gold, gold or high silver). It’s sort of like if football players suddenly were judged after a play by someone on how well that person felt they performed. Imagine the Detroit Lions scores: bronze, iron, tin, doily.

Just as football players and hockey players have awesome moves, so do dancers. I have often loved watching people like Denis Savard (Chicago Black Hawks) perform his spin-o-rama on two defenseless defensemen and score a goal. Or watch ex-Lions running back Barry Sanders juke players so bad they had the PA announcer notify them when their jockstraps were found. Dancers have some similarly cool moves. Some of my daughters friends can stand on their left foot with their right leg extended above their head pointing to the sky and SPIN!!! HOLY SHIT THAT IS AMAZING. Seriously. They will perform a routine in the middle of which they will spin five or six times completely around and manage to face forward, not fall on their butts and still smile. I’d quite honestly just throw up.

The girls are great and they have great teachers at D*FAD. They all enjoy it and even after leaving the girls always come back. Like college football players attending games at their alma maters, the D*FAD dancers of years gone by show up to see their friends, teachers, etc. perform again and again. Some people might find it silly to write about something like dance but in reality it very much reminds me of attending a sporting event. The girls are athletic as hell, very good at what they do and they’re all beautiful on top of everything else.

Tomorrow is the recital and I am looking forward to it as usual. This year the dads are dressed as robots, which isn’t quite as embarrassing as when we wore grass skirts or tap danced in our pajamas. Once again we’ll provide the comic relief while the girls provide the serious entertainment. So, I encourage you to attend a recital or competition. They are interesting to say the least. And who knows, maybe you’ll see someone lose an arm, smile at the audience and keep right on dancing. There’s a saying that goes, “If dancing was any easier, it’d be called football.” After watching both I think there may be something to it.

Hope you enjoyed.