Recital Saturday

Anakah had her ballet recital this morning at 10:00 a.m. This is Ani’s first venture in to ‘dance’, today was her second recital and there was improvement. Sad but this was this little dance company’s last recital. Seems the teacher is moving out of the city. And that is that.

The teacher of this little company is a stay at home mom with a degree in fine arts and with an emphasis in ballet and dance. The teacher is also Anakah’s almost next door neighbor. The teacher has a huge recreation room which turned into a dance studio once a week, a few neighbors, a couple of girls from the ward and her own three daughters and poof you have a troop of dancing princesses.

The recital is weird not “bad weird” but sort of strange weird. The recital was in a church in the gym. Ten o clock on a Saturday morning the families are a mixed bunch. Grandma and grandpas, lots of step dads and weekend dads and boyfriends all mixing with video camera’s and digitals. There’s babies crying, screaming and sisters too young to dance wishing the could dance and wondering onto the stage every once in a while. I was surprised to see the amount of blue jeans and sweat shirts and tennis shoes. Like the recital was the first or second item of business on today’s schedule of things to do. I was worried that my white slacks would be too casual when I saw the other folk there I realized I had come over dressed.

There were two groups of dancers: intermediate class and senior class, intermediate was basically ‘babies in tights’ sort of cavorting to the music blaring from the troops boom box. The ‘senior’ dancers had survived at least one year with the grand dame who might by 30. This group actually had an idea of what dancing in unison was all about. Of course Anakah was one of the three seniors dancers. And as proud grand parents we felt she was right on the mark, she danced to the music and finished the dance with the music. She did not wander; she kept her eyes fixed to her teacher and did no fall of the stage once. She did not look bored once, like some of the other ‘daughter dancers’ did. Anakah actually wanted to be there in fact she was awake at 3:30 a.m. she could not sleep, she was excited for her big day. Get this she even went to s sleep over last night but demanded her father come and get her at 10:30 pm so she would no be late for her recital.

So the neighborhood dame is moving on and the troop is no more. Now, if Anakah is going to go to the next stage of her dance career, chances are, she is going to have to go to a “real” dance class where real money is exchanges and real dance is expected and real premadonas are born. But is now on the back burner now, it summer and Anakah is getting ready for gymnastics .