Dance Magic

Last weekend was my granddaughter’s modern dance recital up in Salt Lake.

I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard in years. Kids galloping around for an hour and fifteen minutes looking tense and lost? What’s not to love? I’m so glad it was free!

I wish you could have been there. Arms waving, the ever-popular “jewel-tone” outfits, the serious inward looks of people trying to stay in line.

The good news is that there didn’t seem to be any relationship to the rhythm of the music, making the experience just that much more free floating.

My granddaughter’s group was killer cute naturally. Picture thirty little girls running around in circles dressed like fireflies. They were in red and black with these kind of medieval looking wing things on their backs. The highlight was the hand waving, slapping the floor, clapping part. We were all there with her.

It’s recital season.

This is the chance for all of us to pay back our parents for the years they spent watching us as trees in school plays.

The only thing that keeps me awake is the vulnerability of the kids. The eager look in their eyes, the exciting fact that this is their 4-year-old pre-school graduation, and then they’ll be in kindergarten where the big kids go!

Performances are times when kids can feel for a moment that they’ve achieved parity with grown-ups. All eyes are on them. They, who lead lives furiously watching others to see what comes next, for an hour are the only ones who know what comes next. They hold the secrets.

It takes us back to a time when we didn’t take things for granted, a time before being a grown up when we still hadn’t been disappointed: by kindergarten, by grade school, by our first job. A time when all you had to do was grow up and things were going to be amazing.

It’s like watching a baby see snow or taste ice cream for the first time. All of a sudden, you see snow and ice cream for the first time too.

What a debt of gratitude we owe those crazy folks who’ve made it their life’s work to entertain us every May. The high school teachers who corral 450 seniors into auditorium seats for graduation and convince them it’s not funny to write crude things on top on their hats. Piano teachers who listen to kids play simplified versions of Fur Elise and Pachelbel’s Canon year after year and still manage to keep the vision.

Those wispy dance majors teaching six year olds to be fireflies for five minutes in front of an audience of anxious parents and grandparents and use the money they earn to buy tickets to Ballet West, to keep their souls alive.

We owe them so much for enlarging the hearts of our children.