Blog # 59: Dance Con't

The best part about jazz dance was performing in front of an audience. Every year in my town of Wellington there would be one huge dance recital for the whole town to see. It was held in the junior high school auditorium. It was a very competitive time of year when we performed. We would all get ready in the empty classrooms getting our hair and makeup done. I remember one year there was a bag of candy in the 8th grade teacher’s desk and being the obnoxious little girl that I was I decided to have a few suckers before I performed my jazz dance with my fellow dancers. When it was time to perform, my entire mouth including my lips and teeth were stained blue from the sucker I had just ate before. I drew unnecessary attention to myself. After performing our dance I got lectured by my dance teacher, but I thought it was hilarious.
When my grandmother was younger she took tap dance lessons. She told me how much she loved putting on her tap shoes and tapping away at lessons. I begged my mom to put me in tap lessons because after 2 years of doing jazz I was pretty much tired of it. My mom didn’t care what type of dance I did, she just wanted me to be involved in something other than gymnastics since that was only once a week. However, I had to choose between jazz and tap, and I obviously wanted to try something new and picked tap dancing. So when I was about 10 years old my mother enrolled me into tap. I enjoyed every minute of it. It was quite different from jazz but in a good way. I liked the fact that tap was still dance, but it was a form of music too. In my opinion I was a much better tap dancer than a jazz dancer. I think one of the main reasons why I wanted to take tap dance lessons was because both my sister and I were gymnast and then my mom put both of us in jazz dance together and I wanted to do something that was completely on my own without my sister by my side.
I did tap until I was 12 years old and a seventh grader in Junior High. Every since I was in elementary school I knew I wanted to be a cheerleader throughout my junior and high school days. I wanted to try out for cheerleading and knew I couldn’t be a cheerleader, gymnast, tap dancer, and a full time student, so I dropped out of being a tap dancer, even though I was sad to leave. I used my skills of being a gymnast to get bonus points at cheerleading tryouts. I made the seventh grade cheerleading squad along with 7 other girls, because only 8 were allowed on the squad. I was so excited to cheer for the “Blue Knights” football and basketball team that following fall and winter. During the summer is when we would learn all the cheers and dances for the upcoming year. We would learn dances so we could perform them during halftime at either a football or basketball game. I remember one dance either my seventh or eighth grade year we did it to “hey Mickey.” Cheerleading dances are very different from a jazz or tap dance. The movements of a cheerleading dance are more stiff and choppy than the elegant moves of jazz. Also, in cheerleading dances we might yell words occasionally like “GO BIG BLUE, BEAT THE BULLDOGS,” which you would not hear that in a jazz or tap dance.