Last night and tonight was Alice’s big annual dance recital. It’s been building for the last week or two, with picture days and make up practice and a full up dress rehearsal on Tuesday. I have some not particularly good pictures from the rehearsal because pictures are not permitted during the actual performance.
I had the priviledge of being an usher on Thursday, which meant five hours of standing around. I managed to watch Alice through the small windows in the door. The next night we had the whole family along with Grandma and Grandpa Virgil. Poor Corwin was along as well, even though it was his birthday. Not quite the way he had envisionsed spending it, but Mom said it would be even more pathetic to have him sitting home alone.
It was a nice performance, with a large number of short pieces and one 30 minute mini-ballet.Corwin watched the earlier parts but we let him skip out of the ballet to read. He responsed by trying to fall asleep during the third section. Luckily for him, there was a mixup in our tickets in that the ones for Corwin and me didn’t actually exist. We had to sit off by ourselves so Mom was unable to observes Corwin’s non-observance of the performance. He did watch Alice, though so it wasn’t a total loss.
Alice got her first flowers when we got home. She had seen other dancers get flowers after a performance and demanded some of her own. Mom, being softer than cereal soaked in milk all morning, acquiesced to this demand. Alice is just lucky she has Dad to stand up to her whims.
At the end of the event there is a current call with everyone on stage. The girls enter by act but there are so few boys that they come in as a group separate from which acts they were in. The kids are arrange with the taller ones in back so the front is basically several layers of little girls in short skirts and tights, a veritable forest of little girl legs. It’s quite impressive when they all start stomping their feet as fast as they can.