Dance to the Music: the Kids Owned the Day

You've seen Dancing with the Stars, and such? Well that's the top of a pyramid. This post from five years ago is about what's more or less at the base of that pyramid. Fun. Yes, fun!

It IS, after all, about them, no?

Here’s the scene: A middle school auditorium in suburban New Jersey. It’s late Saturday afternoon on the second day of a dance competition. The auditorium is filled—but only loosely—with young dancers and their parents, other family, and friends. They’re all waiting for the last performance of the competition.

Some hip hop comes up on the sound system and a few of the dancers begin moving to the music. Some of them are standing up from their positions in the audience and are dancing in place. A couple others, at the far-left and far-right down front, are dancing in the outside aisles. More start joining in.

Down front, in the center, the action photographer—the guy who’s there to shoot photos of each dance number so they can then be sold to parents—is sitting down front on his high swivel chair. He’s smiling, swiveling in the chair to survey the scene, and he starts clapping on the back-beat.

That’s me.

Now another hip hop number comes up and, in a whooshhh! dancers get up out of their seats, rush to the aisles, and the aisles are jammed with kids joyously dancing. Five, six, eight, eleven, fifteen years old, a few older. Even the dancers waiting in the wings on stage for the final number, they danced too.

All dancing. 100, 200, maybe more. Dancing.

It was wonderful.

It made the day

How so?

Competitive dance.

What’s that?

What it is is an industry. There are some 200 companies in the USA that hold dance competitions, regional and then, in some cases, national.

Oh, You Mean Like Dancing with the Stars, only for kids?

Something like that. I don’t really know how it works because I’ve only seen this one day’s worth. What was going on that afternoon is that various dance studios would enter students in the competition as solos, duets or trios, small groups and so on, and they’re divided into a bunch of age groups so you don’t have four year olds competing against fourteen year olds.

And they dance in various styles too: lyrical, ballet, hip hop, jazz, tap, flamenco, and so forth. I must have seen dance moves from three or four continents up there, not to mention costumes.

I mean I was there as a photographer. I had to take 50+ pictures of every single dance number. Maybe 150 dances in 10 hours or so. It was pretty intense. But every once in awhile I saw something so joyful that I just had to laugh a little, even as I kept snapping the shutter.

You just wanted to hug those kids.

But what about the competition?

Oh, yeah, the competition. There were three judges, sitting down in front, right in front of me as a matter of fact. They had scoring sheets and microphones they talked into. I assume they were making oral notes for the kid’s dance teachers.

What’d the kids win in the competition?

To be honest, I’m not really sure. There WAS one awards ceremony early in the afternoon, but I took that as an opportunity to eat some lunch. I did catch a bit of it though. There were plaques, for kids and teachers, and trophies. Some of the trophies were almost as big as the kids. There was another ceremony at the end of the day, after the last dance. By that time, though, I was anxious to get on the road and get home, so I didn’t stick around for it.

What I think about the competition is mostly that the kids got to stand up in front of their friends and get a prize. What mattered was having fun dancing and just having people see that you did good.

What David Said

A couple days later I talked to my friend David about it. He has a daughter who was a serious competitive gymnast in her youth. She eventually made it to the state championships in New York and, I believe, won in this or that event.

He said it was great for her poise and self-confidence and he can see what it did for her even today, when she’s just become a mother herself and is running a small non-profit.

Of course, at the root of it, whether gymnastics or dance, is fun, physical fun. And for very young children physical fun is mostly what there is. Because they’re all body. Sure, they can talk and draw pictures and dream and tell stories. Sorta. But what they do best is move around.

So in gymnastics and in dance they get to move around all they want. And they learn to do so with grace and they learn that there is a special pleasure in being graceful. That’s a valuable and important lesson.

Plus, they get to dress up in a colorful costume! They get to put on an act.

The Malibu Diner

The Malibu Diner is of a piece with diners everywhere.

Really? Everywhere?

Well, not everywhere, but wherever there are diners, they are much of a piece. They aren’t so much alike as one McDonald’s is to another, or even as a McDonald’s is to a Burger King, but they are highly similar. Similar architectural details, inside and out, similar menu, similar philosophy.

Despite its name, this Malibu Diner is in New Jersey, not Southern California, though the palm tree design motif one sees here and there is a node to Southern California. This diner is in Hoboken, NJ, at the corner of Park and 14th. It’s only a few blocks from where I live. That’s one reason I like to eat there.

The other reason is that I can get Belgian waffles for breakfast; in fact, diners being what they are, I could probably get Belgian waffles any time of the day, any day of the week. But I have them for breakfast, once every week or two.

The “Belgian” in waffles is neither here nor there. That qualification started showing up, when? in the 1980s sometime. Whenever. These days Belgian seems to be what waffles are, which is OK—though I haven’t the foggiest idea whether or not there is any connection to Belgium (I’ve been told the English muffins aren’t English). But, truth be told, I’d be happy with plain old waffles, like my mother used to make.

That’s the point of the meal, it’s a tether to my childhood, an umbilicus to my origins. I don’t need to have waffles for breakfast two or three times a month, nor the bacon, and the (rather thick and bland) syrup. But it’s comforting.

Comfort is a minor virtue, and if I say it’s bourgeois, then it seems a bit déclassé, and a bit indulgent. Perhaps. But I don’t seek it as a permanent condition. Only as a temporary respite, and reference point.

One need not always go boldly where no man has gone before. And not for breakfast. Sometimes one needs to visit where one has always been. Otherwise, what’s the point of getting lost?

Animals have their daily circuit. And, depending on the animal, and the local ecology, circuits of greater compass, including yearly migration, nesting, or hibernation. The Malibu is part of my monthly circuit.

No more.

No less.