This past Saturday, we had a dance competition in Philadelphia. It lasted 13 hours. Let me repeat that….13 HOURS!! I arrived at 9:00 am and left at 10:00 pm. This is the best of those 13 hours….
10. The guy in the Captain America pants. The stage manager wore Captain American pants. Well, not the entire outfit, but he did wear black pants with a Captain America belt, which annoyed me greatly, because (a) the pants didn’t fit properly which led me to (b) stare at his ass all day. I was not staring because it was a nice ass. I was staring because the pants made his ass look just plain wrong. To top it off, literally, he had a white gangsta hat on, what I believe to be, his balding head. I was willing to give him a pass on his hat because he was funny. I like funny. But, by the end of the night, the pants were annoying and he replaced the hat with a blue hat that lit up. Pass revoked!
9. Spontaneous cursing. If you put even the nicest dance mom in a room for 13 hours and force her to watch 4 hours of lyrical dancing by emotional teenagers to wrist-slitting music, she will curse. My favorite of the night…..It’s 8-f***ing:30, a**hole, walk!
8. By hour 12, my teeth began to feel weird. At first, I thought it was because I hadn’t brushed them in 14 hours, but then I realized that I felt like they were falling out because I had aged so much in the hours I sat watching dances.
7. My new career as a judge. I think I have found my calling. I plan to pursue my new career path so that I may write on some child’s score sheet, “WTF?” and “The peeing on the tree move is not good.”
6. The studio that won everything. Okay, they didn’t win everything, but they won a lot. It’s hard not to win when you had 150 students competing. We believe they recruit their dancers in utero or they may have some class and wait until the babies come out in the delivery room. They were awesome and it was a pleasure to watch them dance…the first 50 times. The next 50 times…not so much.
5. The announcing of awards at the end of the evening. They talked extremely fast and, as one mom put it, “I can’t understand him. He sounds like he has a mouth full of turds.”
4. The anime convention next door. I don’t need to say anything else about this. Except…
3. The looks on the kids’ faces when men dressed up as Pikachu walked past us with women dressed up as Wonder woman. Inside joke coming up…”Come be a regular.”
2. Spontaneous mocking. If you put a semi-smart ass, fully witty teenager on stage after 13 hours of dancing and then ask her to jump around to Bieber music, she will in fact mock the m.c. when she gets up to accept her award. This could have been the best moment of the night if it weren’t for….
1. The joy I got from watching my daughter and all my students at the competition. It wasn’t even the winning that made me proud. It was a drama-free, fun day with kids who genuinely like each other, support each other and like to dance. That was my best moment….and the silly string fight in the parking lot 
