This entry was going to be about how cool I was to take some master classes from Mia Michaels, of So You Think You Can Dance fame. Then I couldn’t find any impressive dance pictures, only embarrassing ones. I’m much better at self-deprecation, so. There you go.

Although you might not guess it from my contant stumbling and embarrassing moves “in the club”, I was a dancer. Am, a dancer. I will even drag out my Best Buy-discounted $15 crappiest scanner ever to show you.

Rockford School of Dance, 1988. I am the mop top in the red sweatshirt with puppies on it.

I love how the teacher and assistant clearly have static arm positions, and EVERY girl is doing something different.

Recital, 1990. I’m pretty sure those bangs could survive a tsunami.

“Ghostbusters!” I’m not kidding. That was the song. 1991.

“Waltz of the Poppies.” We were poppies. 1996.

There were a lot of dancing years after that. I also like to think I got more attractive? You’ll have to wait until Mom brings up the scrapbook to see.

But seriously, I did take a couple classes from Mia Michaels. When I was in dance competitions (ACTUAL dance competitions, not the kind you see on ESPN2 with all the tumbling and bad remixes with dubbed whip cracks every five seconds. Whu-PUSSH!), we’d go to the annual New York City Dance Alliance. But it wasn’t in New York City, it was in Lansing. It was in Lansing, in some random Holiday Inn, in their huge ballroom. There would be a “competition” portion of the weekend, and a “convention” part of the weekend, where

Competition = You were the best dancers in your corner of Michigan and you had the most fun, but you could never beat that studio with those Jon Benet kids that trained for 8 hours a day.

Convention = 42384234293 girls crammed into a ballroom, learning a routine to Journey’s “Separate Ways” by a guy named “Billy Angel”… and really, Billy? Did you maybe think that choreographing a fouette turn in this space was such a good idea, when this Detroit amazon to my left just clotheslined me with her leg?

Don’t get me wrong, they were amazing experiences. You had reknowned choreographers come into your little town and name drop things like, “I choreographed this for Janet Jackson. She completely rejected it, but YOU get to learn it.” Mia Michaels was a trip, and if you think her choreography now is abstract and weird, you should have been in that ballroom in Lansing in the late nineties. Mia was all, “emotive shapes,” and the Midwest was more…”jazz hands!”

My senior year of college I traded in my tap shoes for tequila, but now I’m looking to get back into it. Bess and I have talked about joining a hip hop class (I’m hoping she will incorporate her hand-boob shimmy…you’ll know what I mean when you see it.) Or, do you think Damon and I can hit up an Arthur Murray and learn this?:

I especially like the part where she essentially punches him in the face with her butt.