Dance Festival

It's been almost three weeks since the Dance Festival was over and I still haven't posted anything about it... my bad. Let me just say that I am soooo relieved that it is finally over. IT'S FINALLY OVER!!!! Hooray! After spending so much time practicing and learning the dance, I am so glad it's over. I'm just going to summarize this whole experience from the beginning:

The first few practices were unbearably painful. We were all stuck with a dance we didn't like, and with the other ward that we weren't particularly fond of (very Christ-like, eh?). Nobody would freaking listen so the leaders were constantly frustrated. The first part of the dance was just a simple line dance, but for some reason it took forever for us to get it down. We had no idea what was really in store for us!

After a while it got a little better, but we were incredibly short on guys. I got a wonderful idea and asked my fabulous father if he would learn the dance and come to practices with me. He said yes and I must admit that the practices actually became fun :) We were still very short on guys at the practices though so there were some partnerless girls in the back (we would rotate every once in a while. When I say we I mean all the other girls. I stayed with my daddy :) ). Our leaders didn't know how to solve the problem of finding more boys. For weeks they would tell us to invite friends from school to participate with us. Since boys are basically lame, we still didn't have enough. My leaders found a possible answer to this madness. And they brought in deacons. Whoohoo. And just my luck, I was assigned one of them being my partner. Even more fun. Out of five deacons, I must say I got the best one ;) Since I now had a partner, my dad didn't have to come anymore which made me sad. So practices went back to the somewhat dull activity.

Since the deacons were coming in late, they didn't know any of the dance and it was just a couple weeks before the performance day. They had to have extra practices and I volunteered to be one of the girls to help lead the boys (all of the girls that were partnered with the deacons led. It was hilarious!) since one of those boys was my partner. I think we had three more practices than everybody else, and the young men got it down :)

Learning formations was one of the most tedious things we did. It was absolutely insane. Nobody would listen or stay in their spots so we were continually confused. Ugh, people sometimes. Again, just my luck, I was at the very very very corner of the performance stage. Very corner. That's not cool. I would have been happier if I was somewhere inbetween the middle and the side of the stage, but that's not what happened. Dang.

Dress Rehearsal was......... fun? Um, no. Not at all. I thought our costumes would be to our ankles and they would just flow straight down (that's how they were the last time they did the dance festival and they just used the same costumes). Um, no. They altered the skirts. First off, I want to state our colors (we got two colors for the technical part of the dance). Imagine bright pink and bright green. Now times that brightness by ten. Holy wow. Now back to the alterations. They cut the skirts so they were more mid-calf, which I didn't mind. But they added netting to the bottom and they sewed the skirt to make it look like it had layers. We had to wear a white T-shirt (tucked in... ew) and they made us scarves to put on our shoulders. The scarves kept falling off and the netting kept ripping our nylons. From up close, we looked awful. But some people said we looked fine from far away. Hopefully they weren't saying that just to comfort us, because we knew we looked absolutely horrid. The young men wore dark jeans, a sunday shirt, and they got bandanas that matched the color of their partner's skirt. Of course they looked fine. Hmph :(

Performance day was Saturday April 25th. And it lasted all day long. We went to the Taco Bell Arena (BSU's basketball court) at noon and stayed until eleven at night. The whole day was pretty crazy and very very warm. When we got there it was our Stake's turn to get on the floor and mark our positions of where we would stand. We went through our entrance, our dance, and our exit. Then we went back upstairs (we were all the way up on the second level. Let's just say that every one of us was sick of those stairs by the end of the day. Most traveled them ten or so times) and did a whole bunch of this and that. We went back downstairs and practiced our hairspray dance (this dance was everybody all on the floor... if you call it a dance. It just looked like we were waving our arms) and found our positions which was very time consuming (this is an off story, but in the hairspray dance some of the lines of people have to combine to make aisles. The guy in front of me is a beefy boy and he totally bootie bumped me on purpose. Yeah, I moved a few people back after that. Anyway, back to the story...) and very obnoxious. We got dressed a few hours before the performance and had another dress rehearsal. Funness. We went back upstairs and sat in our seats waiting for the performance to start. Just my luck, our dance was the very last one. Isn't that just wonderful? So we were all anxiously waiting in our seats just wanting to be done with our dance.

The actual performance was kind of lame. When I was in dance, I would always have a little rush of nervousness and butterflies before a recital. Not this time. It made it not quite as fun, but oh well. When we were waiting in our lines in the lobbies waiting for the other Stake to finish, we were all talking quietly. A boy in my ward came up to me and asked me what my ending pose with my partner was. I told him not to laugh and it was pretty lame so he promised not to laugh. My partner and I were going to make guns out of our hands and "shoot" each other. The boy was just like, "Wow. That is lame." I started to complain and said that my partner, Jake, couldn't lift me. The boy, Sid, just said, "You're kidding me! I could lift you and I'm shorter than him!" You have to understand that Sid is my height. I just laughed and said yeah right. Sid said, "If I can lift you, you owe me a Sobe." I agreed and Sid just walked over and lifted me. What the crap?! So I ended up in debt, and I owed him a Sobe. After Sid let me down, I walked over to Jake and told him to lift me. And he couldn't. But now it was time to go on and perform our dance so that put a little damper on my performance.

When everybody was gone, there was a multi-Stake dance held in the Taco Bell Arena. Yeah, I went, much to everybody's surprise. Of course Emilea was making me laugh the whole time, so it wasn't all bad. After the dance the young women in our ward piled into the man van and we went out for ice cream. It was soooo good after a whole day of just having an apple, fruit snacks, and soda (by the way, whoever decided to give us pop instead of water is a complete idiot. Since I was dehydrated, I got a very bad headache and I went to the nurse after the performance. I got ibuprofen and a water bottle. I consumed four full bottles of water in half an hour. I'm pretty sure anybody there could have done the same). Since I had ice cream I was on a little sugar high. We got home at about twelve thirty and I couldn't sleep for another few hours... that's why I try not to eat sweets at night ;)

Everybody said that the Dance Festival would be something we will always remember. I do agree it will be remembered. Probably mostly remembered for the ending :)