Glimmers of Rainbows

COVID may be a torrential downpour of suck, but even torrential downpours have glimmers of rainbows. The most recent glimmer of a rainbow for me was OMG DANCE RECITALS DURING A PANDEMIC WEEEEE!

Yeah, so, we're sort of returning to normal-ish? Kind of? The girls' dance studio made plans for an adapted recital weekend months and months ago. For a long time, it looked kind of iffy, but then in the past month it became clear that their plan was going to work out. They have over 1000 dancers total, so instead of having 8-10 very long recitals, they planned for 20+ short recitals. Each recital was around 45 minutes long and each kid was generally in just one recital.

Except for the competition teams, of course. There was one competition team performance in every recital, so Alexis was in like four total recitals or something like that. Still, IT WAS SO BEAUTIFUL. In a normal year, she would have been in EVERY SINGLE ONE. Multiple times. In fact, the only way to see all of her dances would have been to attend at least three recitals, but not this year! They ran through all of her team's dances in one show! The other appearances were more like encores and I definitely do not have to watch those.

More beautiful, however, was that both of Mila's dances were pressed together in to one short recital. In a normal year, I would have had to sit through four hours of dancing to see her perform twice and then participate in the awards thing at the end. Four. Hours. I will take 45 minutes over four hours any day of the week.

So, uh, thanks COVID? I guess?

Also ... crowd restrictions. I had no idea how much limiting the number of people allowed to watch a performance could improve the entire situation. Each dancer had four tickets, so it wasn't like nobody was allowed, but not letting huge extended families take up multiple rows of seats made everything so much better. Those extended families tend to talk through the whole four hours of recital, except for the five minutes the kid they know is dancing, so basically I turn violent every year. But not this year!

And now begins my campaign to keep smaller recitals around forever. I'm sure they are a ton of work, but so are the long ones, so let's keep things short and sweet. Please? Maybe?