Another Kind Of Stage Mom

I performed in so many dance recitals growing up that I can catalogue them like Friends episodes. There’s the one where we started out tapping to “Singing in the Rain” only to throw off our raincoats midway and feverishly time-step to “It’s Raining Men.” The one in which we chair-danced, in hot pink Natalie-Portman-in-Closer wigs, to The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black.” (I was a teen by then, though recitals can tread on provocative Toddlers in Tiaras territory.) The one with the mermaid-themed pointe duet to the siren call of Enya, when my partner Kelly’s shoe came untied and we connected telepathically on stage, willing her to keep twinkling and not snap an ankle.

If it was June in the ’90s under the hot lights of a high school auditorium on Long Island, I was sashaying away at my annual dance recital, quick-changing through a good six to seven numbers, including ballet, jazz, lyrical, hip-hop, pointe, and a Rockettes-inspired kickline. I’d hated soccer and fouled out of more than one basketball game, much to the chagrin of the coach, who was also my mother. The very idea of the Presidential Fitness Test triggers me to this day. But dance! Dance was joy and sparkle and self-expression, a place to channel all of my big, dramatic feelings and untap multiple personalities. We razzle-dazzled (and, once, Hula-Hooped) in jazz, flailed on the ground in lyrical, and tried mightily for grace in ballet. The studio — named Spotlight — felt more sacred to me than the cold pews of church, its mirrors and barre and sprawling floor beckoning night after night like a blank slate.

Dance was home — and then it was all gone. By the time I was 17, I’d drifted from Spotlight to captain my high school dance team. I chose prom over the cherished June recital. In college, I danced mainly on sticky fraternity floors and in the performance portion of sorority rush, in which, just factually speaking, I killed. Living in New York in my 20s, I took occasional classes at Broadway Dance Center, an institution whose real-deal teachers gave me tingles, but it took effort to make it to the few amateur classes around the city on the few nights that fit my schedule, while Spin and yoga and Pilates abounded. (It’s chicken-or-egg: Are adult dance classes rare because few adults dance, or do few adults dance because classes are rare?) In my 30s, I had two babies, and it was curtains on whatever was left of my dance career.

Dance was joy and sparkle and self-expression, a place to channel all of my big, dramatic feelings and untap multiple personalities.

When do we stop doing the things we loved as kids? It’s a depressing question, and yet talking to adults, especially fellow parents, is to roam through a graveyard of their former hobbies. They used to play basketball, softball, or soccer; drummed in a band, did karate — past tense. For years, parents exist in survival mode. Then, our children get older and parents — well-intentioned, crazy parents — funnel the time and energy they regain into a gantlet of children’s extracurriculars, often at the expense of their own.

While I fiercely believe youth sports in particular have escalated to unhealthy levels of intensity (none of you are getting scholarships, please relax!), I’m happy to cheer on my kids’ passions, which, at 8 and 11, they’ve narrowed down to softball, basketball, flag football, chorus, flute, the literary magazine, and — insert jazz hands — dance. When my now-11-year-old daughter turned 3, I enrolled her in ballet at Steps on Broadway in New York, another institution, where she pointed and flexed with live piano accompaniment, a privilege I never had in all the years! Watching her pirouette while Vladimir tickled the ivories was better than ecstasy. It made my heart burst and — as I walked through the halls of bunned teen ballerinas — ache a little bit, too.

In terms of social normalcy, there are adult activities and children activities. Team sports, taking up new instruments, art, and, yes, dance are children’s hobbies, while tennis, pickleball, golf, yoga, running, and nebulously “going to the gym” are for the Olds. The only problem is that, to me, the children’s activities are infinitely more appealing — creative, whimsical, and potentially including sequins — while the adult stuff is grueling, competitive, and often requiring of lessons. This is another way of saying that I’m terrible at tennis, and for years, I dreamed of dancing and performing again. I pierced my ears seven times in the span of a couple of years chasing the high I felt during that emotionally charged mermaid duet!

Our whole family commits to softball and basketball practice and before-school band rehearsals; my husband manages to golf with friends. Didn’t I, too, deserve the space to do the thing I loved for a single hour?

Strangely enough, leaving the cultural epicenter of New York and moving to suburban Connecticut four years ago is what led me back. I found a studio, The Dance Collective, and stumbled into morning classes, a rotating slate of salsa, samba, cha-cha-cha, et cetera. Aside from my Cuban abuela showing me a little la bamba in her kitchen, I’d never learned Latin technique (it all flows from the hips and literally keeps you on your toes). It challenged and humbled me, but our teacher, Enrique Alarcón, a magnanimous Peruvian with unparalleled hip action, kept me coming back. With Camila Cabello’s “Havana” blasting and a step called the Cuban break, I felt closer to my own heritage, wondering for the first time if it was some intuition I’d inherited that drew me to dance in the first place. I also tried to relinquish my past quest for perfection. Just being there, finally, in another sacred studio — rolling my hips to the filthy bombast of Bad Bunny on a Wednesday morning — felt like an achievement.

One of the best parts: I was surrounded by other grown women dancers. At then-40, I was one of the youngest cha-cha-cha-ing through those Latin classes, not that it mattered. Into their 50s, 60s, and 70s, my fellow dancers were, and are, fiery in fringed skirts (which I soon copied), energetic, skilled, dedicated (with some competing in ballroom competitions), and, just saying, quite hot. One of my theories is that people stop dancing because they think they’re too old to leap and turn and such. But leaping and turning sustains my classmates, who are as healthy and strong as women years their junior. (It’s pickleball that keeps the orthopedists in business.)

“Many of us were trained to believe that there’s a physical expiration date on being a dancer,” my classmate Nicole Tremaglio, a born performer in her mid-30s, told me. “It’s refreshing, and perhaps rebellious, to dance, especially at an advanced level, as an adult.”

Another dear dance friend, the actor Patricia Kalember, who legendarily played Georgie on Sisters and currently appears on Starz’s Power, is salsa-ing into her late 60s, complications be damned. “After my first hip replacement five years ago, I sat in a chair, put on, oh, who knows, Earth Wind and Fire, Stevie Wonder? And I danced sitting in my chair,” she told me. “Too old? Who says?”

I feel seen in my fellow dancers’ backstories: They, too, grew up dancing and performing, then stopped as adults. “Between a full-time job, two kids, and a long commute, I could not fit it in,” my elegant French classmate Helene Bates, 59, told me. “Dance was a luxury I felt guilty about allowing myself.” I get it, lusting after the evening contemporary and jazz classes I seldom make because they conflict with my kids’ nighttime shenanigans. One of the rare times I did get to jazz, Enrique taught electric choreo to Paula Abdul’s “Cold-Hearted Snake,” transporting me right back to the glory of the ’90s.

Aspirationally, though, many of my elder classmates only dance more with age, as their kids grow older or leave for college and their nights return to them. Marlene Ferguson, who’s in her 50s, used to wrestle with making hip-hop classes once or twice a week. Now, “I have so much more freedom,” she tells me. “I’m thanking God that I never gave up.” Marlene tells me she was me in the past; she tells me to keep going.

This past January, I sat at my laptop signing my kids up for all manner of enrichments, managing their schedule like a White House chief of staff. Buzzing with big new-year energy, I decided to sign myself up, too: for that evening jazz class I’d so loved, which culminated, for the first time since Spotlight more than 25 years ago, in a spring recital. Or as The Dance Collective rebrands it: an adult showcase. It required the commitment of weekly attendance, which worried me, but then again: Our whole family commits to softball and basketball practice and before-school band rehearsals; my husband manages to golf with friends. Didn’t I, too, deserve the space to do the thing I loved for a single hour?

I ran the choreography in my head and marked it at home, imagining myself blacking out and forgetting everything midperformance.

Turns out, all I had to do was ask. Each week, my husband came home from work to be with my son. With my class immediately following my daughter’s, she did her reading homework while I rehearsed for what would become known at home as “Mommy’s recital.” Occasionally, I felt a twinge of guilt for keeping my kid out later than usual, but I’m convinced it’s a good thing to show her that all members of the family can support each other. I turned down dinners and declined events that fell during jazz. Like Marlene said, I kept going.

Though as the weeks passed and the recital adult showcase loomed, I panicked. Performing never rattled me before — I lived for every second on that Seaford High School stage — but over the years, I lost the comfort and confidence of a performer. I ran the choreography in my head and marked it at home, imagining myself blacking out and forgetting everything midperformance. The other dancers, including Patricia and Nicole and Helene and Marlene, didn’t seem so nervous, though, which helped. Patricia, the veteran and pro, suggested smiling so brightly it reached the back of the room. That part came back to me, too: the energetic connection between dancers, all of us putting our hearts into the routine and doing something scary together. On a giant text chain, we coordinated our costumes, sharing sparkly top options. We reminisced about recitals past, stored on VHS in our childhood dens, but we weren’t done yet.

In May, after years of yearning, I added another to my recital canon: the one where, at 43, I strutted, leaped and kicked to a sassy “Sparkling Diamonds” medley from Moulin Rouge (a mash-up of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “Material Girl”). The one, also, where I almost tripped coming out of a quick turn but recovered on the beat and didn’t kill myself over it later, too busy congratulating myself for surviving my first adult showcase. The one, for once, when the kids cheered for me. With her children grown, Helene was the busiest among us, performing in the jazz, Latin, and contemporary numbers. The pure joy in Patricia’s smile — and the swish of red fringed pants — was contagious. “Dance is a place for me,” my fellow sparkling diamond Sally said, and we all went there together.

Now that I’m back, in the immortal words of Pink, I’m never gonna not dance again. It’s the dawn of a new era of recitals — Mommy’s recitals — and the show must go on. See you next May.