The Longest Day of My Life

As I've mentioned on here a few times, my 12 year old daughter is a competitive dancer. Between the first of February until the first of June or so, she's normally at competitions about every other weekend. I try to attend at least part of them but it's usually my wife that is with her while I handle the soccer duties. It's not a sexist thing but with the costume changes between dances, the moms help in the dressing room with keeping everything organized, doing makeup, hair, etc. and the dads, for obvious reasons, are not allowed in there.

This past weekend, however, she was involved in a competition that was a little different than normal. Instead of wearing costumes, all the girls wore black leotards with tights and shoes and little or no makeup. Since my daughter can take care of these things by herself, my wife asked if I would take her to this competition. Being the supportive dad that I am, I quickly agreed.

I should have looked at the schedule first.

My daughter's first dance was at 1:00 p.m. The studio has a standard policy that dancers are to arrive one hour before their first dance so we left the house a few minutes after 11:00 and arrived at Southport High just before noon. I helped her find the dressing room and went into the auditorium to find a seat to watch.

I knew that Libby's routine was number 105 so you can imagine my surprise when they announced that the next dance to perform was number 70! Knowing that the average dance lasts anywhere between 2 1/2 to 3 minutes, I quickly calculated that I had about an hour and a half to kill before Libby's dance. Fortunately, I had my laptop with me so the time went by quickly as I worked on some proposals. It was about 1:30 before she took the stage and they did very well.

That wasn't the worst of it. Her next dance was not scheduled until about 6:30 p.m.

Without trying to seem happy that someone is sick, one of the dance moms was running a fever so the dad, Kent, brought his daughter. I quickly found him and we made plans to grab something to eat with our girls and maybe kill some time.

After a nice lunch at Ruby Tuesday's that we tried to make last as long as we could, we asked the girls what they wanted to do. They wanted to go to a pet store and see the puppies so we did. After that, the girls decided they wanted to head back to the competition to watch their friends from the studio perform their routines so we did.

And arrived back at 3:30. Great, only three more hours until the next dance.

Oh, wait. Did I say three hours? Nope! Shortly after we got back, Libby came over to inform me that the competition was running about an hour behind and she wouldn't be back on stage until closer to 7:30. Great, only FOUR more hours until the next dance.

Well.......let's just say it's a good thing Kent was there as he and I have somewhat similar backgrounds and interests so we had some good conversations. We alternated taking walks in the hallway, going to our cars to catch up on the Purdue basketball game and driving around to get something to drink. For the record, Kent had a Mountain Dew that REALLY looked good to me but I gave up soda for Lent so I opted for a frappucino instead. Okay, we had both gotten our caffeine fixes so we were ready to go!

The caffeine didn't last near long enough as shortly before the girls were to go on stage, Kent turns to me and states, "Okay, this is officially the longest day of my life!"

The girls took the stage shortly before 7:30 and danced three other numbers in the span of about 45 minutes or so. Seeing my daughter on stage several times got me re-energized and I knew I'd need it as her last dance was originally scheduled for 9:40 but, of course, was now going to be at about 10:30 or so. Great, only three more hours until the next dance!

One of the things that Kent and I have in common is that we both formerly were high school basketball officials and still enjoy the game very much. And guess what else was going on at Southport High School on Saturday night? Yep, the girls regional basketball finals. We got to see an exciting game between Carmel and Ben Davis that was close. Now I was full of energy and could easily make it to the end of the night at dance.

Well..........in the words of Lee Corso..........not so fast my friends.

Being a guy, if I'm watching dance, I want to be entertained. My daughter's studio does a great job at that. As with everything in life, though, everybody has their own style. There was a studio there that, well, is a little more, shall we say, artsy-fartsy. After watching a few of these from this studio, I was completely drained of all energy again.

When yet another performer from this studio came out onto the stage, Kent said loudly enough for several of us to hear, "Oh great, another performance of rolling around on the floor!"

So to make a short story long (I know, it already is), our girls performed their final dance number at about 10:30, awards were given and we were out of there and on the road at about 11:15. My daughter was hungry so we went through the drive-through at Wendy's to get some chicken nuggets. For what it's worth, I don't go inside Wendy's anymore after the experience I posted about on here earlier. We were home just before midnight.

Another mom told my wife that Kent and I were real "troopers" this weekend.

I hope my days of trooping are over.