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Letter to the editor

Grace under pressure

Recital season brings out the best in girls - and the competitive spirit in parents.

By JANET ZINK
Published June 10, 2005

I am the luckiest mom on earth.

My 12-year-old daughter, Emily, brings home near-perfect report cards and keeps her hormone-fueled temper tantrums to a minimum.

Even luckier, I didn't have to wait in line at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center to buy a ticket to her dance recital last Sunday. True, waiting until three days before the show meant I had to settle for a spot in the back. But by procrastinating, I avoided the hordes of people eager to nab the best seats in the house.

Some parents jockeying for tickets the morning they went on sale waited for hours.

Late spring, early summer is dance recital season, the girl version of Little League tournaments. Each year, the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center hosts more than 13,000 proud parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles who pay about $16 a seat to witness their little girls going through this feminine rite of passage.

More than a dozen dance programs and studios use the center for their recitals. They come from as far north as Mary Jo's Performing Arts Academy in Carrollwood to the Brandon School of Dance in south Hillsborough County.

Competition for tickets can be as fierce as a 12-year-old boy's desire to hit a home run.

Some studios do their ticketing through the performing arts center. Others sell from their studios based on lotteries.

In either case, ticket buyers line up sometimes hours before sales begin. Women hiss to each other that one mother with a good place in line bought up all the good seats. Some studios limit the number of tickets one person can purchase.

Bonnie Wise, Tampa's finance director, said she showed up at the performing arts center at 9 a.m. several years ago to buy tickets to her 3-year-old daughter's performance with Brucie Klay's Dance Center in South Tampa.

She saw the line and thought surely it was for a huge concert like the Rolling Stones. She would just cruise up to another ticket counter.

Fat chance.

People had been camped out with lawn chairs and lattes for hours.

Now Wise knows better. This year, she sent her mother-in-law to buy the tickets.

Rochelle Tagliarini, whose daughters, Alexis, 9, and Angelica, 13, take classes at Frank Rey Dance Studio on Waters Avenue, was first in line to buy tickets at the studio on May 21.

She got there at 3 a.m.

"I took a bottle of water, something to cover with, a beach chair and a magazine," she said. "I'm thinking about bug spray next year."

She marked her territory by putting her lounge chair at the studio's doorstep and then climbed back into her car to sleep until sunrise.

She walked away several hours later with 15 tickets for the recital this month. Her family will be sitting in the center of the auditorium, four rows from the stage.

"They just expect good seats, darn it," Tagliarini said. "It's silly, but sometimes it's kind of fun. Some parents might complain about it, but as far as I'm concerned it's once a year. It's worth it."

Buying tickets at the last minute every year ensures that I end up watching my daughter from the back of the theater.

From that distance, once the girls take the stage, it's hard to distinguish which child is actually mine. They're all dressed alike. They have the same hairstyles, the same moves.

Backstage, dressing rooms are a blur of sequins, tulle, hair spray and lipstick.

Some of the little girls got into this just because they wanted to wear the pretty ballerina outfits, which can cost parents a fortune. Recital outfits sell for well over $50, and a dancer may need several for different numbers. After just a few minutes of wear, these sparkly garments often end up in the closet for Halloween parties and dress-up games.

The older girls have loftier goals. Some dance on their high school teams. Others dream of performing on Broadway.

My daughter's nascent dance career had a rocky start.

I enrolled her in ballet classes when she was in preschool, but she refused to dance after a classmate dissed her scrunchie.

We tried ballet classes in another studio. While the other girls dutifully stretched into plies and arabesques, Emily bent over and peeked out between her legs. She picked at her leotard. She made faces in the mirror.

"Maybe Emily would be better off in creative dance," the teacher at Brucie Klay's told me after a few sessions.

A year later, I took her suggestion and signed Emily up for classes more suited to her free spirit.

She took to it, and she's still at it.

Sunday, I went to her fifth recital.

All around me were friends and family members of other dancers, many clutching bouquets of flowers to give as congratulations at the end of the show.

They clapped enthusiastically after the advanced performances and gave out a collective "awww" when the preschoolers followed their teacher onto the stage, their tutus bobbing like duckling tails. The audience applauded wildly when a little girl, who left the stage with her hand over her eye after a fellow dancer accidentally clocked her in the face, rejoined her group.

Whether they're aspiring princesses or music video performers, all of them are testing the waters of what it means to be a girl who dresses up and dances in the spotlight.

That's definitely worth the price of admission.

Maybe it's worth hours of standing in line.

Maybe I'll do it next year.

Maybe I'll just buy binoculars.

Janet Zink can be reached at 226-3401 or jzink@sptimes.com

[Last modified June 9, 2005, 10:29:11]