The Dancing Shame

By Kenny

"Come on Kenny, we’re going to be late for the dance!" My parents yelled up the stairs.

"I'm coming!" I shouted back.

When I was running down the stairs, I was running so fast and so hard my footsteps sounded like a herd of elephants that were running as fast as they could to get a way from a mouse.

My family and I were going to a dance performance that my dance teacher had signed my dance class and I up for. The dance performance was in the lobby of the Embassy Suite at Lake Tahoe.

On the way there I was so nervous and a little bit excited. I didn't really know what was going to happen. It seemed like it was about an hour drive on the way there, but it was really only ten minutes.

When we got there and walked into the room, I suddenly got terrified. The reason that I got so terrified is because I saw all of the people that were going to watch us perform. After I got a little braver I slowly stumbled into the room. As I looked around the huge room there seemed to be at least one hundred people sitting in the room ready to watch our every move.

I saw the other kids in the same dance group as me sitting on the ground in front of the audience watching our dance teacher, Judy, doing an act that she and her friends were doing. After she was finished with her performance, there was another act with a lot of little kids that were going to do a tumbling act.

I walked up sat down by another boy named Tim who was in the same dance class as me. While I was sitting there, my hands got all sweaty. I couldn’t think right. I thought that I had forgotten every dance step. I was so nervous.

When it was our turn we all got up onto the sparkling, round stage and got into our positions. It was a good thing that I was positioned in the back because I didn't want any of the people watching my sweat slowly falling down my face. When we were in our positions, my mind went dark, and cloudy. I felt really pale and felt like I had a million butterflies flying around wildly in my stomach. I couldn't move. All of the colorful, motionless eyes were about to watch our every move. When the music turned on. Somehow I felt a little better. I thought that I had remembered every thing that our teacher has taught us, at least I thought.

At about the middle of the routine, I forgot a few moves. I was even sweatier than ever. So I did the first thing that came into mind. I copied the move of another dancer named Joe that was in front of me and really easy to see what he was doing. I tried his move and accidentally tripped over my shoelaces that were flying around the stage when I was dancing and stumbled into his way.

I tripped him. I couldn't believe it. It all felt like slow motion. While Joe was falling, his back leg went behind him and caught on to Silvia's leg and tripped her. It was all like dominos. Then the same thing happened to her. Sarah's leg went to her side and leg swept Jimmy. About that time my face was so red. Jimmy's was so surprised that he had gotten tripped that the first reaction that he had was reaching up out of the bundle of the fallen bodies and he grabbed onto my shirt. He pulled me right down. At first I felt like I was flying into the air, but the only part that was unpleasant was when I landed into the junkyard of bodies. I landed right on to someone’s elbow. Their elbow drove right into my side. Before I could yell someone fell onto my face and kept me from yelling. Under all of the bodies I could only hear two things. One was the yelling and screaming of the kids saying, at all different times were: get off me, I can’t breath, ahhhhh, and the second thing that I could hear was the audience laughing. After a few minutes the whole dance group started laughing. No one really knew why we were laughing but we were anyway.

After everyone got up and started feeling a little better, we asked the dance teacher to restart the music and we did the whole dance performance all over again. There were only two differences this time. The first difference was that I did it all right this time, because when our dance teacher stopped laughing she told me what to do, and the second difference was that after this dance performance everyone started clapping.

After this I learned that if you don’t know a certain step you should just skip it and wait for the other step to come up and that it’s better to do your own thing instead of copying other people.