Not to brag, but I was pretty much the star of my school in fourth grade. Only instead of a star, a rainbow tiger was born🌈🐯✨ I got to go play on the computer after finishing my work because I was always done before all of the other kids were barely getting started, and I would get antsy if left to my own devices, so they had to find something else to do with me. I also hosted several school events, and joined the school chorus. But reading the announcements every morning on our school intercom was my favorite, because I was a little ham at that age.
Mrs. Kennedy, the school principal, even knew me by name, which made me feel very important.
One night, the school held some sort of meeting at the local junior high school auditorium, and invited all of the parents. The reason they held it there was because our school was overcrowded at the time, so they were using the gym as one of the classrooms. And guess who was one of the lucky kids who was part of what our teacher Mrs. Hudak called The Gym Dandy Class?
If you guessed anybody but me, you haven’t been paying attention 😄
But anyway, on the night of the meeting, they asked the school chorus to perform. So I was there, in the standard chorus uniform back then, which was always a white shirt with either black pants or a black skirt. And they’d also give us little red ribbons to tie around our necks, I guess to jazz it up a little bit?
We sang whatever number our chorus teacher had cooked up for us, and then… I was called upon to save the day.
At first I went back to my seat with the other kids in the chorus, while a group of third graders came onto the stage. They were going to perform a dance, but it turned out that one of the boys was missing his partner.
Mrs. Kennedy was up there explaining the delay to everyone when her eyes landed on me. And the next thing I knew she was calling me up on the stage asking me to dance with the boy instead.
Like it was an automatic given that oh yeah, Emily is down for anything, let’s get her up here and make her dance with a boy she doesn’t know in front of hundreds of parents and teachers, not to mention all of her friends in the chorus.
Here’s the thing though: I was ten years old, and I had no idea how to dance at that point in my life. I had not practiced at all, and I was completely unprepared. And I’m good as long as I know what’s coming, but when you hit me with last-minute changes like that out of nowhere it basically sends me into a panic.
But what could I do? I was already up on stage, the music was about to start, and the third grade boy was tentatively putting his hands on my waist.
We danced the box step to an instrumental version of The Band Played On and I was totally off my game. I tried my best to keep up with the boy, but I knew I wasn’t doing too hot with the whole moving my body in a coordinated way thing. I kept fumbling the steps, and getting my feet stepped on, and oh, it was just an embarrassing mess for the entire five minutes I was up on stage.
I didn’t feel like the star of fourth grade anymore after that. I felt like I had let down the whole school, and especially Mrs. Kennedy, even though in reality I don’t think anyone even noticed but me.
But I was so upset, I remember crying about it later to my mom, who had seen the whole thing because she was at the meeting, and she knew how I could get about things like that. Like the time when I learned the recorder at school and had crying fits every night because I thought all of the other kids were better than me. So yeah, there are just certain things that set me off like that, and it’s always been that way. Blame it on me being an artistic, sensitive little soul? 😝
So after I was called upon to save the day, my mom was the one who really saved the day, because she offered to teach me how to dance. I remember her showing me how to do the box step (1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3), and singing the same song, The Band Played On, until I finally started to get it.
And if anybody ever calls on me again to come up on stage and dance the box step, this time I’ll be ready.
