COMMUNITY MEMORIES

People Magazine, the Burlington Free Press, the Times Argus and a host of radio and television commercials are touting the “end of (this) season, beginning of (the next) season, MUST-SEE” television offerings.

As if basketball and hockey playoffs weren’t occupying enough of our valuable family-garden-spring cleaning-“off-duty” time, within one week we have the final episodes of “Bones” and “House”; the two-night finale of “American Idol” (Go David!), “Dancing with the Stars”, “Desperate Housewives” and “Scrubs” followed immediately by a host of New! Shocking! Exciting! Revealing! shows like “So You Think You Can Dance” and “The Bachelorette” waiting in the wings. So much choice and so little time! What is a person to do?

The answer became clear to me last Friday night.

I sat in the balcony at the Barre Opera House while Montpelier’s Contemporary Dance and Fitness Studio performed its spring showcase. Two of my children are dancers. The older one takes Hip-Hop and Jazz; the younger one, just Hip Hop.

I sat for 3 ½ hours to watch my children perform in three numbers totaling about nine minutes. If I’d had to I would have sat for twice that amount of time.

It wasn’t just that my kids performed in front of a packed and hugely supportive crowd. Nor was it just that I knew about every fifth member of the audience and their children who were also dancing.

It was one of those rare times that I suddenly realized I was at the creation of a life-long memory for at least two of my children.

At this age (11 and 12), a lot is going on. In school they are learning all the fundamental issues in math and science and social studies. They’re into things like how plants purify our air. They’re exploring intergenerational issues and problems like global warming. They’re basically kids learning to stretch their minds.

But for my daughter and son, and for the 125 other kids who performed last weekend, the one thing about this whole year that they will always remember is their performance this past weekend.

The make-up. The hair-spray. The lights, the sound, the palpable energy flowing over the stage from the audience. The hoots and applause, the laughter, the flowers and boxes of chocolate. The bottled water. The staying-up-way-past-your-bed-time. The recap of who barely made their entrance, whose costume was falling off the whole time they were on stage, the missed entrances, the awkward pauses, the final positions held until black-out.

I sat rooted in my seat, tears in my eyes. I’m fifty years old, and I was transported back to that precious time when I played a guard to the three wise men and my older brother was one of three mummers in our grammar school holiday extravaganza. I remembered the time I wrote a Star Trek play for seventh grade English class and we staged it for our school and my grandmother came to the performance dressed all in black with a black veil (we don’t discuss her wardrobe choices anymore). I remembered all the times when we kids did things together. We shared our joys and heartaches; won our championships, and lost them together—as a community.

At intermission I ran into the guy who fixes my car. I’ve known him for 11 years. He knows my car intimately. I know next to nothing about him. I asked him which dance his child was in. “The Hip-Hop one,” he replied, “She does a brief duet with a boy up-stage right.” “Funny,” I said, “my boy does a duet in the same place with a little girl.”

It turns out his girl and my boy were dance partners. And thus another shared moment goes into the memory banks.

It’s likely that most of the little kids who were featured in the beyond-cute beginners’ classes will not, by the time they graduate from high school, be involved in any meaningful way with dance. In every class, especially the beginners’ classes, there were only a few performers who stood out. By the time all the rest of those kids get to be seniors, they will have experienced a self-selection process that will push them towards soccer, lacrosse, hockey, theater, science club, or a host of other worthy activities. But one thing is certain. Everyone who participated in the program will always carry this experience with them. They will always be able to say, with increasing fondness as the years go by, that for one magical weekend they created a community’s worth of lifetime memories.

Sure, I’ll probably watch the American Idol finale. But 10, 20, 40 years from now I’ll have forgotten whether the winner was David Archuleta or David Cook, and even who Simon Cowell was. But I will still remember last week’s performance at the Barre Opera House, and so will my children and my auto mechanic and his daughter, and their 125 friends and family members.