OK, so I’m at a competition where I’ve set out to achieve Top Student. I have a lot of heats to complete. The first day I had 30 dances in a row. It about killed me. Amazingly, I survived, but somewhere later in the day I had Paso Doble and I fell. Okay, I coached myself, okay, it’s okay. One fall. Whatever. You can recover.
But then, well, I fell again. A la Kirstie Alley on DWTS. In front of Jonathan Roberts, no less, who was serving as emcee. I lost my shoe. Also, I’m big like she was when she was starting on the show.
So Jonathan, after the heat ends, makes an annoucement that we’ve had our, “Kirstie Alley moment.”
Yes sir, yes we did.
I bowed my sweaty head, raised my right arm straight up into the air, and made the sign of the devil with my hand.
Yep.
Uh huh.
In case anyone didn’t see the big girl in the red dress tumble to the floor *gracefully* and jiggling like a Jello shot dropped from the Empire State Building, well, in case you missed it, that was me.
What else could I do, but push on, push through? I suppose running screaming out of the ballroom was an option, but it was one I never considered. So, I continued dancing the heats until there was a break around midday.
Then I found an empty stall in the ladies room and bawled my eyes out. Then I cleaned myself up and called my friend Billie for some encouragement, and also cried my eyes out once again. Finally, my tears ran dry. Both my body and my emotions were spent.
But when I went to bed that night, exhausted, with blisters on my toes, and legs that felt like molten, bright red iron inside a blacksmith’s furnace, I decided that the next day would be better.
And it was.
