![]() ![]() ![]() In the ballroom I found my classmates, a gaggle of girls who were already sporting the black velour spaghetti strap leotards and black skirts with crinolines of different primary colors for our upcoming can-can dance. But even in a state of emergency, a dance competition must go on-or so I had thought before I arrived and saw how underwhelming the scene of my very first dance competition was. Later that night, the governor would declare a state emergency and ban all vehicles from the road. The five-mile drive had taken us an hour. It was a Saturday evening in late January 2005, and my Aunt Alice and Uncle Joe had driven me to the hotel in the midst of a blizzard that dumped about 18 inches of snow in the area. Surely all these mothers shellacking their squirming toddlers with hairspray needed to get a grip. Surely these three disinterested-looking middle-aged men and women sitting in front of that parquet floor could not be the judges who would hand down the final word on how well we executed the routines we had spent scores of hours practicing. As I walked into the ballroom of the DoubleTree Hotel in Somerset, NJ, I thought to myself, Is this all there is? Surely this dimly lit room, with its tacky maroon-and-cream geometric-print carpeting and a paltry expanse of parquet flooring for a stage could not have been the competition sphere that my classmates had talked up for months. ![]()
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