Dance Regionals- Part 2

I really kind of don't want to finish this story, as it happened so long ago, but I suppose I must and should, so as not to keep you waiting too far into this new year. At this point it was almost two months ago that I was dancing (where has the time gone???), but I haven't forgotten any of the details, really. I left off in Dance Regionals- Part 1 where I had figured out that I had recalled- meaning I had placed somewhere in the top six out of the fourteen in my competition- and was thus waiting for awards, which were supposed to be at 4 p.m. 
By the time I had found out about my recall, I think it was about 10 in the morning. I had danced at 7:30 or 8 and had been up since 4 a.m, but the excitement of the day kept me going. 
(Note: I've been composing this post for more than 2 months, too- I don't really want to finish it in great detail so I'll just prioritize and finish.)
I did recall, one of only 6 out of the 14 original competitors in my competition. Then we waited many hours for awards, which were initially delayed about an hour, but I did get an event sweatshirt while we were waiting, as well as folding a bunch of little origami stars. I didn't bother with homework until the next day, which was Saturday and thus the weekend. Awards started at about six in the evening and by the time I came out of there it was 7 or 8 o'clock and I had gotten second place. Yay. I got a nice white sash and a small vase made of irish crystal. 
Yep. It was cool, and I'm glad I got to do it. 

Irish stuff. In the middle: dance shoes. On the right: a spiral, or triskelle, as the ancient Celts called it. 

WAIT- guess what else is Irish? The popular 80's band U2! You may or may not believe that, but it's true. All of the original band members hail from Dublin, the capital of Ireland. One time my dad was in Ireland for a business trip and him and his colleagues were walking through Dublin looking for a good place to have dinner. One of his colleagues requested that they go to a place that was playing irish music- and he meant the kind that we dance to (traditional), not stuff like U2. And so on they walked. Sometime soon after that they walked up to a pub that was playing U2. My dad, who was the only one in the group that knew U2 was Irish, said, "Hey- there's some Irish music!" He told us that he said it jokingly, but even then he got some weird stares from his co-workers. So, yeah. There's your random factoid of the day. And yes, I got second place at dance regionals this year. 8)
Goodbye. :)

Dance Regionals- Part 1

Last Friday, (a week ago today) I spent my day at a convention center instead of at school. This was because of an event that translates from its natural language of Irish as regionals for Irish dance. The actual word for this is oireachtas (o-ROCK-tus), the literal meaning of which is legislature, or gathering. This is quite right, as the country is divided into several main regions, and each region is very big. It's fun, though!
It was a large day for me. I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. just to do my hair and makeup. This is a long process, yet one that yields quite some results. See below:

Me trying to do precision eye makeup at 4 a.m. while my mom does my hair.

My mom helped me do my hair while I worked on makeup. By the way, all of those curls are NOT- I repeat, NOT- my real hair! It's a curly wig that, like most irish dancers, I pin onto my real hair. The only part of my real hair that you can see is that darker poof at the top and in the front. It takes many bobby pins to pin this onto my head, and oftentimes they disappear into the wig itself. We lost a few pins that morning, but it was all good in the end. Many thanks to my mom for doing this for me. Without that help, I probably would have lost all the pins in my possession and then bad things would have happened. But, after the process of all of this hair-and-makeup, I packed everything up in our car, grabbed some pumpkin-chocolate muffins (small ones) for breakfast, and off we went. I also finished my makeup in the car.
When we got there it was about 7:00 a.m. Not many people were there yet because the larger competitions didn't start until later in the day, but I was perfectly fine with this because once all the dancers at a single Oireachtas get to the venue, they take up much space. This can be owed to the fact that we must lug around our dress bags. They look like this because our dresses have wide skirts.

Anatomy of a dress bag.

So we found a spot to put our stuff in the ballroom that I would be dancing in, and I started to get ready. I still had about an hour and a half, plus one competition before me, so I kind of just warmed up in a corner and put my shoes on and just diddled around a bit. When the competition before me commenced (too formal, sorry!), I put my dress on and kept warming up. I know that this must seem like a lot of warming up to some of you, but it's actually really important for us dancers to stay warm before you dance and in between dances, if that applies to you. 
At somewhere around 9:00 a.m., we got called over side stage to wait for the final few minutes before we danced. We line up in numerical order and then the backstage helpers categorized us by dance. See, there are many- M-A-N-Y- different set dances, as mine was called, and we dance three at a time. So we have to know what dance each person is doing so that the musicians will play the right music at the right speed and so that you'll be able to dance the dance you've been practicing for months. It always works out in the end. I was in the second round of five (there were only 14 people in my competition, compared to 150 in others), so I kept warm while the first round went, and then I was up on the stage. It went by SSSSOOOOOOOOOOOOOO fast. I don't remember much of it, except that I could hardly get any sound out of the stage. Overall my round was good though! I was happy enough with it. 
The rest of the day was pretty much waiting. And waiting. And waiting some more. But, as my dance teacher said in her pre-regionals email, "Wait many hours for awards and enjoy the experience." I think that this is very good advice. The anticipation of finding out how you placed is quite enough to sustain you through the long wait time. It was great. Now, before I could know what place I got, I had to recall. The recalls are a way of narrowing down the field of competitors to the top dancers. These dancers are then placed. So I waited for the recall list. 
But considering the time right now I think I will stop. To be continued...

The story stops here for a while...

Ridiculous Costumes

Before I go on from here, I will warn you: I speak not in jest!

Whoops. Slipping back into Shakespeare mode. Sorry. I've been forced to read enough Shakespeare that when I have to say something forcefully I say it like Shakespeare would have done in his infamously stupid plays. (With all due respect to my English teachers past and present, I really dislike English classes and Shakespeare.)

Yes, you know that I do marching band. (If you don't know that, where have you been?) It is fun except for the small hitch called our uniforms. No, they aren't the bane of our existence, (I am actually quite proud to wear mine) but there do make us really hot and sweaty, and every time you take off your shako (marching hat- I hope that's how it's spelled), your previously-silky hair is matted and- quite literally- wet. This is due to the fact that the insides of the hats are made entirely of plastic and vinyl. To the average teenager watching a parade, these [uptown] band outfits look stupid (average person), cumbersome (smarter person), or just to much work to bother with (someone who thinks they're smart). I like them. But, I will say that the style is a bit outdated.

It's marching style. You wouldn't understand.

< Marching coat (shown with the left gauntlet, although in parades, of course, you wear both gauntlets). Not bad, except that the shoulders have about 2 inches of padding in them and the gauntlets add an extra layer of already-thick fabric. Plus, who wears gauntlets anymore?








Below is the shako (MY shako). Not a lot of high school bands use shakos, as it's supposedly a hat for higher-ranking military people or something. I guess that means... we're a high-ranking band? I'm not sure, although I know that our jazz program has been nationally recognized. Anyway, that's what's ridiculous about marching uniforms. Bulky, thick, and really cool but stuffy hats.

Yes, these are cool hats.

BUT... what about dance costumes??? I've never really told you guys much about dance, and that is due to the fact that next year I will be quitting dance to save money for the band trip! And, without all my dance practices and competitions, I will NEVER miss another band event! Unfortunately, I have to miss the very last Pep Band of this year so that I can go to a dance competition tomorrow. I am very sad to miss band but also a bit excited for the competition as I probably won't do another one for years. Anyway, it's unfortunate that I must miss band, but the year's not over yet, so I must persevere with dance for the moment (and to my band friends that are angry at me for having to miss Pep Band, I WOULD MUCH RATHER BE AT BAND THAN AT DANCE BUT I MUST GO TO THIS COMPETITION SO THERE). Moving on... my dance dress is almost as ridiculous as my band uniform, and, like my uniform, it's heavy and made of velvet and satin. That aside, though, (also like my uniform!) it looks nice on stage.

Not your typical dance costume...

Yes, it doesn't look the best in the drawing, but that's as good as I can do on the computer. It looks better in person, and the dots on the left sleeve and skirt are actually rhinestones, so they add sparkle and don't look like weird polka dots rather than... looking like weird polka dots. Yeah. In short, it's also cumbersome and I can't really draw it.

So, what has the most ridiculous costumes? Marching band... or dance? Reminder: I'm not joking!

(Pretty-good-but-not-great-digital artist: me)

So you think your feet hurt???

My feet hurt. Somewhat. Mostly just from mild repeated shock. 
See, in addition to my life of band, I do irish dance (I just finished practicing b/c I must practice 9 hrs. a month at home). It's that stuff they do in Riverdance or Lord of the Dance or any of those Michael Flatley dance shows. Not only is it good exercise, I have lots of opportunities to injure myself. ; ) Not really, I've only done that once and it was around last year.
Dance has a lot to do with feet, actually, just like in marching band! Some of the only differences are that in dance we're always on our toes and that we start our dance steps with the right foot instead of the left. I'm proud to say that, thanks to all that fancy footwork in irish dance, I'm one of the top five marchers in the marching band. Mr. Hughes, one of our band directors, said so. I can actually do a backwards slide (that's how you march backwards in halftime shows) without dropping onto my heels! In dance, we're always on our toes, leaping through the air, making precision-sensitive rhythms with our feet, drilling moves that cause problems over and over and over again...
Now, on the subject of feet...
These are my marching shoes:

These are my dance shoes:

Which ones do you think would cause more foot pain?

WELL, I'll tell you. Your feet have not been in pain until you've broken in a pair of irish dance hard shoes! Those are the ones on the right that are akin to tap shoes. Something about the stiffness of the leather and the way they're shaped causes more and larger blisters than I've ever gotten from regular shoes in my life. These shoes need more breaking in than marching shoes for sure. Or maybe my feet are just pain-proof at this point, after 6 years of dance and 5+ pairs of these feet-killing shoes. 

And, take a look at these fiberglass taps:

If you hit an ankle with one of those, you're toast (just for about 3 minutes, but the idea is that it hurts a lot). I suppose you could fracture an ankle bone if you hit them hard enough, though. 

Anyway, a LOT of people complained about their marching shoes over the summer and how they had so many blisters and how their feet ached so much and all that, and I was just like, "Your feet haven't hurt YET! Try on these shoes and THEN your feet will hurt!" And I would shove a picture of my dance shoes under their noses. No one really said anything in response to that, but... yeah. Although I was mildly annoyed by my bandmates' complaining, I WILL make one exception, and that's for my flute-playing friend Emily (find her blog here). Her marching shoes literally rubbed a hole in her big toe because they just didn't fit the shape of her foot. By the end of the marching season she had to wear all-black Converse sneakers instead of her marching shoes, so I don't blame her for that, because who can control the shape of their feet?

In the end though, irish dance hard shoes are almost guaranteed to make your feet hurt more than marching shoes do.

The end. (Photos by me.)