Little Miss Sunshine is Alive and Well

Just got back from spending almost my entire weekend at a dance convention in a nearby suburban hotel. My older daughter has been taking dance lessons since she was three, and attending dance conventions with her dance studio has been an annual ritual for awhile. For the uninitiated, here’s what a dance convention is in a nutshell: Hip faculty featuring top dancers from across the country travel to dance conventions each weekend, teaching classes to both dance students and teachers for two days, with one or two evenings devoted to competitions, where afore-mentioned hip faculty are the judges.  Trophies are given out, and scholarships to future dance conventions and Hollywood classes are awarded on the last day. Usually the faculty performs in a grand finale on the last day as well as the competition dances deemed “Judges Choice”.  Even a ragtag bunch of parents performs at the finale, thanks to groovy hip-hop moves they learn in a “parents class” earlier in the day (I’ve done that before– what a hoot!).  Dancewear and professional photos snapped just about every minute of the convention are on sale in the hallways.  It’s pretty much the same drill at every convention, such as LA Dance Force, Company Dance, and Dance Olympus, to name a few.  In the Dallas area alone, there are hotel-based conventions and other dance competitions (at high school gyms and civic auditoriums) going on all over the city each weekend, sometimes two in one weekend (and some dance studios try to take their students to as many as they can!). The hotel ones are a lot of fun, albeit expensive, and the faculty is always top-notch and friendly.  It’s good mother-daughter time for Allison and me.  We both love dance, and we get to see some outstanding, creative choreography.

What I dread at these things is what I call the “hootchie mama” contingency.

This past weekend, I saw more pelvic thrusts than at a Tom Jones concert, and enough fast butt shaking going on that I was thinking, “You could strap on a Martini mixer to each of their behinds and serve drinks to the whole crowd.”  Seriously.  In a number called “Shake Your Shimmy”, one group of over-rouged girls danced just like the women in the old 2 Live Crew music videos (didn’t that group get arrested back in the day for lewd behavior??)  And these dancers weren’t women– they were nine years old.  In fact, after the convention was over, I realized that the most overtly sexual moves in the whole competition came from the Petite and Junior divisions, not from the Teens and Seniors.

What’s wrong with this picture? Am I too much of a prude? As the little hootchie mamas kept winning top award after top award, I seriously began to wonder– then I heard a total stranger next to me say, in disgust, “That was that hootchie studio.”  Ahhh- a kindred spirit! Upon striking up a conversation with her, I learned that even more of her thoughts echoed mine exactly.  “They might as well just put a pole up there and let them have at it,” she added.  I suddenly flashed back to a past convention where I watched girls, who couldn’t even fill out a training bra, dance to “Lady Marmalade” dressed like hookers. (Remember– that song means “Will you F—- Me” in French.)

In this already sex-saturated culture, where girls use drugs and die of eating disorders because they feel they can’t live up to the stereotypes and pressures put on them– why do some dance teachers, most of them women themselves, feed the fire by putting very young girls in this position?  And, the girls are not only being given the message that sex sells, but also that it’s okay, when you’re age 6 or 7 or 8 or 9, to act sexy in front of men.  The audience at competitions and recitals is not made up of just moms.  It’s also Dads, grandfathers, little brothers, big brothers, uncles, and that teenage boy I saw this weekend with a T-shirt emblazoned on the front with the words “Amateur Porn Star”. All these dudes are getting a big dose of come-ons by lipsticked pre-pubescents.   (I half expected Chris Hanson from MSNBC’s “To Catch a Predator” to come strolling in with his camera crew.)  Again, there is something wrong with this picture…

Our studio owner, who abhors sleazy dancing and costumes, told me she thinks the tendency to teach and perform in that way is a  “small town thing”– if that’s the case, I couldn’t help but think that most of the small-town hootchie dancers probably come from very conservative religious backgrounds….  so it’s okay to grab your crotch in a performance on Saturday night in the dance show, as long as you’re grabbin’ your Bible come Sunday morning.

I’m proud our tiny, traditional dance studio won some nice awards without wearing sequined midriff-baring bra tops and hip-hugging “booty shorts”, without perfect Barbie shapes, spray-on tans, diamond earrings and matching, perfectly pinned-up hair with a “poof” on top, and without bumping and grinding. Our girls looked like real girls up there on stage, some with braces, some with acne, some big boned, others stick skinny.  They may not have gotten the Judges’ Choice award, but I think they’re going to be big winners in the long run, in the more important dance of life.   I just hope that they can see that, too.