She put me into tap dance lessons at age 3 “to strengthen my legs”. There’s a story behind this, something wrong with my feet or my legs and needing to wear braces of some sort. Me and 2 other girls, Debbie and Angela, learned a tap routine to the Teddy Bear’s picnic and performed it at the Kitsilano Showboat. Everybody laughed at us, how cute we were just these wee little girls dressed up in pink tutu’s and sequined top hats. Their noises made me red in the face and I stopped dancing part way thru.
At age 4, she put me into Highland Dance lessons. I want you to know that I had never seen Highland Dance, that I did not ask to take dance classes of any kind, that this was not a case of me pursuing a passion. I believe she would tell you that the dance lessons were to burn off some of my extra energy, because the doctor had told her I was “hyperactive”. There was no medication, I just had to go around telling everybody that I wasn’t allowed to have Tang.
What I want you to see is that dancing was not my choice. That she didn’t ask what I would like to do, maybe play soccer or softball or singing lessons or anything like that. Her parents were Scottish, and her mother loved Scottish Country dancing, where couples lilt around together like square dancers, and this is the reason why Highland was apparently chosen.
I hated it. I didn’t like the music, or the costumes, or the stiffness of the dance steps. It’s a dance style that lacks any form of creative expression entirely. It’s rigid and repetitive and traditional – you must do it the way it has always been done.
When I asked why I had to go she’d say “Because I’m your mother and I said so.”
Lessons were 3x a week. I was made to practice my steps at home every day that I didn’t go to class. And I got spanked every time I got a step wrong. I was four years old.
I cried every time I got spanked. I cried and wanted to push away, run away from the reach of my mother. She felt scary and mean and angry all the time. She felt like a big scary monster. All punishment and retaliation and rollers that ached my head every night.
At age 5 she entered me in my first Highland Dance competition and I think I placed third in one of my dances. Well, she must have really caught the bug because I was entered into every dance competition in the province for the next 10 years. We bought an RV camper so we could drive all over the place to go to these competitions.