I'm choreographing the middle school musical, y'all! Yeah, I'm familiar with phrase "glutton for punishment," why do you ask????
As I described to my Facebook peeps earlier in the process, choreographing middle schoolers is like herding cats. Cats with ADD. Cats with ADD who forgot their meds, and who just chugged a gallon of Mountain Dew. WHEEEE! LET'S DANCE! OH LOOK - SOMETHING SHINY!!!! I must be nuts.
Admittedly, I did this to myself. I've wanted to choreograph a musical ever since I saw All That Jazz at a very impressionable age, mostly because I love the idea of waking up, looking in the mirror and yelling, "Showtime!" at myself every day, the way the Bob Fosse guy did in that movie. (An aside: My parents, of all people, took me and my sister to see All That Jazz in the movie theeyayter when it came out in 1979; after all, what's more suitable for your impressionable preadolescent daughters to see than a film about a dipsomaniacal, pill-popping sex addict working himself to death? On the other hand, it was the '70s, so perhaps that looked like wholesome family fare in the era of key parties and coke binges; what the hell do I know, anyway?) Besides, I coached JV cheerleaders for years, and they're barely one step removed from middle school themselves, right? Ha. Little did I know. Let's just say that middle schoolers aren't known for their keen insight into themselves, or their ability to view their own efforts objectively, or even their ability to know what the hell their limbs are doing at any given moment in time. As a result, we have a lot of discussions that run along the lines of, LADIES! PLEASE PUT YOUR FEET TOGETHER. TOGETHER. YOUR FEET. THOSE THINGS AT THE END OF YOUR LEGS? MOVE THEM SO THEY ARE TOUCHING. ALL OF YOU. LOOK DOWN. LOOK. DOWN. AT. YOUR. FEET. et cetera, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And no matter how many directions I give, one little Martha Graham is standing in the middle of the kick line, looking like a member of that famous Irish family, the O'Blivious, as my sainted dad likes to say. Seriously, no matter how much I remind them to focus! and look! and count! in their heads and not out loud!, there is always one kid who looks for all the world like she's waiting for a bus and just happened to have wandered into the middle of a dance rehearsal. What's more, as soon as my eagle eye turns from them for the briefest microsecond, all hell breaks loose. Yesterday, I turned my head long enough to answer a question, and in the time it took me to answer a simple query, all discipline and decorum had evaporated. Half the girls had wandered off their marks, two girls were swinging one another around in circles, and a couple of 'em were standing around looking dazed, as if they had just woken up and realized that this was not, in fact, the bus stop. It took me five minutes to get them back from a five-second mental lapse, and that was doing pretty well.
So, just to get us all in the mood for Showtime!, I leave you with a montage of clips from the aforementioned movie... if only so you can bask in the whuck-tasticness that was 1970's cinema.
I like the ciggie-in-the-shower shot.
I love the reference to casual sex and the foul language. I wonder if the 11-year-old me noticed it.
And this? This is just bizarre. That was one weird decade, to say the least.
