Flip yer wig: confessions of an Irish dance mom

Report from inside a national champsionships Irish competition

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Reporting from inside the world of Irish dance

Photo by Shelly Allen Art / shellyallenart.com

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The “moms” settle into the ballroom packed with spectators. They announce our team and we all hold our collective breaths. “Please GOD just let them dance well.”

I have bitten my well-manicured nails down to the nubbins at this point.  It seems like an eternity, but somehow during the dance the rest of the world slips away as we watch our girls dance.

I find myself feeling my mother, long gone, standing right beside me.  I know that this is what she and my dad experienced all those years ago watching me and the girls I still call my dance friends perform these same ceilis in the basement of St. John the Baptist Church in Jersey City under the tutelage of Margaret McNamara. 

Back in the here and now, the girls danced beautifully.  Now we wait and see if they were good enough to get a medal.

They don’t actually tell what place you’ll get, just that you placed.  Emotions ping-pong back and forth, between happy, hopeful, sad, terrified, disappointed and just teenaged angst.

“Do you think we’ll recall?” my Kathryn asks.  There is no right answer.  For the record, not even Zoloft Mary Poppins can answer that one correctly.

They get their recall, which is code for “more stress this way.”

Exhausted, we put back on the dresses, check the wigs and headbands, slap on some make-up and send them up.  Thirty seconds later it is all over with.  We waited for three hours for 30 seconds of fame.  

I cheer loudly for the their accomplishment, wishing maybe they could have been a little higher (unless they’re first -- we all think it and you’re lying if you say you don’t).

She comes off the stage and we hug, and in that hug I feel every arm of every Irish ancestor wrap around us and suddenly, three hours of claustrophobia doesn’t seem quite so long and my heart is swelling with pride. My inner Zoloft Mary Poppins swallows hard on a Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious spoon full of sugar that helps the medicine go down.

(Madden Marano regularly blogs on the Irish dance world at http://flipyerwig.blogspot.com)

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