Once a Lakette....Always a Lakette

Something I've been waiting years and years to hear....the Lakettes are having an alumni dance performance. 

YAY!!  For those of you that didn't know me in HS, I honestly can't express how much danceline and jazz/marching band meant to me.  After I graduated, I did spend an extended period of time feeling quite lost and like I left behind who I was and had to start all over. 

Good grief...ok the point of this blog is not to be all sobby and bleh so I'm going to move on....geez...

So over the course of a month, we had a couple two hour practices on Sunday nights.   I REALLY looked forward to those practices :D  And it was so much fun to be in a room of alumni from 2012 all the way back to 1974.   Now let's not forget that when I was in danceline we won state my sophomore year and won again my senior year in jazz funk and took second that same year in high kick.....so I can't help that edge of competitiveness to be perfect.   But right off the bat, I knew it couldn't be perfect, we all have lives scattered all over the Twin Cities so not everyone could make every practice and we only had really one day to work on formations.   So I let go of caring about the little things and just enjoyed practicing again in the gym, in the cafeteria, in my kitchen, my living room.  

Our performance was during an intermission at the Lakettes Dance Invitational.  It brought back a lot of good, bad and indifferent memories walking through the front doors of WHS again but maybe luckily, the building has gone through a lot of changes.  We all had shirts with our graduating year on the back and "Once a Lakette.....Always a Lakette" written on the front.   In the end there was about 40 of us on the floor.   So many of us that our kickline had to be a U shape so we all fit!

It was really exciting and fun for me to introduce Mark to something that was such a huge part of my heart and my life when I was growing up.  I suppose I should have clued him in to how guys typically guy their dancer girlfriend/wife a flower ;)  The crowd was SO loud for us and it gave me the chills and made me feel so amazing.  

I just wish I could continue to perform as an adult.  I'm not classically trained, I'm not a ballet dancer and it just seems like unless you can go out and find actual paid jobs as a ballerina or a backup dancer for JLo, the closest I'll ever get is DanceFIT class at the gym.  

Ok here's the video we made:

Anyone know of an "outlet" for a precision dancer?  I've often thought that maybe I could do something with the local community theaters or something but with dancing often comes singing and while I can kind of sing, I'm not up for auditioning my talents as a singer.