Commusings: Diaries of a Dance Dad with Jeff Krasno

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Dear Commune Community,

It’s that time of year again … no, not baseball or spring cleaning. It’s dance competition season! My daughters, Ondine and Micah, are avid and committed dancers and tour Southern California dance “comps” as part of a local studio. Suspiciously, Schuyler also schedules the bulk of her retreats to coincide with these weekend competitions. This curious time-tabling forces me to assume my least preferred role in life: Dance Dad.

Today’s musing is a stream of consciousness tapped into my phone at last weekend’s spectacle. If you’re easily offended, you may want to stop short of this relatively unfiltered romp. If you press on, however, you’ll hopefully have a chuckle or two.

Here at [email protected] and dancing on IG @jeffkrasno.

In love (and laughter), include me,
Jeff

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Diaries of a Dance Dad

March 2, 2024
Cypress, California

I am enduring a 3-day dance competition in Orange County with my horrible-adorable daughters — a torture I wouldn't wish to inflict upon my worst enemy.

I sit alone among throngs in a cavernous and fetid auditorium, waiting and waiting and waiting for my girls to take the stage. It’s a strange type of boredom for me – the tedium of which is starkly counterpointed by the emotional tumult of the 500 endocrine-disrupted teenage dancers in the room.

For them, the weekend is an adrenaline roller coaster fueled by nerves, hair spray and skittles – full of squeals and tears. There is literally nothing in that last sentence that I fancy.

The competition is titled “LA Inferno.” The organizers at least have the self-awareness to name this ghastly experience appropriately. Indeed, there is a profound deviousness to the structure of the event.

Each individual routine is about 90 seconds in duration. Hence, my daughters’ six dances could be tidily packaged in about 10 riveting minutes. Instead, however, the performances are spread out over three days – creating a multi-hour purgatory. This scheduling manipulation is an iniquitous form of hostage taking, for every audience member is clustered here just to watch their own child. There is only one Misty Copeland in the universe and apparently every parent In Southern California has one. But, now, we are nefariously forced into sacrificing multiple days of a rapidly diminishing lifetime watching other children bumble about.

This scheme maximizes audience size and the opportunity for the organizers to hock shoddy polyester merchandise in the lobby. I am tempted to purchase a crimson t-shirt emblazoned with “Inferno” across the front just for an ironic selfie – but I resist.

The dances are so brief and the schedule so unreliable that one dare not take a pee for risk of missing a daughter’s performance – and subsequently facing their wrath. I’ve missed dances before and tried to lie about it. They always know. And then you’ve given up your entire weekend only for your daughters to revile you. So, you sit there and give yourself a urinary tract infection because a UTI is less egregious than the consequences of missing a fucking lyrical routine. This is Dante’s ninth ring.

The future may well be female in the rest of the free world, but it’s very much the present here at Barbieland High School in Mini-mall-istan, California. Among the 1,000 or so chromosomes present, there are about a dozen of the Y variety, all clustered towards the back of the auditorium, slumped and beleaguered, asking themselves that very question: Why?

I am there in the back row with the other hapless dads. You might think that this penance provides an opportunity for male bonding, but it doesn’t. No commiseration is required. We may exchange an anguished half-smile. But, like convicts, our shared immiseration is implicitly understood.

On occasion, when our progeny takes the stage, one of us will try to pull the dance Dad version of Rosa Parks and move closer to the action, only to quickly retreat, penis firmly between our legs, when the music stops.

Men have occupied the seats of power in many milieus, but, here, we’re treated like imposters at best and like perverts at worst. In response to this relentless persecution, like a badgered suspect, we begin to question our own innocence as we stoically survey the hundreds of scantily clad pubescent teenage girls thrusting their hips on a well-lit stage.

But let me set the record straight. Despite the fact that you may be witnessing gyrations otherwise reserved for window-less Hollywood dive bars featuring a pole, I guarantee that this spectacle is a form of testosterone-sapping castration. The absence of eroticism is largely underwritten by the gaggle of dance moms trying desperately to impersonate the grotesque TV personality Abbey Lee. With all apologies to Hieronymus Bosch, this inferno could be bottled up and sold as un-Viagra.

The entire affair is an imp’s breath from a beauty pageant replete with the self-important panel of judges, the frenzied award ceremony, the sanctimonious and unintelligible speeches, the five-and-dime plastic trophies. The volume of concealer deployed could mask a zit the size of Vesuvius. The absurd surfeit of blush, mascara, lipstick and garish costuming is an exercise in homogenization. I literally cannot identify my own child from another – a phenomenon that only increases the demand of my attention – making it only more difficult to type this musing into my phone.

I serve only two purposes here – chauffeur and food runner. I attempt to be supportive and leverage my musical background for useful commentary. But jazz dance is curiously not set to jazz music, nor is hip-hop necessarily set to hip-hop and contemporary doesn’t appear contemporary at all. And don’t you dare confuse it with modern!

So, I’m back in the car, having relinquished my prized parking slip and heading to Jersey Mike’s with a text thread of requests. The weekend requires a suspension of all culinary, health and moral standards. Twizzlers, Advil, mascara, Doritos, Liquid Death, nail polish, a phthalate sandwich. It’s like we’ve moved into a CVS.

I deliver the goods backstage without the faintest nod of appreciation and head back into “the inferno.” I stick my AirPods back into my ears and un-pause Audible. The juxtaposition of listening to Christopher Hitchens during a tap dance routine provides brief but needed comic relief. If God has anything to do with my predicament, he certainly is not great.

Finally, the loud speaker crackles … Please welcome Micah and Ondine from Creation Station as they perform their duo titled “One Moment More.” Indeed, one moment more is about all I can muster.

Like a well-trained cadet, I come to attention.

And there they are, center stage – focused but serene. The piano ballad perfumes the air and they yoke with it, carrying its wistfulness in the lilt of their hands. Their arms unfurl, strong yet supple like the boughs of a willow. They float with each sauté and ascend effortlessly with each relevé, instinctively aware of their bodies in space.

They are locked-in, an imaginary string between them, moving as if connected to a single source. They dance in front of 500 people as if they have no audience – no past, no future, just simultaneous intention and action.

They know where to go without knowing. This taste of cognitive absence will someday make them susceptible to vice offstage – but, for now, it’s pure liberation. To just flow like water, to fill empty space without purpose.

The music stops. And they culminate the routine in a deep embrace, an act of sorority that shrouds the buzzing theater with a longed-for silence. This emotional salience will win them a first-place tchotchke.

I mop a tear from the puncta of my eye. My daughters are better than me. And, for a fleeting moment, I get sit to under the trees that I have planted.

They stride confidently off the stage. And, as quickly as it lifted, the marine layer drifts back in. I am once again socked in the fog of gaudy leotards and Taylor Swift remixes. Eventually, through the awful grace of god, this divine comedy ends.

I wait for the girls in the lobby, tapping my own foot. I’m malodorous and feel fat. They take their sweet time packing up their “dream duffel” – the grossly misnomered repository for their sundry dance gear. I will eventually get the honor of hauling this uncommonly heavy piece of luggage up the 93 steps to my house – but only after a two-hour, bumper-to-bumper car ride home.

Frumpy moms file out languidly. Garbage bins overflow with almost emptied venti Starbucks tumblers. Foot-printed handbills litter the soggy carpet. It’s over … almost. The return home will be a deafening re-litigation of the weekend’s lowlights, high golds and elite platinums.

I stare out the window into the humdrum of pumped gas and dry-cleaning – and return to thumbing out these words on my phone.

In this moment of utter insignificance, in this shithole of a lobby, I realize it is, in fact, insignificance that we so desperately crave. To do something not because it signifies anything, but simply to do it for its own sake. To dance just to dance. To write just to write.