Exhibited!

I think, based on my two experiences with it, that when people ask Ballroom to do an exhibition, they really need to define what their idea of "exhibition" is. Perhaps also what their idea of "ballroom dancing" is.

So we danced at the very beginning of the trustees' dinner, while they were all slowly going into the room, or, rather, the glassed-in floor hockey rink where it was being held. (We just opened our new athletic center this semester. Everyone's very proud.) I assume you can already see the problems with this. Yes, we were dodging trustees and waiters as we Foxtrotted and Tango'd around an admittedly relatively nice floor, if one ignored the taped-down cable for the projector going through the middle of things. (Sadly, Ben and I ignored it too well and tripped ourselves up a bit on one circuit round the floor. Ah, well. No one noticed.)

No one paid us a whole lot of attention for the first go-rounds of Foxtrot and Tango, except for those who were walking through our line of dance to get to their tables. By the time we moved on to Swing, most people had filed in, which was good, and we actually got some applause at the end of it, although most people were paying more attention to getting to their tables and talking to each other than to us. But I totally landed the leapfrog jump in my Latin heels, which was awesome.

Then the president of the college arrived and was ready to begin her speech, so we got shuffled off unceremoniously without getting to do our Samba. Bah! Silly people. Don't they know Samba's awesome?

So yeah, we felt pretty dumb, particularly at the beginning, but the club gets some money out of this, so all is good.

The best moment actually occurred before the show. We took over one of the bathrooms just outside the rink for changing, and once we were all be-feathered and be-sequined, we were all hanging out in the hallway outside for a while, waiting to go on. All the girls are standing in a ragged sort of line (it's a very narrow hallway) chatting, with me at the end furthest from the front of the hall. Some lady comes by, catches sight of us, and while she's looking slowly down the line, she says, "Oh, you all look so--" audible pause as she gets to me and my neon pink dress, "...pretty."

Heh.

Chandra took several videos of me dancing, which I can totally put online once I swipe the last one off her camera. I'll be doing that tomorrow, so those of you who haven't seen me dance can now see me do the two perkiest dances in the world, with added vision impairment from the pink dress at no extra charge! Ginger took an amazing amount of photos, at least some of which ought to come out, so there will be those to come as well. Woot!

And now I go to get the enormous amounts of makeup off of my face. I can't believe I went out in public looking like this. *hangs head in shame*