Old dog, new tricks

True story: I was 15 years old when I tried out for Raiderettes, the dance squad that performed at football halftime shows and pep rallies. I was 5'6" of long flailing limbs, but I wanted so much to be that dancer, to have that graceful control over my body. I lacked any sort of refined gross motor skills, so not surprisingly, I didn't make the team. I was disappointed, but focused my attention on other things where I wouldn't make a fool of myself. Like art, newspaper, and drama.

Over the next 20+ years, that lack of refined gross motor skills never posed any sort of hurdle for me. I could  keep a beat and dance when out with friends, I could gradually move away from the very back of the class in step or zumba classes. In the real world, most adults don't need the grace and coordination of a dancer.

Unless they want to do musical theatre.

When they discover that their brains are even less capable now of piloting those long flailing limbs than they were at age 15.

Which is utterly ridiculous and unfair, when I think about it. When I was 15, I'd had only two or three years' experience being 5'6". It makes sense that I might not have mastered the skills needed for finer movement. I did grow another two inches some time over the next 15 years, but for heaven sake, I've been this tall for a long time, stayed fit and mostly trim, and I can do the electric slide and the macarena!

But rather than time-earned mastery of physical movement, I honestly feel like I have some sort of learning disability. Equating dance steps to spoken words, I can get the little words, like 'and' and 'go' and 'the', and with practice, words like 'bank', 'truck', and perhaps even 'recliner.' But as much as I desperately want it to, my brain just cannot form sentences with them because when they occur a bunch at a time, they make no sense to me: Go the and truck recliner to the and bank bank go the recliner bank refrigerato-shoot and the the cat tree go the the. I get the 'words' switched around or stumble over them completely.  And the more I stumble, the more flustered I get.

Last night I decided that I'm a Hot Box Girl because my daddy owns the club.  But even if a cutesy dork dancer is funny and would garner laughs, Adelaide is the focus of the Hot Box numbers. And I feel that drawing attention away from her is a disservice to both that actress and the authors of the show.

So today I'm going to see if I can't use that dance-step vs. word correlation analogy to find words that will assemble into meaningful sentences. At the very least, I want to get the words in the right order. The occasional 'trunk' in place of 'truck' is a little easier to cover than 'go' in place of 'refrigerator.'