When Don heard that one of his daughters wanted to quit gymnastics, after five years on the prestigious Advanced Junior Team, he was more relieved than anything else. He sat through what added up to hours of Coach screaming about missed opportunities and throwing away God-given talents with polite reservation, not offering any more explanation than "it's what she wants". He was glad that one daughter, at least, was done with the caustic, nearly secret world that had consumed his life for the past five years. The terrible fall his other daughter sustained a year later caused similar disinterest in the sport, but by then he and Jamie were out of their honeymoon period with dance.
Adah had spent exactly twenty-four days without a competitive sport on her schedule. On day seventeen, she had announced she wanted to start dancing. On day twenty, she came home from school with a print out of Madame Bouvier's School of Dance's website. On day twenty-two Don drove the short distance to the school for an "examination of ability". On day twenty-four, her first class began.
The examination had been, according to Adah, a success. (Don could not say for himself, as he was not allowed in the room to watch.) It had lasted ninety minutes, and at the conclusion Madame Bouvier appeared to be the same stern and emotionless twig of an elderly lady that she had been an hour and a half earlier, but Adah claimed she had been impressed. And sure enough, the old French woman wasted no time in having her secretary plop a monster contract on Don's lap, for the – surprise, surprise – Advanced Junior Team.
While Don and Jamie mulled over the contract, Adah took four lessons a week at the school. Dance was cheaper than gymnastics, and, of course, less dangerous. The team would require only (only) twenty hours of Adah's time a week, Wednesday through Saturday. Though Madame Bouvier gave an equally miniscule number of compliments as Coach McDonald, she at least seemed better able to control the decibel she uses to voice her criticisms. After two weeks, Adah was officially enrolled.
Coach McDonald had prepared Don for the long hours, the weekend competitions, the endless supply of dance paraphernalia sucking constantly at his thinning, government-employed wallet. He could deal with the obsessed parents scorning him for not having the time to watch every practice, come to every competition. He understood that he and his wife would never truly fit the dance mom mold, which seemed to require a rich husband and an unreasonably amount of Botox. He knew that he didn't understand the fashion of dance costumes or the importance of the right brand of pointe shoes, and that whatever his daughters wanted, he would have to agree with. All that was manageable.
Overall, he feels he has adjusted well, over the past three years. He was, in general, supportive of the skimpy costume and heavy make-up, the sometimes excessively sexualized choreography. But this, this is a bit much.
He is watching a video of yet another rehearsal he and his wife couldn't make it to, sent to Jamie by another mother, in an effort to get the Flacks to join the protest the parents of the Advanced Junior Team were putting on.
Calling it a protest was using the word liberally, to say the least; fear of the damage Madame Bolívar could do to a child's reputation in the small dance community was enough to keep all outright condemnation from every breaching any dance mom lips, but the disapproval was clear. And Don, for once, agreed with the housewives.
Ella, along with the seven other members of her team, were clad in black lacey lingerie that goes beyond the "What are you wearing, young lady?" stage, into the "put some more clothes on right now, and then I'm going to tell you how long you're grounded." area. They were marching around seductively to one of those cringe-worthy pop songs of which Ella had in the past expressed disapproval, calling the man saying some woman's "booty don't need explainin' " a chauvinistic pig. When Don said they looked like prostitutes, Ella had replied "Yeah, but at least we look like high-end prostitutes."
The dance did have one redeeming quality: in the last few beats, the girls rip off the stomach portion of their flashy costumes to reveal, painted on their tight skin, "still not 'asking for it' ", which, if you understood the reference, turned the sex show into a no-less-shocking statement about feminism and rape culture. However, the message was somewhat swallowed by the insanity of the costume, music and choreography.
"What if someone sees a video of this dance, ten years from now, and brings it up? Wouldn't you be embarrassed?"
"Embarrassed?" Ella scoffs at her father's question. "I would be so proud to show off, like, my small part in the movement – which, by then, will hopefully have come to, like, a successful conclusion– to end, like, slut-shaming and rape culture, and, by the way, if there is no, like, slut-shaming left, then no one will care about how 'slutty' " – she uses air quotes – "this dance is, and even if there still is slut-shaming then, I would happily talk to whoever brought it up about, like, the current state of women's rights in the world."
Don imagined every girl on the team telling her father the same thing about the dance. But the speech felt so authentic, so Ella-esque, he could not believe it had been completely staged. And the three would argue more, on into the night, about the realities of such a dance and implications on Ella's future, and Don would put on his most stern overprotective-father face, but he knew, at that moment, that Ella would win, that she already, perhaps, had, and that, the following Saturday, he would be watching his daughter strut around on stage to a song suitably named "Talk Dirty".