ABSTRACT
My sister Kathy was five and I was four when our mum enrolled us in the local ballet class back home, and our sibling rivalry quickly and bitterly focused in on the upcoming recital in the church basement. The issue of whether her appearance as a sunflower in the Dance of the Sunflowers was superior to my own as a moonbeam in the Dance of the Moonbeams was resolved when a) unforgivably, the sunflowers got their picture in the local paper; and b) Miss Ewald suggested to mum that I try the tap class instead. My sister glided upward into toe shoes, while I continued my downhill slide from tap through Highland dance to Mrs. Hymers's acrobatics class, and finally into baton twirling. It was awful.
