Trip Down Memory Lane: Installment #1

Firstly, happy Easter! I spent Easter on campus again this year to a) help out with the Masses on campus and b) get ahead with some work. Mom flew up on Friday, and will be here until this coming Saturday. I was able to have a nice (read: excellent!) Sunday brunch with her, my grandmother, and my cousin, Mitchell, who is a senior at Tufts. Never fear – I had a wonderful Easter, and it hasn’t been all work.

So raise your hand if you remember this:

The short hair, the non-dance shoes, and the lack of stage make-up. Yes, you’re looking at a photo from my first ballroom competition, which was held at Harvard.

Quite poetically, my last American competition was held at Harvard on Saturday (which is one of the reasons why Mom came up). Let’s compare, shall we?

Kind of a difference, right? More like a massive difference. For starters, the ratio of rhinestones to body space is definitely higher in this photo than in the one from my first competition. And I finally discovered how to achieve that dance look with fake eyelashes, hair extensions, gel, and copious amounts of stage make-up.

Josh and I did quite well – poetically enough (sorry, I know that I used that phrase before), I made a goal at that first Harvard competition to end up on the Advanced floor. Josh and I competed on the Advanced Rhythm floor, and we made it to the semi-finals, which wasn’t bad for practicing only two hours before the competition.

The transformation in my dancesport look has been extreme – let’s take a look through some of the older dance photos, shall we?

Here’s one that probably conveys the transformation most clearly, though:

No, no – not that one. Although it does show how crazy dance has made me, and how knackered Josh can get after one round of Rhythm (he perks right back up in you give him water, though).

This one. This was almost the cover of the HC Magazine, but the editors decided to go with something a little less…sexy (can I use that word on this blog?). This doesn’t manifest just my transformation, but the team’s. We were the cover article for the HC Magazine, which was just amazing. We had so many people come to our booth at Accepted Students’ Day telling us what a wonderful team we must be to have that type of coverage. On top of that, we were also nominated for the Outstanding Club Sports Team of the Year. Our competition this year was the largest in our history, and we were officially bigger than the competitions run by UConn, Harvard Beginners, Brandeis, and BU. It’s incredible to see how much this team has grown – we started out as just a bunch of students who wanted to learn how to dance, and now we’ve become a real team. It’s beyond remarkable.

Don’t worry – we’re still crazy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2011 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Trip Down Memory Lane. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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