Mad Hot Ballroom

I just finished watching Mad Hot Ballroom on Showtime and found myself bawling like a baby, just like every other time I've watched it. MHB is about a ballroom dance competition for school aged children in New York City.Apparently this is a yearly thing with a big trophy going to the winning school. SO why do I cry? Maybe because I've never had a chance to do something that could prove to my mother and the world that I was good at something. Maybe because I remember the elation of my sons when they had there moments in the sun. When older son, first chair sax in band all throughout his high school career, despite the fact that, as his middle school teacher so cruely reminded him, freshmen never make first chair. Older son made first chair on the very first day and held it forever more. The school band had one big trip a year where they competed and always brought home a prize or two. One trip as the older son was unpacking his bags from a trip to Virginia Beach he told me he brought me something. Thinking I was getting salt water taffy I was excited but not as excited as when he hauled this trophy out of his bag and handed it to me. Outstanding soloist. And he said the trophy was mine.
Younger son wasn't much into band. Instead he and a select number of his clasmates, wrote an dillustrated a slide show called "Save the Bay'. Each and every picter was made of paper. No pen lines no markers. If you wanted a line it had to be cut out of paper and glues just so so that there were no shadows. I had helped with their project the year before and they came in runner up for the state, complete with a trophy. That year the teacher was too busy to help so another mother and I worked with the kids. I can't tell you what fun I had with these creative kids. We won county, we won state and then we went to the International film festival that just happened to be in DC that year. So the other mother and i hired a bus, invited the parents and off we went. When they won first place I think the parents screamed more than the kids. Their trophy is still at the elementary school and younger son is now 24.
I think I know why these things and Mad Hot Ballroom make me cry. For once, the focus is on the arty kids, the creative kids and not just the atheletes. In high school, football players get a letter and recognition at the end of the school year. Band gets a letter as well but no mention is ever made about first chair this or that. But we know. We band parents know that not only doe sit take skill and practise and determination but a sort of stuborness that our kids like being in the band, despite all the geek connotations, just as the arty kids, love their glue and cut paper and the chance to let their imaginations fly. Some day the arty kids will get their recognition.
After all, according to what I have heard and read, the thing that made ancient man into what we call human wasn't his skill with a spear, or relationships with the others in their clan. It was art. When ancient man first put finger to pigment and drew upon a cave wall, we left the workd of the brute and entered the world of the modern man. Someone hand me my glue.