SPAC Tour: Weeks 1-2 Rewind Time

Okay I have not been very good about posting everyday. I do realize that. So here are some funny things that I have remembered from the past two weeks.

Week one:
Traveling. We were in the vans way more the first week than we were the second week. Well, maybe not but it definitely feels like we have been traveling a lot closer to Provo or that the schools are closer together during this second week of performing than it did the first week. I may have just gotten used to it too. The first week had us performing at 11 schools. We had three every day except for Thursday, which was a huge blessing for us. We were so tired and beat because we were not used to performing that much that only doing 2 performances on Thursday (4/27/2012) was good.

Friday (4/28/2012) was a fun day. We felt more excitement as we danced. We had a school up in Daybreak and then we were in Orem for the last two shows of the day. They were such great audiences. In the first school in Orem (Hillcrest) one of the teachers was on PAC last year. Her name is Mckenzie. She is a wonderful dancer and she grew up doing Scottish dancing her whole life. The principle was not there so she was in charge of the assembly since she knew what it was like (she had been on SPAC once upon a time too). It was good to see her and she gave us a very good introduction. The first school in Daybreak was crazy. We had so much fun! The school is conjoined with their city's community center. The room where we performed had the best floor (even though our clogging sounds were pretty muffled because of how open this space was) but it was open up top, meaning that there was a gym and a track that surrounded the place on the second level while we danced on the first. It was so cool! People were running on the treadmills or on the elliptical while we were dancing. Enough said.

Week two:
We finally got to perform twice at one school. I love that. We don't have to worry about picking everything up all at once so it gives us a good break in between shows but we still are able to stay warm for the next show. We did that at three different schools this week. We did it at Tolman Elementary (4/30/2012), Brookwood Elementary (5/1/2012), and at Midvale Elementary (5/4/2012).  The second week also brought new narrations for the whole week! I was switched from Moldovan to Yemenite. It was not to bad to remember.

May 1, 2012 was Will Farnbach's birthday. He turned 22. We all sang him happy birthday and had donuts to celebrate. I was scared all day though. We have this tradition in Folk dance that on your birthday you get thrown in the air by all of the guys. I ran away before they could do it to me during the Fall semester. I was out of the waters as far as I was concerned right? False. Craig Call and Will Farnbach had been trying to get me thrown all semester. I never did get thrown during winter semester. I just never let it happen. No one thought about it until after they had passed a birthday so they said they would wait until the next one, and then the next one, and the next one, ect. I never got thrown. Rewind to April 23, 2012. The day we moved in for SPAC I was with Craig all day and we were just hanging out. Well, I saw something that I wanted to know the story behind it and he would not tell me. I finally gave in and said, "What if I said that I would be thrown on Will's birthday if you told me?" That got his attention. Long story short, I got thrown. UGH! It was so scary!! However, I didn't get thrown until the day after Will's birthday. We didn't have any time to do it on his birthday so both of us were thrown on May 2, 2012. I was terrified. I also hit Jay in the face. I felt bad about that.

Amber Moon also had something terrifying happen to her during our first show on the first. She does the flying girl with Wesley Valdez in Hopak. She holds onto his neck and they just spin around in a circle with her being the only thing holding her on. It looked so great! It was the best one they have ever done. When they came down something happened and she ended up flat on her back hitting her head hard on the tile floor that was not forgiving for our feet let alone a head. She hit hard enough that she couldn't see for a few seconds and her whole left side went paralyzed for a few minutes. They carried her off but she ended up being fine. Nothing bad really came from it other than a humongous bump on her head. When she showed us the bump, Kaitlyn Gourley just bust up laughing and says, "It's true! Mormons do have horns!" hahahaha! It was the best quote anyone could have ever had! The best thing too is that Amber had the history for the day. That will go down in infamy.

May 2, 2012 was just a bad day for me all together.Other than being thrown at the end of the day, I had something scary happen to me at the beginning of the day. During the first show I got hurt. I had hurt my foot during our Moldovan number (the second number of the day for me). We were doing AAB as our line up so I was able to only have to do Hopak at the second school since we have alternates for every dance in the A show line up on 9 couple. I just sat out and chilled with Delynne during the second show to let my foot just relax. I danced all of the numbers at our third show though along with doing my narration. It was scary for me. Yemenite is a lot of bouncing up and down on our feet so I was very cautious dancing. I didn't do toe stands on my right foot during clogging either. It was a hard show for me to do but I got through it. The next day I felt better but we had a lot of shows to do.

Thursday (5/3/2012) we had our only four show days. I was really scared considering that I was injured and didn't really know what was wrong with my foot. I had it wrapped for the first show but then it just hurt more to have it wrapped so I took it off and danced with no support. Yeah I know... I am an idiot for doing that. I could have made it a lot worse. Well I was very careful the rest of the day. The crazy thing though is that I didn't really need to be. I felt great. My foot was not really hurting at all. I wonder why... oh wait it was because we had the BEST audiences we have ever had. Every single school was amazing. At the first school we had kids that were from all over the world. There were 32 different countries represented at their elementary school. At every single school on Thursday, Caucasian was the obvious minority. It was so much fun to perform for those schools. After our performances we went to the training room to get worked on or to use the whirlpool to ice our aching bodies. I was worked on by Bridget and she told me that what had happened to my foot was that I had pulled my Peroneal muscles and tore some tissue at the insertion point on my foot. Great! Not. There goes one of my tour goals. Not getting injured is a bust. She worked on it, had me do exercises, and then she put me in the whirlpool for 15 minutes making sure that I was constantly moving my foot the whole time. She taped me afterwards as well. I feel better but I still hurt every now and then. I have to be careful still.

Friday the fourth I had history. It was such a great day! We performed at two schools but had three shows. Our first school was at Midvale. We performed two shows there. The first audience was for the older kids so they didn't really respond outwardly and it felt really dead for us. We all kept saying that we felt really dead. We felt a lot more exhausted than we usually would have been. It was a hard show because we were trying so hard to make them happy and get them excited but they were not giving us anything so it was sucking the energy out of us. We kept wondering why it was so hard compared to the day before where we had so much energy the whole day.Audience is the key. The second audience were the younger grades. They were so great!! They clapped through the whole show and reacted so well to everything. Afterwards we sat down in the audience and the second graders danced for us. They did a Line dance and a dance from Mexico. It was the cutest thing ever!

The girls that I was sitting by were so mesmerized by the ribbons on my head piece and they wanted to play with them. They kept braiding them over and over again. It was so adorable. I said goodbye to them and thanked them for being so cute after I took pictures with them. I went up to Craig afterwards and told him how the little girls were braiding my ribbons. He then decided to do the same thing and took three of the ribbons and started braiding. He moved away from me and I was so confused as to why at first (he was trying to get a little tension to make a good braid haha) and so I followed him so he wouldn't rip out the head piece and ruin my braid. He kept walking away backwards and I kept following him. Apparently there were some little boys that were observing us and thought we were flirting. They proceeded to yell out, "KISS HER! KISS KISS KISS!!"

EMBARRASSING! I took the ribbons out of Craig's hands and walked out. I had the history for Friday so I am for sure going to include that. The kids in the second audience were just so excited about us being there. They had climbed up and jumped up on all of the boys at the end as well. I loved being there.

The third show was not as memorable. The third show was a lot of fun as well. We decided to use real bread for Bread and Salt in Hopak. It was cool. My van ate part of it after the show. This school had a dance class after our performance and we decided to all join in! Garrett Jacobson started it all but we all just came in and dance with them. It was a lot of fun.

Friday night had SPAC being volunteers at the Edgemont Extravaganza. I was on the Princess Bean Bag Toss all night long. It was fun to see all of the little girls get so excited to see a girl who was dressed up as Snow White. It was a lot of fun. We got free food at the end of the night. They had a ton of food left so it was nice. :)

Yesterday was super chill. I had a visit from Brent and Chelsey in the morning. It was good to see them. There was a Nacho Libre party that SPAC has been planning for a long time.

Today I had church at 1:30pm. Ugh. Gag me. I am not a fan of church that starts past 11am. I like morning church a lot. It is nice and way chill. We just got done with a breakfast for dinner break the fast as a team. It was a lot of fun and we had SO MUCH food!! I am just so excited for this week. It will be a great week!