Tale #26: Not So Shy

I have been teaching children since I was a child. I started by teaching choreography to other kids when I was eleven working as a choreography assistant on Mama Terry’s inaugural children’s theater production of RATS. However, the youngest age I ever worked with through that program was five-years-old.

The only time I had ever worked with a kid younger than five prior to taking over the Verona Recreation Dance Program was when I would babysit, and I charged a lot of money to care for those ankle grabbing, biting, toy-throwing little cutie pies.

In the summer of 2018, after the dance program’s first season as residents of our building, their head (and only) instructor was leaving. She stopped me one day while I was in the office and asked if I would be interested in her job or if I knew of anyone that might be.

I had spent a lot of time that year thinking about how VACT needed to absorb this program into its’ own programming lineup. Having a foreign program in our building four days a week was difficult. The dance studio was unusable in the afternoons, the parents didn’t always respect the space (see Tale #25), and we didn’t have any authority over daily occurrences in our own building.

I told the instructor I would only be interested if the head of the Department of Parks and Recreation would discuss re-establishing the program as a joint effort between our theater and their department.

She pitched the idea to her boss, but he dismissed it. Therefore, I was not interested, and they had to begin the search for a teacher.

About a month later, I got an email. They were ready to talk.

After much deliberation, we agreed that after one more year of it solely being under the department of parks and recreation, the program would become majority-owned by VACT.

Therefore, I had one year where I got to say I worked for Parks and Rec. Being a huge fan of the Amy Poehler comedy, I thought that was pretty fun.

Running an after-school dance program never was on my list of career goals, but it paid well and I thought it would make a good long-term investment for VACT. We had regained full control over what happened in our space, there was the potential to make a bit of profit, and it expanded our own educational offerings. 

The program had multiple classes for ages 3-4. Being the only adult teacher on staff (I had hired two teenagers from our theater program to teach some of the classes) the three and four year-olds were in my care.

My experiences with these three and four year olds have made me slightly terrified of having any kids of my own. These little rugrats are a lot to deal with it.

Never did I think I would spend so much timing telling kids to get their fingers out of their nose, to stop smashing into each other, and the most common: to put their leotards back on.

Little kids do not like to wear leotards. And why would they? They are stiff, tight, itchy; it’s not a comfortable clothing item.

Therefore, they would often futz with them during class leading to an inadvertent flashing or they would fully remove them and intentionally flash the rest of the class.

One time, a four-year-old took her arms out of the top of her leotard, start lifting the top up and down while shouting “woo hoo woo hoo woo hoo”. I ran over and said, “nope. Arms back in the sleeves please.”

The ultimate episode of awkwardness happened during a 3-4 year old hip hop class. We were sitting in a circle doing our stretches for the day. We were in a seated straddle stretch when one of our young participants felt an itch, you know, down there.

She proceeded to pull her leotard to the side completely exposing her you know what.

I immediately called her name and shook my head frantically. I looked around to the other students. The first two were always in their own little worlds, so they didn’t notice the incident. When I turned to look at the remaining student (one of our loudest in class), she had eyes as wide as if she had seen a ghost walk through the room. She proceeded to point and shout:

“She showed her privates!”

This was only my second month teaching three and four year olds so I wasn’t the ultimate expert. However, I knew that whenever you were stuck with an unpleasant situation, you immediately changed the topic, activity, and location.

I immediately got all of the kids up off of the floor and we started to do an across the floor activity.

After class I had to talk to two moms: the one of the flasher and the one of the flashed.

I felt so bad for the mom of the flasher. She looked mortified and assured me that they would send their daughter in different attire in order to avoid another incident.

The mom of the flashed was also very understanding. She was appreciative I explained the situation to her before her daughter recapped the story in the car.

I completed three seasons with the program by the time I left for California. Although I guess it’s really more like 2, maybe 2 1/2, as we couldn’t really run a full program during COVID.

While preparing to move and closing out my final season with the program, I looked forward to being in a new environment where I didn’t have to remind people to keep their clothes on correctly.

But then I moved to North Hollywood.