Saturday, August 7, 2010

Back in my shoes

Today I put my tap shoes on for the first time in a long time. And it was okay.
Today I also taught again for the first time in a long time, and it was okay. It was weird, but it was okay.
The great thing about tap, it's all in the rhythm. And teaching tap is the same way. Just hold onto the rhythm.
The girls were great today. For some of them it was their first day back at the studio since my mom died. And I think that they felt it, okay, but something was missing.
But once the class started and I put the music on, then we just fell back into the rhythm.
Over the past few months I have had to get used to being there without her. For the most part my family and I have been in and out, never staying more than an hour or two. Checking the mail, voicemail, cleaning a few things out, mowing the lawn.
The three of us have all said the same thing, it feels like she is there. Sometimes that feeling is okay and sometimes not so much. The oddest thing for me is not that she's not there, but that she's not about to come in the door at any moment.
There have only been a handful of times, when I was there and she was not. And if she wasn't, then she was calling every half hour making sure that everything was okay.
Last night she didn't call to make sure that I was going to be at the studio, she didn't call this morning to make sure that I was coming. She wasn't in her office or behind the snackbar when I came in, she wasn't there to tell the girls how good they sounded or to check on there shoes when we took a break. And she wasn't there when class was over.
Since she died, everyone has been asking me what was going to happen to the studio? And I honestly had to tell them that I didn't know. I still don't know.
When the studio first opened, she kept calling it mine and I kept calling it hers. Finally we settled on ours. But when I went on the road it became hers, it had to be. She always wanted to share in it with me, but Mama didn't always share well, and I didn't want to fight about it with her.
The one thing that we always agreed on was the Tapgirlz! So that part of the studio will live on. She loved seeing them perform as much as she loved seeing me perform. That was the one area where there was never an argument, tap and the Tapgirlz.
It felt good to put my shoes on again. It felt good to teach and see the girls again. We just fell into the same old rhythm.
So I guess it's time to stop shelling out money on pedicures.