God at the Dance Recital

The Princess of Everything (AKA M. Peevie) danced her heart out tonight during her two-minute recital performance.

We were getting ready for the dress rehearsal (DH) yesterday, and the Princess resisted putting on her pink tights because they looked like they had been Swiss cheesed by a pit bull. We promised to buy her new tights today before the recital.

At the DH, they ran through every dance number. I noticed a grand total of three boys participating in the dances. One of them was a surly pre-schooler who hilariously stood in the middle of the stage with his arms folded while ten pink ballerinas twirled around him. He won that battle: the ten pink ballerinas plied without their young Baryshnikov during the actual recital.

Today I fixed M.P.'s hair in the ballet-approved fashion--bangs twisted back off the face and her long wavy layers bobby-pinned into a bun that immediately started plotting its escape. I carefully applied mascara, blush, and lip gloss to her already-perfect face.

I opened the package of new tights and discovered that they were footless. Oops.

All day the sky threatened rain, but the downpour only started moments before we headed for the car. We grabbed jackets and umbrellas and made a dash for it. We didn't find out until we were headed into the school that in the hubbub, M.P. had put down her dance bag with her ballet shoes and left it behind.

We noticed that M.P. had somehow gotten her new footless tights grubby in the half hour since she put them on. Mr. Peevie bent down to try to clean her off, and somehow the two of them klonked their heads so hard that they both had enormous hematomas sprouting from their foreheads. "Any harder and I'd be unconscious," Mr. Peevie said.

The ballet princess wailed and sobbed, and her tears made rivers of mascara run down through perfectly blushed cheeks. I spit-cleaned her up as best I could, and we headed to the check-in point. That's when we realized we didn't have the ballet shoes. Back to the car we headed, with M.P. praying, "Please, Jesus, let my shoes be in the car, let my shoes be in the car."

They weren't. "Jesus didn't answer that prayer," M.P. observed.

"Well, then, we need to keep praying that God will bring you a different pair of shoes," I told her. "And if He doesn't, then we'll make the best of it, and you'll dance barefoot."

So, she revised her prayer, and we told the program helper about our problem. Later, after the recital, M.P. told me that God had answered her prayer. Right before it was time for her performance they found another dancer with the right size shoes that M.P. could borrow.

God is in the little things.