Last year at one of my dance shows, I thought my whole tap routine looked horrible, but I was wrong. At first I was nervous about doing turns, then soon everything was going great. But at the last part with turns I messed up and was worried that I ruined the whole group dance. Though in the end my routine looked good and nobody noticed my mistake.

My friends and I were backstage when we were told to go wait behind the wings to perform one of our routines. Unfortunately tap was my weakest type of dance. For some reason I could never pick up the choreography in my tap classes. Even though we had been preparing since the end of December, and it was now the middle of June.
When the group before us had finished, the lights went out and the they walked off stage. We quietly shuffled on stage and got into our first formation. We waited a couple of seconds, already smiling, when the music turned on. I was nervous that I would mess up on the part where we did turns. I have never been a great turner so this part was hard to do. Especially since the stage was slippery. Though, despite my nervousness about the turns I was excited. It felt great to be back on stage.

As we went on to part two out of three I was having a lot of fun. Every time I had a chance I tried looking for my family sitting in the audience but with the blinding lights in my eyes it was almost impossible to tell who was who. So far, my group was doing great! Everyone was smiling and nobody was getting off count. I thought this would end up being my best routine yet. Until part three came.

As we went into the transition that would lead us into the circle part where the turns were, I got nervous. I did the first two step combos with no problem but then came my weakest part. I completed one turn, trying to travel as I did so, but it wasn’t enough. If I did another one I would be off count and be holding up the group. With half a second to decide I ditched the last turn and continued the routine. I felt so bad because I was sure that I stood out from only doing one turn. When the dance ended we headed off stage towards the dressing rooms to change into the next costume for our next routine. I asked my friend, Julia, if she thought only doing one turn would make the group look bad. She said it probably wasn’t noticeable and thankfully this wasn’t a competition.

After the whole show had ended, I found my family and asked them if they noticed that I only did one turn in my tap routine. They said they didn’t even know and that I looked like I was doing exactly what the rest of the group was doing. I breathed a sigh of relief that nobody noticed my one turn. I can learn from this incident that we shouldn’t always expect that we failed or looked bad from a simple mistake. Also, nobody is perfect so we should not be embarrassed of small mistakes that we make.

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