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2001-05-21 | 11:32 a.m.

Took Felony to the dance studio yesterday to get portraits taken with her dance class. Her costume is a long-sleeved royal blue leotard with two V's on the chest formed by strips of gold sequins. There is also a royal blue tutu frosted with strands of gold sequins and a headpiece made from a V of gold sequins and a knot of royal blue feathers on one side. You see how the themes repeat. The outfit would be perfect for working as a majorette in Las Vegas, should the need arise.

On the way to the dance studio, I fret all the way there about the tights. I'm so broke I didn't order the heavy "tan" tights to go with the costume because we already bought them for the Christmas show. I know they're somewhere in this house. Except I couldn't find them. I even went through the pile of eye-wateringly piss-stained laundry that my incontinent dog ruined, which I have been quixotically trying to rehabilitate with increasingly expensive specialized stain, spot, and odor removers. Imagining the dance teacher's wrath, I start feeling belligerent about the whole thing. "Fuck it," I say to myself, "it's just a portrait, not a performance. Who cares? With or without tights, she's the best dancer in the whole fucking class." (The subtext of all this is my constant low-grade infectious worry that people will think we are white trash because I so adamantly don't have my act together. Or that they'll feel sorry for my kids because they have such a bad mother. Or even, when things are really not going very well, that they'll call CPS on me. But I didn't get that far over the tights. Even at my most delusional, I realize that no one is going to report you for forgetting to bring the tights. But I know, too, that little adjustments are made in the way you are received by others, and those can subtly affect your life later on, sometimes in the most unpredictable ways.)

By the time we get there, I have a serious chip on my shoulder. It's about 97 degrees, there are at least a hundred people milling around, and I've turned into my own evil twin. I'm surly to the girls working the sign-in table, inadvertently insult the woman working the cash box---("You haven't memorized these prices by now?") then try to salvage the comment and end up doubling the insult ("You must have been here since early this morning!") ---then decide I don't care if I've hurt her feelings, she probably didn't understand what I said, anyway. (Mean!) Then I snap, nastily and overloud, from my checkbook to the portrait matriarch who's trying to prevent Felony from getting her picture taken ("I'm PAYING for it right NOW"). That's the whipped cream. The cherry on top is when I spot Felony's fake smile just as the photographer is about to snap the shot and boom "NO!"---surprising myself as much as the other parents (in my megalomania, I imagine that they admire me for it) and prompting the photographer to turn around and shoot daggers at me. Only I have on my invisible stage-mother shield and I'm practically laughing out loud with evil dunderheaded glee. Why should I pay for another pack of pictures to throw in a drawer!?

It occurs to me that I'm channeling my grandmother and my sister circa 1987 and I'm loving it. From the back of the studio, I throw my arm up in the air to prompt Felony with the precise hand gesture the teacher is trying to show her and mouth suggestions in an exaggerated way. I am beyond embarrassment. I used to be rather self-conscious about these things (tarting the girls up with makeup and saucy costumes) and while they were happening I thought semi-continuously about Patsy Ramsey and JonBenet, but apparently I am over the novelty. We have absorbed these rituals into our routine, and they have absorbed us.

In the car on the way home, I apologize to Felony, who is being unusually quiet, but she doesn't seem to have noticed or minded my behavior. She's just tired and starts to drift off. Someday, when she's 12 or 13, or maybe 10, or even 7, she might not let me get away with such things. That's fine. I'll teach her how to curl her own hair and she can just go it alone.

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