Pink Curlers.

By Miss Becky.

I’m going to really date myself here: When I was young dancer, we had to sleep in pink curlers the night before competitions or recitals. Wigs or extensions just weren’t a thing. It was the style to wear your hair in tight ringlets, and the best way to accomplish this was cheap, foam curlers.

It was terrible. It took our poor mom what seemed like 25 hours to roll these darn things into our wet hair, to only then listen to us complain about how they were uncomfortable and too tight.

We could never sleep well, because gosh, who can actually sleep on those darn things? Unless you can slumber with your face planted directly into the pillow, there is no comfort to be had with a head full of curlers.

The next morning, mom would, one by one, remove each roller and hairspray our heads as if these ringlets needed to survive the apocalypse. The cherry on top of this entire process was then getting to wear a hair net. I can only speculate because I actually don’t know for sure why we wore these, but I’m guessing it was a backup plan in case the 14 pounds of hairspray began to fail. Never on stage would we have droopy curls.

Why am I telling you this nonsense about hair curlers? Because when our mom signed us up for dance, I’m pretty sure she had no clue what she was getting herself into. She had no idea that soon after enrolling her two daughters in dance, her entire life would be spent sitting in the studio waiting room, applying blue eyeshadow, sewing green sequence onto elf hats for the mother-daughter dance, and yes, rolling our hair in pink curlers every other weekend from March til June.

At The Dance Project, we realize that you have a life outside of this studio. You have a career, a family, hobbies, a house to clean, and a grocery list that isn’t going to shop for itself. Dancers themselves have school, homework, friends, and other sports to balance. Especially for our recreational dance families: dance is important, but we don’t expect it to consume your lives. All things in moderation. Including dance.

A painstakingly awful way to achieve recital-ready curls

If those pink curlers ever come back in style, we’ll have some serious thinking to do. Maybe we’ll see if our mom is available. She probably still has our pink curlers stashed away in a closet somewhere…