Everything I Learned about Life, I Learned in Dance Class Read online

  Years ago, dance studios were more like glorified babysitters, where people dropped their kids off and went to the mall, or home to make dinner and clean their houses. Now parents have time to stay. They want to watch, critique, gossip, have their noses in everything. They’re living vicariously through their kids. I don’t think they want to be their kids, they just want to provide their offspring with everything they didn’t have when they were children. In some cases, they did try to excel, but it didn’t work out well. Now they’re just married with kids, living in the burbs and realizing they “never made it.” Maybe they wanted to be a star when they were young. Who knows? I feel like a lot of these parents don’t want their kids to grow up; they want to keep them little so they can continue to mold them.

  My dad told me every day that I was dumb enough to be a twin. I think he meant I was dim enough for two people. I guess I must’ve been a beautiful baby because my parents didn’t feel the need to constantly tell me that I was beautiful, but everyone else did. I hear these mothers telling their kids they are so pretty over and over, all day, every day. Don’t get me wrong; in this business, pretty helps. Dancers from around the world audition for me and attend my master classes. There are some angelic faces that light up the room. There are kids so stunning the cameraman focuses on them. And then there are those exotic, interesting looks that capture your attention too. I can easily spot a child with the right look. Parents, be careful. Don’t you want your child to be more than just another pretty face? Don’t you want her to have a brain, personality, and talent? Be very careful that she doesn’t rely on her looks to get her through life. It’s nice when doors open easily but substance is important once you’re on the inside. And remember, pretty is only skin deep, ugly is to the bone.

  Kids are less independent now than they were years ago. Before, we all rode our bikes to the store without helmets! We went out in the woods and knew to come home when the streetlights came on. Nobody had a cell phone back then—our parents didn’t know our whereabouts 24-7 like they do today. And guess what? Most of us survived just fine—in fact, better than just fine.

  The problem with kids today is that their parents do everything for them. I think they aren’t going to be the nurses and doctors who give me my medicine in the old folks’ home. They aren’t going to be able to function on their own.

  ARE YOU MOM ENOUGH?

  Channeling Your Kid’s Passion

  Answer the questions below honestly to see if you are helping or hindering your child’s talent. Then see how you rate.

  1.Your daughter is always dancing around your house, singing into a hairbrush. You:

  A.Tell her to keep it down. The neighbors will complain.

  B.Hire Britney Spears’s manager for her and move to L.A.

  C.Enroll her in some dance and voice lessons, so she can learn correctly.

  2.Your child sees a cooking show on TV and decides she wants to make you a four-course dinner. You:

  A.Tell her you’re on a diet.

  B.Call Rachael Ray—maybe she’s available for private coaching?

  C.Supervise the oven and chopping but let her experiment and wow the family with a feast.

  3.Your son loves baseball and says he wants to play in the big leagues one day. You:

  A.Offer to take him to a Pittsburgh Pirates game so he can see how far he has to go.

  B.Sign him up to play with a league—and bribe the coach to show him some special attention.

  C.Get him a glove, ball, and bat and take him out in the backyard to practice.

  4.Your daughter is obsessed with cutting her Barbie’s hair. You:

  A.Refuse to buy her another doll unless she stops butchering the ones she has.

  B.Suggest she practice instead on real live models—maybe her BFF needs a new ’do?

  C.Take her to a salon and let her watch how stylists really cut and color hair.

  5.Your eight-year-old is always standing on her head and tumbling around the house. You:

  A.Tell her to stop those shenanigans: all that blood rushing to her head is going to give her a headache!

  B.Contact Cirque du Soleil and ask if they need any able-bodied assistants.

  C.Sign her up for gymnastics classes so she can learn proper technique.

  If you answered mostly As:

  Bah, humbug! You are raining on your kid’s parade! Don’t pooh-pooh what he/she loves to do. Pay attention and try to encourage him/her more.

  If you answered mostly Bs:

  You’ve got stage mom written all over you. You push way too hard. Support your kid’s interest but don’t overdo it.

  If you answered mostly Cs:

  I like your attitude. You nurture your child’s passion and help him/her get the lessons/skills needed to succeed. Maybe you can teach my dance moms a thing or two . . .

  * * *

  ABBY’S ULTIMATE ADVICE

  Three Key Points to Remember

  1.No one wants to hear your kids cry, least of all their coach, their teammates, and the judges!

  2.Raise your kids to survive on their own—require them to man up!

  3.Tell your kids to stop acting like a baby—the tears, the crying, the temper tantrums, and the spoiled little brat syndrome! Teach them to maturely make better choices.

  * * *

  FOURTH POSITION

  ÉPAULÉ

  Mother Doesn’t Always Know Best

  The best revenge is massive success.

  —Frank Sinatra

  MOTHER DOESN’T ALWAYS KNOW BEST, because Mother doesn’t really know anything at all. For example, if a kid is into baseball, I really doubt that Mother came up through the minors into the majors. As for dance, I doubt most mothers ever go to New York City and see every new show with the original cast or dance with a major ballet company.

  Every once in a while, you do get a mother who obviously knows about a certain activity and can critique and direct her child. There’s a little girl who came to our classes in Atlanta. She is Daniela Silivas’s daughter. Daniela is a former Olympic gymnast who received six Olympic medals. Her little girl is a budding gymnast too. Now if she wants to tell her daughter what she’s doing wrong, this mom has every right. She also has the knowledge, the talent, and the experience to give pointers.

  For the most part, though, mothers don’t always know the best advice. They may think they know everything, but they may not know anything! They want their children to look up to them and to respect them, but mothers don’t always know what they’re talking about.

  When it comes to my teaching, I don’t want any discrepancies and I really don’t want any opinions. I tolerate my dance moms best when they keep their mouths shut and don’t say anything to me. I’m the teacher, it’s my dance company, everyone plays by my rules, and I’m sure all the qualified experts out there in other fields feel the same way I do. Stay out of our business. I don’t tell you how to perform a craniotomy, don’t tell me how to teach dance.

  Still, there always seem to be moms who just cannot control themselves. When I auditioned to fill a spot on our team, I was scouting for a very particular look. One girl, Payton, was simply too tall and too mature to fit in with this particular group of dancers. When I cut her at the audition, her mother had an over-the-top meltdown, screaming at me with her finger in my face in my own studio. What did this do for Payton? Not much. And will I ever send her out on a professional audition with a mother like that? Nope. Not gonna happen. So this mom sabotaged her kid’s chances of success, simply because she couldn’t zip her lip.

  I would never go into a doctor’s office, a school, or your husband’s workplace and tell them how to run their business or how to do their job, so don’t come into my dance studio and tell me how to run mine. This is not my first trip to the rodeo. I have found that if I give an inch, you will take a mile.

  Sometimes mothers can’t handle it when kids get into their teenage years and begin to confide in me more than they do their moms. Moms have a hard t
ime handling that their children care more about what their coaches, teachers, or dance instructors have to say than what their moms have to say. A mom thinks she knows what’s best for her family, when in fact she may know very little about organized sports, the game of golf, or Bach’s concertos.

  DANCE MOMS—THE INSIDE SCOOP!

  As you’ve probably noticed by watching the show Dance Moms, those women can really drive me crazy sometimes. I’m not worried about them reading this book; they can’t even read the ALDC rules and regulations handbook. They just can’t seem to follow the rules, no matter how much they try. They are all vastly different, yet they have one thing in common: zero talent. Oh, yeah, and one more thing: they’re all jealous of Maddie.

  •Melissa, a.k.a. Miss Congeniality. She wants to be everybody’s friend and always be in charge. She has to run it—that’s her thing.

  •Holly, a.k.a. the Politician. Oh so politically correct, but oh so wrong!

  •Jill, a.k.a. Forever Young. Not only living vicariously through her daughters, she’s wearing their clothes too!

  •Christi, a.k.a. the Mean Girl. She’s clawing her way to the top—one meet and greet at a time.

  •Kelly, a.k.a. Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda. But now it’s too late.

  Believe it or not, the moms are worse off camera than they are on. You cannot believe how they’ve gone from rags to riches, and from bags to Botox, with this television show. My dad used to say, “It’s like putting silk stockings on a mule,” and in Christi’s case, this definitely rings true.

  I feel that the moms on a whole are very ungrateful to John Corella, who created the show with me and the Abby Lee Dance Company in mind, as well as to God above for putting them in the right place (registered at my studio) at the right time competing with the Abby Lee Dance Company (when they met John for the first time).

  What nobody realizes is that the show came about when the Abby Lee Dance Company was on a trip to a national competition in Las Vegas. John was there too, and he came to the hotel to meet me. He hung out and met all the moms sipping their cocktails at the pool of the Alexis Park Hotel, which is an inexpensive place far away from the Strip and all that some Pittsburgh families could afford. At that time he was already working on the idea for the show. Years later, after all this crazy success with the show, he found himself once again in the presence of a screaming lunatic. With tongue in cheek, he reminded Christi, “Don’t forget—I met you when you were broke and drunk at the Alexis Park Hotel!”

  A couple of the moms think they made this opportunity happen, that they had something to do with creating a television show. They never stop and reflect on the possibility that if it weren’t them, it would have undoubtedly been some other mother. Most of the moms have class and self-control. They are nice and polite in conversing with the other parents at my studio. They are very good to my faculty members and consider themselves part of the ALDC family. But there are two who think they are higher and mightier than everybody else.

  Jill always had a little money, and she knows how to act. Holly was raised with class and dignity and to read books. Her sister is an attorney, her mother is a judge, and her dad was a schoolteacher in the Bronx. She is a good person. Melissa came from nothing but she’s on the ball. She’s a go-getter with honey—sweet and helpful.

  Dear Abby:

  We live in a very small town with only one dance studio and my daughter really loves dancing there. The problem is, we feel that the dance teacher is not helping the girls reach their full potential—they never win a competition! Do you have any suggestions to help this studio create winning dancers?

  What about the next town over? Keep your daughter where she is—don’t bite your nose off to spite your face—but go to the next town or three towns over—up to ninety minutes away—to see if there’s another studio that your daughter could attend once a week to get better training to improve her technique. Then perhaps tell the dance teacher or ask nicely and respectfully if your daughter can just do a solo at the competitions and not be in the group dances. If you see your daughter start to win on her own while the group remains stagnant, then, when the time is right and you’re willing to drive those hours, you might want to make a switch. But please refrain from telling someone how to run her business. She doesn’t really care.

  Abby

  DON’T OVERSTEP YOUR BOUNDARIES

  A good example of overstepping boundaries would be if I were to ask one of the moms at my studio to order rhinestones for the girls’ costumes using my account with a wholesaler, and then at a later date she calls using my name to order rhinestones at wholesale prices for herself to use on her kid’s dance bags, leotards, and costumes. That’s overstepping the boundary—especially when she easily could have called one of my two stores and purchased rhinestones the retail way. I have a mercantile license and I pay sales tax, insurance and telephone bills, and credit card fees.

  And it’s not always the moms who overstep boundaries. One time a photographer who has a kid who dances at my studio needed a headshot of another student quickly, so I let him come in and get the shot. The kid’s mother paid the photographer for his services. The next thing I know this photographer is taking more kids’ headshots in my studio because he used that one kid’s headshot as an advertisement. He was claiming to be Abby Lee Miller’s official photographer. By the time I figured this out, he had already taken a hundred headshots, and a hundred kids’ families had spent a fortune. I’ve got nothing to do with this photographer, and if it hadn’t been for my allowing him to take that one headshot, he never would have had the opportunity to photograph all my students, resulting in all that money. That’s overstepping your boundaries.

  Here’s another example. When students have been dancing with me from a very young age, once they turn eleven or twelve I have them help the younger students as class demonstrators. Then when they’re around fifteen or sixteen, they become more like assistant teachers. When they’re eighteen, and it’s their senior year, I give them the opportunity to teach my curriculum. Every month they get a paycheck and they get a lesson plan from me for their next month of classes. A teenager is overstepping her boundaries when she starts teaching dance lessons to neighborhood kids in her basement, or she has a dance room in her house above the garage and she’s charging money for youngsters in the area to come take dance lessons using my curriculum, my lesson plans, and my accumulated knowledge. That’s overstepping your boundaries. Don’t do it!

  Dear Abby:

  There is one student in our studio who is very disruptive during classes—making excessive noise, blurting out rude comments, and acting bored. It seems as if the teacher isn’t sure how to deal with her rude behavior. What would you suggest?

  The dance teacher could be a wonderful woman with excellent training. However, she doesn’t have the ability or the teaching credentials to deal with a student who obviously is crying out for attention. I’ve had students in my class do this very same thing. They want to hear their name whether it’s good or bad, and whether they’re being praised or scolded, it doesn’t matter. Something is going on at home and that kid is starving for someone to pay her some attention. So look the other way. Tell your own child to ignore the situation and concentrate on her lessons.

  Abby

  PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE

  So often, people want instant success, instant glory, instant applause—they don’t understand that you have to work for many years to become great at something. I believe that with any sport, including the performing arts, like dance, ballet, and tap, it’s a very long process. Stop looking for a huge improvement overnight.

  Oddly enough, I don’t have that many pushy parents. I always have to be the pushiest stage mother with my students, more so than any parent. In fact, I am Queen Stage Mom. In New York some of my friends call me Mama Rose, after infamous Gypsy Rose Lee and her mother! I wear that label proudly. I’m going to get the best for my kids, make the most out of it, get them every opportunity, and knock
down the doors until those kids are famous.

  In the past I’ve had stage mothers at our studio try to outsmart me. Moms take their little lasses behind my back to study elsewhere or to learn a new trick at another studio. They don’t understand that I’m going to find out about it and it’s going to backfire on them, or that the kids can get hurt by being taught something they aren’t ready to do yet, which is why I didn’t teach it to them myself. I think these parents are trying to impress me and they go about it in the wrong way instead of through their kids’ due diligence and hard work and being exemplary students.

  That would impress me more. I’ll give opportunities to the kids if the opportunities are right for them. I would never send your kid to an audition that she can’t handle. If it’s an ethnic call, and your spitfire has red hair and freckles, she’s not going to the audition. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and money. If they are seeking advanced dancers who tumble both right and left, I’ve done my research, I know the choreographer, and I’m sure your kids can’t handle it. Trust this is not because I don’t like your kids; it’s because they just aren’t right for this opportunity. At least not right now.