At every gathering in my family\u2014Christenings, birthdays, weddings, even wakes\u2014people danced. There were seven of us as I was growing up, not counting my parents, so a party quorum wasn\u2019t hard to reach. Everyone learned to dance. No exceptions. My mom was the dance instructor. Foxtrot, Lindy, tap, jig. She could show you how. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the centuries, dance has played a role in everything from religious ceremonies to healing rituals, but in our family it was just plain fun. Still, my mom took it seriously and shared with us not only a love for the joy of it but a respect for precision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So when my sister wanted to perform in our high school variety show, my mom was the perfect choreographer and artistic director for our chorus line. In this mini-memoir of what that experience was like, I try to recapture how Mom coped with a hoofer whose talents were less than advanced. It\u2019s a creative nonfiction piece called \u201cPractice Made Perfect\u201d<\/a> and you can read it in The Write Launch<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At every gathering in my family\u2014Christenings, birthdays, weddings, even wakes\u2014people danced. There were seven of us as I was growing up, not counting my parents, so a party quorum wasn\u2019t hard to reach. Everyone learned to dance. No exceptions. My mom was the dance instructor. Foxtrot, Lindy, tap, jig. She could show you how. Over…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1179,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}