As You Wish

Hi everyone! I'm back. It's been about a month since my last post. I have several reasons for my absence, but I'm not going to bore you with them. Instead I'm going to talk about football. Now ladies before you go running for the hills I guess I could elaborate a bit and say it's a bit more about dance than the actual game of football. Are you still with me? Ok good.

Yesterday as I was watching the pregame coverage of Superbowl XVIII with Andrew I noticed for the first time that it was being held in Tampa, Florida at the Buccaneers stadium. I know this doesn't mean much to most, but exactly 8 years ago Superbowl XXXV hosted the Ravens and Giants. The Ravens beat the Giants with a final score of 34 to 7. You know what else happened that day? I was chosen to perform in the pregame and halftime shows of that game.

Thanks to American All-Star I was chosen as a dancer that was invited to perform in London, England and at Superbowl 35 in Tampa. It was an amazing experience.

When I was in high school I was on the Varsity Dance Team for all 4 years (don't judge). Each year we held a summer camp at the beginning of August and we invited American All-Star staff to come out from Louisiana to conduct a week long camp teaching us several routines a day. At the end of the week we would have a "show off" day for friends and parents to perform the routines that we learned throughout the week. After the performances the staff would give out awards and a select few would be chosen to represent American All-Star as a goodwill performer to travel to whichever destination they chose for that particular year. When I was a junior the location was London, England. (I will save London for another post.) Then from the goodwill performance team they would narrow that number down and invite those young ladies to accompany them to the Superbowl to perform. I was lucky enough to be chosen twice (my junior and senior year).

I don't remember the name of the photographer that took our official pictures, but look at how young I look. Wow 17 years old and thinner. To think that I wanted to lose a few pounds at that time makes me laugh now. That's not how I did my hair for the performance. This was an at the last minute kind of thing, so my hair isn't nearly as cute as it could have been. I was 17 at the time too, so who knows what I was thinking.
Pretty snazzy outfit right? We performed in the pregame show to Sting's song "Roxanne" wearing this outfit. I had no idea until I was on the field practicing that this song was about a hooker. Talk about naive. I remember the girl who was placed right in front of me in our formation was quite large and always had the look of death on her face. When we had our dress rehearsal I noticed that she had her skirt on backwards, so the slits that should have been in the front were showing off her rather large behind. I wasn't about to tell her for fear that she might eat my head.

One of our less attractive outfits would have to be the full body white sweat suits that we had to wear while the National Anthem was being sang by the Backstreet Boys and America the Beautiful by Ray Charles.

Ray Charles was quite funny from what I remember. There was some sort of delay and he was standing on his platform waiting patiently. Finally you hear him say into the microphone, "Can we get this damn show on the road?"

After our dress rehearsal with the Backstreet Boys we were told we could change back into our street clothes. At that point in time I wasn't one of those screaming fans that was absolutely in love with the boy bands. I heard some girls screaming over by one of the tunnels, so I figured I would check it out. You know I was curious. It turns out that they were escorting the Backstreet Boys off the field one at a time with about 10 bodyguards per guy, so the screaming girls wouldn't hurt or attack them. I decided instead of screaming my head off I was just going to go into the tunnel and change my clothes. I bent down to drop my bag by the wall, and stood up to pull my pants off. When I turned around about .25 seconds from dropping my sweats I saw this guy right behind me...Needless to say I didn't undress, I just stood there in shock, first at the fact that there were people there, second these people were men, third most of them were gigantic bodyguards, and fourth I didn't want this guy to think I was trying to undress just for him.

All in all it was nice watching the Superbowl yesterday. It brought back some pretty awesome memories. I need to go through pictures from back then because I didn't have a digital camera. I'll have to scan them and hopefully have some more pictures to blog about.

Good job Steelers! I do have to admit though that I was routing for the Cardinals. After hearing their story and the fact that their franchise has never won a superbowl in their history, it made me want the underdog to win. I was happy with the fact that it was such a good game though. I also decided I need to invest some time in learning the rules of football because sometimes I just don't understand and don't want to bother anyone with my questions.

It feels good to have a post finished and ready to publish.

As You Wish - Sorry for ignoring you. I'm back, I love you, and I will be posting more often I'm sure of it. xoxo