Andrew, wearing full make-up and a dance belt, shimmied around the cafeteria kitchen singing into a hairbrush. Eric and I, similarly attired, tried to sing harmony back-up without either cracking up or letting the stream of people walking by the window see too much of us in our immodest outfits. We weren’t doing a particularly good job with either, and were soon reduced to lying draped over the stainless steel food prep tables snorting with laughter and trying not to wet what few clothes we were wearing. The song? Blondie’s cover of John Holt and the Paragon’s soca (a contraction of “soul calypso”) hit, The Tide is High. The reason we were giggling naked in a school cafeteria kitchen? Dance Tour.

Each of the five artistic disciplines (dance, music, visual art, theatre and creative writing (as opposed to non-creative writing, I suppose)) that were taught at the Interlochen Arts Academy got the opportunity once a year to take their talents on tour around the state of Michigan, showing off and running workshops for those less artistically fortunate. Dance Tour, held in the long white stretch between Christmas and spring break, was one of the highlights of the year, if for no other reason than you got to get off campus for a week and travel around in a tour bus like rock stars, and be greeted with interest and awe when you arrived at the West Elbow VFW Hall and Alternator Service for that evening’s performance. As fun as it was to ditch class for a week and drive around with your homies, the real fun came from the war stories you’d collect on your travels.

I had gone on a couple of Dance Tours as a tech, setting up lights and running the tape decks and so on (being the son of the head of the dance department had its advantages), but my junior year was the first time I was allowed to tour as a full-fledged dancer, having passed the audition into dance major status that previous fall (against the wishes and lobbying of my own mother – being the son of the head of the dance department had its drawbacks).

Anyway, tour stories fell into three categories: those things that happened on the bus, those things that happened at the host family’s house, and those things that happened during a performance. You wouldn’t think there’d be much opportunity to do anything interesting within the confines of a chaperoned bus, but then you’d underestimate the creativity of amped up high school students let out of their cages for a week. In fact, some of the best incidents that happened on the bus happened precisely because it was such a locked down environment. Ian Dury’s reasons to be cheerful – sex and drugs and rock and roll – all took place during the bus trips. Well, maybe not so much sex, as the gender ratio was so unbalanced, but I was once assigned to stand guard during my tech days while two young hormone-addled lovers trysted in the bathroom – remember, dancers are quite limber. You could barely use the bathroom for its intended purpose what with all the people going in there to smoke and drink and puke and whatnot. As boarding school students, we had all become quite proficient at partying undetected from living in the dorms, but the restriction of being on a bus really brought a new challenge to the whole game. Because my mother was one of the chaperones, she’d occasionally pull me aside and ask what sort of things were going on on the bus, but I had already chosen my allegiances, so I’d casually shrug and say, “oh, you know, not much, reading, talking, writing letters, homework, that sort of thing”, and, satisfied, she’d wander back to the front of the bus, either oblivious or with that special kind of willful ignorance that the parents of teenagers develop. And everybody’d go right on drinking and smoking and sucking and puking with impunity.

Because the tour was such a modest proposition, there wasn’t any money to put us up in hotels. Instead, we got to participate in the grand social experiment of staying with host families. The members of the local PTA, or whichever group was responsible for bringing us down to Novi and Left Buford, would spread the word and get local volunteers to put up a couple of dancers for a night. It always felt like we were visiting dignitaries from planet Weirdo, and the long, uncomfortable evenings were usually only survivable because you had one of your tribe with you. Usually. If ever there were a time where somebody needed to go it alone, I would be volunteered (did I mention about being the ballet teacher’s son?). My favorite experience was when I got sent home alone to somebody’s house for the night. They lived next door to one of the dancer’s actual home, so my “host mom” sent me off after dinner to enjoy myself at the neighbors. She told me she wouldn’t stay up late to wait for me but when I stumbled in around 1:00am, there she was, nodding out on the couch, unable to go to bed until “all her kids” were back in the house. I slunk sheepishly off to my room, which I was sharing with her 14-year-old son and fell quickly to sleep.

Suddenly, a loud piercing scream ripped through the room, and I awoke, heart beating and trembling in a strange dark room. It took me a minute to figure out where I was, but when I did, I became aware of a faint, repetitive rustling sound coming from the other side of the room. The rustling slowly increased in intensity and urgency, and was soon accompanied my low moans. I tired to push unwelcome images out of my sleepy head, but the rubbing/moaning increased until, with a deep sigh, it was all over. I drifted off back to sleep only to be jolted by another yell – this time I figured out that it was actually my roommate’s alarm clock making that horrific noise – and, after another moment, I could hear the rubbing/moaning ritual start up again. Fortunately, after the second round, my “mom” came in to wake us up and get me off to the bus. Never was I so grateful to get out of a host family’s house.

Actually, there was one night that, thanks to a series of lucky circumstances, we did get to stay in a hotel. The weather was so bad that our evening performance was cancelled and so the bus pulled into a Howard Johnson’s and everybody got to spend the night there. Everybody except for a lucky few of us that got permission to go stay at Eric’s house. His parents were out of town (a fact carefully omitted in the official version) so a few phone calls later, we were well supplied for a night of fun. Which I guess we had because I don’t remember any of it and was impenetrably tired the next day. Everybody else on the bus was bright and chipper and we huddled together in the back, hung-over and sleepy and wishing everybody wouldn’t blink so loudly.

The performance part of the tour – our ostensible job – was always an adventure and almost never any fun. The places we’d perform were usually, um, rustic and modest, shall we say. The floors would always be ice-slick because of the layers of wax built up on them (a decided no-no on dance floors). The crowds were often restless and the technical failures legion. During one particularly memorable performance of Cinderella, I fell on my face three times, got tangled in the curtain, performed a short solo in the dark and then had the spotlight shine on me while I was trying to extricate my dance belt from the inner recesses of my lower intestines. When Cinderella arrived at the ball, all action froze for a couple of moments while she and her fairy godmother peered in wonderment at the royal extravagance, and then the godmother disappeared and the ball started up again. As background bodies, we quickly learned to get into the most comfortable position possible when Cinderella arrived, otherwise you’d have to stand still holding your arm out and grinning for five painfully long minutes. My partner and I developed a game during those long frozen moments. We would, without moving, tell the raunchiest, nastiest, funniest jokes we could think of, trying to get the other to break. During this particular performance, my partner launched into a lengthy and thoroughly disgusting joke while I tried hard not to crack a smile. Especially difficult to do when I could see Su, the other dance teacher/chaperone, jumping up and down and wildly flailing her arms at me from off stage. She was covering her mouth and slitting her throat, but my partner was oblivious and kept right on telling her story about the farmer’s daughters and the bus full of blind rabbinical students or whatever it was. I could not figure out why Su was gesticulating so wildly, but it was really wrecking havoc on my composure. Finally, when the joke ended, I understood why Su was leaping around with such urgency. Seems one of the overhead stage microphones, the one directly above me, was accidentally left on and my partner’s joke was being broadcast out into the audience. Imagine her surprise when she got to the end and I didn’t laugh, but the entire audience did.

At the end of the ballet, after the shoe fits, Cinderella’s house set is supposed to break in two, revealing the full cast for one final grand finale. I was walking towards the set and, while the left side floated off just as it was supposed to, the right side stayed still. I stepped up on it, having nowhere else to go, just as the frantic stage crew got it unstuck and hurled it – and me – off into the wings. Finally the performance was over, but the audience never got up to leave. Eventually my mother had to go out and thank them for coming and beg them to please just go home already.

As bad as the performances could be, and they could be, they were usually preferable to the lecture/demonstrations. These would usually be held at some school full of hormone-crazed high school students (takes one to know one) who would greet us with either restrained boredom or lusty hostility. The teachers would explain what this thing called “dance” was all about and we’d all prance around like trained monkeys demonstrating some of the basics and then there’d be an exhilarating question and answer period in which we got to elucidate the finer points of the craft, responding to such perceptive inquiries as “what’s her phone number?” or “do you have change for a dollar?”. We once spent an entire question and answer session going around our group and saying what signs we were, to various levels of our hosts’ approval. Fortunately for me, Leo rocks.

The best of all the lecture/demonstrations was when we got to go into the inner city Detroit high schools to ply our trades and promote our lifestyle. These schools were the exact antithesis to our experience. We were paying for the privilege of going to a private boarding school specializing in high-level arts education coupled with a rigorous academic program. We lived out in the bucolic countryside. We were almost all white. They lived in the toughest parts of one of the toughest cities in the country, in an environment in which academic achievement or artistic expression was often ridiculed. They lived in the poor urban neighborhoods of what was at the time the murder capitol of the country. And they were almost all black. The enormous cultural chasm between us inevitably made for a surreal encounter, each group living an existence that was unimaginable by the other. There would often be a strong, vocal subgroup that would welcome us in, but we were warned not to stray too far. So intimidating were these schools that Eric and Andrew and I would sometimes piss in a sink in our make-shift dressing room rather than braving the public bathrooms in our tights and make-up. Which is how we found ourselves dancing around nearly naked in a school cafeteria kitchen singing Blondie’s then-current hit, The Tide is High.