Ann Martin - Baby-Sitters Club 061

"The redhead is named Darcy," Mary told me. "I don't know the dark-haired girl." When we reached the large practice room it was in an uproar. Screaming, shouting kids were running in all directions. I saw almost forty boys and girls, most of whom looked about eight or nine years old. Mary and I glanced at one another nervously. It seemed doubtful that Mme Dupre would be able to quiet them down, never mind teaching them to dance.

Mme Dupre turned off the bright overhead lights. Since it was winter time, the sun was already setting and the room became quite dark. She clapped her hands sharply. "Please space yourselves and find a seat on the floor," she said loudly.

The kids settled down quickly. Madame turned the lights back on and strode to the center of the room. "Welcome students," she said. "How many of you have studied dance before?" The students looked at one another but no one raised a hand. "I can do the funky chicken!" yelled a boy with a mop of dark curls and big brown eyes. He got up, tucked his arms in, and began to prance around the room, bobbing his head and flapping his arms. Of course, the class broke into peals of laughter. Even I bit my lip to keep from smiling.

"Very nice," Mme Dupre said tolerantly. "And what is your name?" "Devon Ramirez." "Thank you, Devon. You may sit down now," said Mme Dupre. "Has anyone else taken classes?" One little girl with very dark skin nodded shyly. Mme Dupre noticed her. "What classes have you taken?" she asked.

The girl spoke so quietly that I couldn't hear her, even though she was in the front. "Please speak up," Madame prodded gently.

The girl's dark eyes grew large, as though she felt suddenly trapped. "No, I never took a class," she said in a barely audible voice.

"Oh, all right," said Mme Dupre. "Well, I'm very pleased that none of you has prior training. We won't have to break any bad habits. Here we will start fresh and learn to do things the right way." She stretched out her arms toward us volunteers. "I want you to meet Mary and Jessi. They're on my left. And Vince, Raul, Darcy, and Sue are on my right. They will be helping me. My name is Mme Dupre." - "Hey, like Jazzy Jo Dupre and the Fly Boys!" cried a pudgy blonde girl with large green eyes. "Man! Now those guys are super cool! Will we learn to dance as good as them?" "Ballet is a good basis for all dance," Mme Dupre replied. "All right, class. We will begin with basic warm-ups. Stay seated, and put your legs out straight in front of you. I want you to bend forward slowly and touch your toes." "This is like gym!" Devon Ramirez complained. "I thought we were supposed to be dancing." "You must always warm up before dancing," Mme Dupre told him. "Touch your toes, please." "All right, but this isn't what I thought it was going to be," Devon said warily as he bent forward.

When the whole class was bent forward, it was easy to spot two girls busily whispering together in the back. They sat side by side and seemed totally unaware of what was going on in the rest of the class. "Jessi, please go back and speak to those girls," Madame instructed me.

The girls were so engrossed in their conversation that they didn't even see me coming. One was petite with lots of red curls. The other had long, limp blonde hair and porcelain-white skin. When I was nearly on top of them, they looked up at me. "You're supposed to be warming up like the rest of the class," I said pleasantly.

"Oh, that's all right," said the redhead. "We don't really belong here. Our mothers made us come. You can just ignore us." I hadn't expected that reply! "Well, as long as you are here, why don't you join in?" I suggested.

"No, we'd rather not," said the blonde matter-of-factly.

I glanced up to the front of the room and saw Mme Dupre watching me. Now what? I thought. "We'd really like for everyone to cooperate," I said.

"Don't mind us a bit," said the redhead, in a tone that was oddly old-sounding. "You attend to the others. We'll be fine." I suddenly thought of those mothers I sometimes see shrieking at their kids in the supermarket. "You have to do it because I said so!" they yell. When I see them I say to myself, I'll never be like them. But suddenly I understood how those mothers might be feeling.

"Please join the class," I begged.

Just then, I noticed Mme Dupre approaching. "Ladies, if you can not participate, please go out in the hallway," she said in a no-nonsense voice.

The girls looked at one another. "Will you tell our mothers?" the blonde asked.

"Your mothers will be told not to send you back to class next Tuesday, yes," replied Mme Dupre.

The next thing I knew, the girls had moved apart and were touching their toes. "Jessi, walk among the children and make sure they are in the correct position," she instructed me. I was glad I didn't hear a hint of criticism in her voice because already I felt badly about having failed at my first official volunteer assignment.

After the warm-up exercises, Madame put on a tape of the musical score from the movie Fantasia, and told the kids to move to the music. Watching them was a riot. Some of them were out-and-out silly. Others were so deadly serious that it was just as comical.

Madame gave us volunteers the job of walking around, asking each kid his or her name, then writing it down and rating them as dancers on a scale of one to five. Five was to mean "lots of natural potential," and one was to mean that the child seemed stiff and offbeat. Two, three, and four were somewhere in the middle. "Don't worry if you overlap and observe the same children," she told us. "I'll put all the results together tonight, and I like to have more than one opinion." As I walked through the room with my paper and pencil, I decided that most of the kids fell into the two, three, and four ratings. There were a few exceptions, though. For example, the kid named Devon was being seriously silly - twirling around with his arms held out wide so that he batted other kids out of the way. Still, something in the way he moved with the music made me rate him a five.

And, surprisingly, the quiet little girl who said she hadn't taken classes (her name was Martha) appeared to have some mastery of basic ballet steps and a lot of grace. She got a five from me, too.

The two whispering friends (the redhead was Nora and the blonde was Jane) just sort of bobbed up and down as they talked. I gave them both a one.

The plump, blonde fan of Jazzy Jo Dupre and the Fly Boys (who was named Yvonne) had a hilarious style which consisted of bouncing around wildly, her head shaking and her hair flying everywhere. I just had to rate her a five, too.

The time zoomed by. Before I knew it, parents started to gather in the doorway to pick up their kids. For the first time that day, I became aware that these were very underprivileged people.

The kids seemed so high-spirited and happy that I hadn't thought of them as "underprivileged." Now something in the parents' faces reminded me of that. Even though a lot of them were dressed neatly and smiled as they watched the end of class, something in their eyes was different from what I see in the eyes of the parents picking up their kids at Stoneybrook Middle School. Was it sorrow? Tiredness? A bit of both? It was hard to describe, but it was definitely there.

It made me sad.

And then it made me glad I'd volunteered to help teach the class.

We handed our evaluation sheets to Mme Dupre as the kids left the room. She thanked us and said we'd all been very helpful.

"That was fun, wasn't it?" Mary said to me.

"It was," I agreed. "Some of those kids are real characters." We began walking toward the dressing room. "But whatever on earth is Mme Dupre going to do with all those kids?" Mary wondered.

"I know what you mean. Is she just going to let them dance around for an hour and a half every day?" I replied. "They won't learn much that way." "I guess we'll have to wait and see," Mary said.