Lunch With Dancers

Ruby is in charge of the Dance Company lunch schedule this year, so I nabbed the first date of the year.  I love having these girls over!  I wish it could be more often. They do lunch together at someone's house every other Friday, when they have rehearsal right after.  Since they only have a half hour for lunch, the food has to be plated and prayed over by the time they start arriving so they can immediately dig in.  All of the moms do an exceptional job welcoming the girls and feeding them.  It's a real highlight of their week to relax in someone's home and be fed at a beautiful table and taken care of.

This Thursday and Friday, the night before and the night of the lunch, was the Davis High Performing Arts Spectacular.  Dance Company did two pieces.  The first one was described by the choreographer as "my most minimalist piece.  There's hardly any dancing!"  And it was 12 minutes!  Even for modern dance, that's pretty long.  It's incredible that these dancers have the maturity to sustain 12 minutes of material that has no counts and very little choreography, yet has to convey to the audience the idea of the piece, which happened to be transformation.  Each dancer also had to invite a civilian in street clothes to perform the dance onstage with them, with no preparation.  I think the piece blew the audience away.  I'm sure some of them felt like they were in an alternate universe.

The other piece was beautiful, too.  Dance Company this year includes a young man, Gabe Adams, who is missing his arms and legs.  Watching him dance is powerful.  He has the stage presence of a true dancer, yet his physical limitations are on display in a stark way that pushes the audience hard to scrutinize their own preconceived notions of what dance is, and what the limitations of dance are.  Maybe dance truly has no limitations.  Maybe physical differences can be overcome to a greater extent than you previously imagined.  Having Gabe in Dance Company is a huge boon to the dancers, as well as the audience.  I love that he is part of the group, and I love how readily he was accepted by the girls.  These young women are, collectively and individually, so talented, driven, hard-working, kind, open-hearted, generous and grateful.

I made chicken caesar salad.  Here's the recipe:  marinate the cooked chicken in Italian dressing the night before, and the cooked pasta the day of, then toss it with all kinds of good greens, tons of fresh romano and parmesan, and caesar dressing.  Plate it and throw a twist of fresh ground pepper and some croutons on top.  I served it with an apple, so they could take the fruit with them in case of a time crunch.

Dessert: chocolate chip cookies.  Our ovens have been broken for a year and a half now, so I'm way out of practice with baking, but Ruby said the dancers really like chocolate chip cookies, a predilection I can completely identify with.  So I took four batches of dough to my mom's house where my mom and I proceeded to turn out batch after batch of horribly disfigured cookies.  The ones that melted into a giant cookie, I turned into pizza shapes.  Some were square, some were extremely fluffy.  All of them were delicious.

Ruby, Abi, Natalie, Lauren, Alise, Amanda, Emily

My mom is the classiest.  I'm always tricking her into helping me.  After making cookies at her house, I "forgot" the forks I wanted to borrow, so she brought them over.  Then of course, she had to stay and help me pour juice and plate salad.  Thanks, Mom!  WWIDWOY?

First place for funniest cookie.  It looks like it has flames coming out of its head.