A is for Astouded

I have always been good at everything. Except golf. When I played sports in grade school I was agile and quick. In school I get A's. My friends are good to me and I'm good to them. Until modern dance.

Many of you have heard me groan about the flowery essence and how my rock-hard personality and lack of any drop of grace was detrimental to my class choice: modern dance.
When the girls in pink leggings went left, I stumbled right. When their hands flew over their heads, my eyes were trying to figure out what to tell my feet to do. When my teacher asked me to be a tree, my gaze turned cynical. Etcetera.

After the first day of class, my teacher e-mailed me asking if I should be graded differently for my disability. I kindly explained to her that I did not have a disability.

Some of you even got to listen to my tale of the final.

For the final, I was required to perform a one-minute modern dance performance -- twice. Same dance two times.

My thesis' due date was eminent, as were two video projects. I was editing the newspaper and producing the news broadcast, I did not have time to make a dance. So I didn't.

The day of my final I freaked out. "I am going to fail. I will have to explain to Columbia why I failed modern dance," I fretted to my classmates.

Then it came.

So I did what any good editor or producer would do. I pretended that I knew exactly what I was doing.

It worked.

"Heather," my teacher said as she stopped my music. "You said you couldn't dance and you just did the most difficult thing there is to do in dance -- legato -- the smooth flow of movements."

"Beautiful," my classmates echoed.

It cemented me as a bullshit artist. I felt vindicated.

I got my grade today for modern dance. A.