Last week was my oldest daughter, Cara’s, end of year performance. Dancers prep their pointe shoes to be perfect on performance day and they can run through them like hotcakes. One professional ballerina danced in over 2500 pairs of shoes in a season! So, the day before the show her perfectly prepped shoes ripped, and a new pair was nowhere to be found, backordered till the end of June. I thought of what my Dad, my “Rudy”, would do. Since his father was a shoemaker, my Dad repaired our shoes and when I started dancing he even worked on those! And it was something I hadn’t thought of in years, running down the basement to his desk, (he had a man cave in the 1970’s!) and handing him pointe shoes that needed to be fixed. In fact, my Dad was the one who looked for a professional ballet school for me when I was nine, and he was the one who spent countless hours to pick me up in the city at night to drive back home. I danced six days a week in Philadelphia and lived in the suburbs, so seeing him in the car every night at 8 or 9 was my welcome home each day. Now, as I am waiting for the girls to be finished a class or performance, I feel like he’s sitting by my side.
So back to Cara’s shoes! We have ripped shoes, a performance looming and no new shoes available. So I thought, Rudy would sew them and glue them and they would look like new. So I took a deep breath and got out my sewing kit and started carefully sewing her shoes. Off Cara went to dress rehearsal and then a flawless performance! After a big hug I asked her how were the shoes? Perfect!
They say you marry your Dad. So the other day I told Sean, as once again he was off to pick up one of our dancers (Little sis dances too!) that he reminded me of my Dad; patiently waiting for ballet class or auditions to be over, helping a little girl’s dream come true!
Happy Father’s Day.
