Piggy Backing

Sacrificing a rare evening alone, I made a trek in the frozen cold to MIT to watch my brother dance. As a dancer, my brother -- and his whole troop -- are hilariously incompetent, but still young enough that their incompetence is rather cute. The audience chuckled its way through their performance and cheered with amusement at the end.

The other dancing was actually surprisingly competent, especially when considering half the dancers were middle-aged parents of teenagers. There were also three different troops of girls, separated by age. The youngest, decked out in baby pink tops emblazoned with "Angel" and denim miniskirts, made me squirm with undue hip thrusting and such Lolita-ish behaviors. Yikes.

But all in all, the dancing fell on the entertaining side, even though the stage was barely larger than my living room. I came out incredibly pissed off, however, at all the elitist, cultish, and clannish attitudes. First, they wouldn't even let me into the auditorium unless I registered. For cripes sake people, I'm not joining your cult; I just came to watch my brother dance. But I held my tongue and registered, only to be accosted when I tried to eat a grape. Apparently, the guy thought I was a random person who walked in to steal food. When I finally sat down to watch the performances, an acquaintance of my parents came by to chat. I made a mild attempt at politeness, "Shushu Hao" (Uncle), only for him to reply, "Here, there are no uncles. We are all students." Okay comrade, I'll keep that in mind next time.