At Least It Wasn't Opera...Mostly

I have to admit that I'm something of a philistine when it comes to what is generally termed "art." Growing up during the infancy of rock and roll jaded me somewhat to other performances genres. Having no friends but the radio and having parents who decried popular music as something degenerate really cemnented my relationship with that single form of "art." As my teaching career progressed, however, I delved into both ballroom and hip hop dance as a way of broadening my students' lives, and, as such, I can appreciate dance much moreso than I can, say, painting or classical music (though stuck in my head is Mendelsshon's "Italian Symphony" because it was played every night at 9 p.m. when I was in high school, signalling only a half hour more of study hall for the day). Thus it was that I headed off to school this evening for the "Danceworks" performance.
Mind you, I didn't go (and drag my sweetie along :0) because I liked dance: there were several of my basketball guys who were performing a hip hop number as part of the program, and watching 6'9" guys dance hip hop is a treat. Little did I know, though I probably suspected, that the evening would be, uh, fraught with frustration.
First of all, I was told that the performance began at 7 when, in fact, it did not begin until a half hour later. That meant sitting outside the theater awaiting the entrance while reading grammatical mistakes in the school paper @#***@!
We finally gained entrance only to find, scanning the program, that my guys would be appearing almost at the end of the evening which was expected to take 90 minutes. I could feel the sweat begin to trickle down my neck as I realized that I was going to decimate a whole weekend evening with my sweetie who was probably not all that keen on being there. The dancing began.
Sometimes, it featured a single interpretive dancer, and sometimes it was a bevy of them in some form of choreographed movement. "What's up with the floor stuff?" my sweetie wanted to know as almost every number had some writhing around on the floor followed by leaps and shoulder-popping, exaggerated arm movements. After ten or twelve numbers, each dance resembled the others, but then, I'm not an aficianado of this kind of stuff. I CAN appreciate how hard it was to do a lot of those movements, but it did seem a bit repetitious.
After each number, there was darkness for a few seconds, followed by a brief curtain call for the performer(s); then, the lights came on for a couple of minutes, and we all just sort of looked at each other. The lights would dim, and another number began.
Following a fifteen-minute halftime, er, intermission, the first number featured some woman singing in Italian while three women and a guy capered across the stage enacting some kind of obscure story...providing me with yet another reason to prove why I would never attend an opera. At one point, the male left the stage, and the audience began polite applause, whereupon, the women started dancing again. I was thoroughly confused by this part.
Eventually, we got to the hip hop number, and it was about 3 minutes worth of toe-tapping, leg-kicking, arm-flailing excitement. The guys were a big hit as the screams and whistles testified; one guy even did a back flip, eliciting huzzahs a'plenty from the audience. For my money, we could have ended it there...but no.
A few more dance numbers followed before we were allowed to escape to the solace of home where I tried to convince my sweetie that those three minutes made the whole evening worthwhile, but she just kept repeating that everything else just seemed the same and wondering what the heck was up with all the rolling around on the floor.
Well, enough culture for the spring...now I have to write a letter to the editor of the school paper decrying the fact that the writers and copy editors don't know the difference between the use of "bring" and the use of "take."
What's college coming to?