When Daughters Become Dancers…Burlesque Dancers

There are days I worry about my children but today isn’t one of them.

I’m so proud of my daughter, Mary. She’s 24, gorgeous and a senior in college. She’s worked for the Clinton Foundation and plans to do good in the world and be taken seriously.

The other day she called because she’d been invited to join a burlesque troop.  (Mary is minoring in dance in college) She was excited, she loved the girls, she would get paid to dance, it sounded wonderful. But…it’s a burlesque show.

I’ve seen that movie with Cher, still I don’t really know what Burlesque is. In my mind it involves fishnet hose and a stage, in my mind it’s the first cousin of pole dancing. But I didn’t say that to Mary. Instead I let her talk and talk and talk. She went through the pros and cons, the ups and downs.

After twenty minutes she decided not to do it because of the internet. In cyber space she would always be a burlesque dancer. There would be cheeky pictures on facebook. When a prospective employer googled her name, there she would be…in fish net hose and hooker pumps…on stage.

“If it was an important job, I wouldn’t hire me,” she finally said.

Mary had the brain process of an adult!  What lots of kids don’t understand is, because of the internet,  bad  choices, drunken keg party pictures and videos of cruel pranks NEVER GO AWAY! They are like forearm and neck tattoos.

For several years I worked at a very very selective high school.  If we got an application from a kid with an email address or twitter account like pyro-nympho-manica2002 @ gmail we did not typically invite them to our special school. Bad choices live for ever on the internet.

I now understand  burlesque is not at all what I thought it was. And if there was a burlesque dinner theater, I’d love to go….as long as my daughter wasn’t on stage.