Showtime!

Day 3: Saturday, February 13

On Saturday morning, as we were making a trip to Costco to purchase roses for our ballerina girl, we happened upon this unusual "artwork" above a CVS pharmacy. This sculpture is somewhat disturbing, yet it somehow seems right at home in Venice, CA. It is apparently a "marriage" between a classically trained ballerina and street performer/clown. It is a masculine, yet feminine looking all at the same time -- definitely the kind of thing that might make me have bad dreams, yet I "had" to take a picture of it. 

I am pretty sure that we may have seen the inspiration for this piece of work strolling on the Venice Boardwalk...

After the flowers were purchased, we met up with AJ and Mark at the Santa Monica Pier. They had an early flight from Portland to LAX on Saturday morning. They, too, had tickets to the best show in LA -- Pepperdine's Dance in Flight!

It was very crowded in Santa Monica, as preparations for setting up the finish line for the Los Angeles Marathon was underway. There were barricades set up, news crews, and more street vendors than usual. Traffic was a wee bit heavier than usual -- both vehicle and pedestrian. We didn't mind the crowds. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

See those two people waving? Braxton and Millie are in the #17 car of the Ferris Wheel.

And here they are close-up.

The main reason we made this trip to Southern California was to see the annual performance of "Dance in Flight," Pepperdine's resident dance company that our girlie has been a part of for the past two years. We were not able to attend last year's performance, but we did get to see a video of the performance. It was amazing! We decided that we would have to be present and accounted for at this year's show, since it IS her senior year.

DIF auditions are held in September, then rehearsals take place every weekend until showtime in February. There is a tech rehearsal, a dress rehearsal, and a show for elementary school children before they get to the four shows on Thursday-Saturday. We opted to see the final show.

Dance in Flight dancers perform Jazz, Hip Hop, Tap, Ballet, Modern, Theatrical, Ballroom and World dance. Although there are 30-some dancers in the company, if I am being TOTALLY honest, we were really only interested in seeing one of them light up the stage with her smile. :-)

We met up with our dancer in between the Saturday matinee and evening shows. We didn't have time to tour the campus, but we did have time to get a quick bite to eat together.

As expected, the show was FABULOUS! (I might be somewhat biased...)

I am including two photos from a ballet piece and one picture from the salsa number that our girlie was in. We were not allowed to take photos during the performance, but these photos were taken by a Pepperdine photographer during one of the rehearsals.

You can tell by the smiles that we all enjoyed the "flight."