Day 16...

...of the 31-Day Blog Challenge - a fond childhood memory.

I was going through my old picture box to find pictures for this post, and I came across this little beauty:

That's me, the tall one on the far right with white short-shorts. This was the summer of 1987. My dad's two sisters and their families lived in Denver at the time, and both families came out to visit us. I looooooooved when my cousins visited (and when we got to visit them). I would go through a major bout of depression every time they left. I would just cry and cry.

A lot of my girl cousins danced at this same studio together, and I think that year, they might have had a finale dance that every kid learned? That's my guess. Because why would, like, 16-year-olds do the same dance that 10-year-olds did? And all my girl cousins knew this dance. It was a jazz dance, to "Dancing on the Ceiling" by Lionel Ritchie.

That album by Lionel was one of the first tapes I ever owned. That and Afterglow, a badly-named, cheesy LDS duo.

When my cousins saw that I had Lionel, they offered to teach Nat and I the dance.

We were in the backyard, learning the dance, and doing it over and over and over again. It was sooooo fun. A bunch of neighbor girls saw us dancing and joined in. It seriously felt like we were in Fame, Footloose, or Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Spontaneous dancing, out in the open air. I felt SOOOOOO COOOOOOOOOOL.

My boy cousins even got in on the action - obviously to make fun of us. :)

I love that picture. I love that memory.