Summary of the Fort Dorchester 2008 Talent Show
They called us from our classes to head to the gym. The gym. When I bought the ticket I was totally ignorant of the fact that the talent show was in the gym. I still can’t believe that they would stuff all of us in such a close space. When I got to the gym, I was looking around for a familiar face in that huge crowd. When I finally found someone, we went and got a seat.
We sat there for a long time before anything started, and we saw the tail end of the practice section that the first group performing was going to do. Little did I know that that first sign of repetition was going to foreshadow a whole two plus hours of the talent show. The music signaled the beginning of the show.
The next part is sort of hazy to me. My want to leave was distracting me from listening to the whole thing. There were a couple of dance groups that went first. It was group dancing, and remember that the boy group did something strange with their red ties, laying them across their eyes.
There were other groups, too. This one guy did some break dancing by himself, and that was pretty cool. There were only a handful of performances that stood out, all of the rest just blended together in a stew of wagging behinds, sexual movements, and heavy base tones. Periodically, the audience would be blessed with the presence of some hot MTV or rap star.
Analysis
I have never really enjoyed talent shows or pep rallies, and I’ve given them a fair shot, too. I have been to at least three of them the whole time I’ve attended Fort Dorchester. The only reason students go to the pep rallies and the like, unless they need a cultural arts event, is to get out of class. The students that get a ticket to get out of class are typically rambunctious. When someone gets a whole bunch of people like that together, its very noisy, super rowdy, and not my scene.
This go around was bothersome, particularly because I was forced to listen to the same thing over and over again. Most of the performers were either hip-hop dancing or singing a song. I was expecting to hear at least a little diversity, but when any new genre or style came to be played, I couldn’t hear them.
Don’t get me wrong, the first couple of songs that had been played or danced to were great. At the beginning of the show, the blasting base tones in the rap music made my heart vibrate. The first couple of dances were kind of cool. Later though, was when the sight became repititious and boring. When the crowd would start talking to each other when someone they didn’t know of didn’t want to hear came on, I found it incredibly rude. I wanted to listen to them, but I couldn’t hear the new things above all of the background noise.
There was a girl who tried to play an acoustic guitar, Kim and her friend sang a song, but I could barely hear the tune for the other noises and the reverb on the microphones. I was only able to hear Jerry’s rap song. Any other acoustic guitar playing, pop, or hard rock songs just floated above the audience and into barely anyone’s ears.
The dancing on average, like I said, was only moderately entertaining. The repetition makes the memory I have of the whole thing less fond, but there was another thing that bugged me about the dancing. I believe that dancing is a form of expression (I think many would agree) and only a couple of the dances were expressive. All of the other ones were generic dances that I could watch by better performers on MTV.
I saw many people leaving early, and I would have followed them if my ride had been at the school. Before the names of the winners were announced, I, along with fifty other people, headed for the double doors. When I was only five feet away from the exit, the doors started to get blocked by administrators, trapping me inside. When I was in line to buy my ticket, there was a boy standing in line in front of me looking for an extra quarter. Instead of giving him the extra cents to buy his own, I should have just said, “Here you go man, just take my ticket”, simply because I already knew better. As soon as I bought that little red sucker, I regretted it. I don’t even know who won the talent show.
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