I don’t remember much about my dance classes, the point of my toes, or instructor barking positions. I remember “Waterfalls” getting all the radio play that year, the smooth, gray bottom of the pink slippers, puffy sleeves with sequins and elastic rough as concrete on my kid arms, the crooning of “Edelweiss” during the ballet piece. Finally, then, during the tap number, white boas draped over our small shoulders, all of us girls were to toss the feathered strands through the air to the back of the stage like we knew something about it. It went off like a bunch of white birds taking flight, a bunch of kindergarteners showing their boas who was boss. Our dads had large video cameras on their shoulders, a hand through the strap, so I’ve seen the footage. Which is to say, even if I didn’t remember clearly what happened next (which I do), I would know exactly what followed: when I went to retrieve my boa and continue the number, someone else had grabbed mine in the chaos. Angry, boa-less, cheeks pinker than the blush my mother had applied earlier while I sat on the lid of the toilet in our bathroom, I returned to my place among the other girls embarrassed and unsure of how to complete the dance, having been plucked so carelessly of my feathers. Even now, decades later, I’m friends with one of the girls I danced with. We've looked through the old pictures of us grinning in our sequined leotards. She says I’m not in the video her dad took much. It’s mostly focused on her, she says. I don’t have it in me to ask if she remembers the boas, how we tossed them into the air, how they drifted toward the lights, how one might have never made it back down, might have sailed right on into outer space.