I Better Get That “World’s Best Dad” Mug This Year…

So my daughter joined her studio’s dance company this year. And since she’s gone to this studio for many years and I’ve been to about 80 recitals, I am well aware that dads are often enlisted to do a dance number (if that’s the right word for it) in a group with their daughters. It’s awfully sweet. When it’s other dads doing it. I suspected that if my daughter continued to dance until, I was figuring her senior year in high school, I might be asked to do such a thing, perhaps if some of the other dads fell ill with bubonic plague. But I had also secretly hoped that she might be finished with dance by then or maybe they’d pick some other dads and maybe just not mention it to me or maybe some governmental organization might determine that dancing causes cancer…

Well, about that…
1) Apparently, the time is 4th grade, not senior year of high school. And also every year until, according to my daughter, “forever.”
2) All the dads must do this. You can get out of it, but only by writing a 400 word essay entitled, “I really don’t have a problem destroying my daughter’s feelings of self worth and sending her to a life on skid row,” which will then be posted at the studio entrance next to an unflattering dad picture. So…a picture.
3) Last year the “dad costume” was a camoflague t-shirt and a headband. This year it’s a suit and briefcase. A suit. And a frickin’ briefcase. I own a suit which fits 20-years-ago-me and I own no briefcase.
4) I don’t move well anymore. In fact, I never moved well to begin with. I definitely don’t move well in a suit. And if I do move in a suit, I damn sure need last year’s headband. Or a towel.
5) I already embarrass myself at a fairly frequent clip. But rarely do I pay so much to be embarrassed. I haven’t worked out the exact numbers, but if I had to guess, I’d say I pay about 90% of my salary to the dance company, but now there’s actually an additional line item for “abomination with dad.”

So it looked like I was needing one of the suit things again. One that can be danced in. I was thinking I might need to go to one of those “Big & Tall” stores or “Big & Not So Tall & No Real Legitimate Reason to Need This Much Material” stores. I went looking for a suit from the David Byrne collection to allow for the maximum range of motion, but was told that his suit was not real. Long story short…I bought a briefcase (which will never be used again) on Amazon for $20, new shoes, and a suit that fits just the way a man’s suit should. In other words, terrible.