My shame wears lycra....

After you're done laughing yourself into an asthma attack, take a minute to contemplate how much I really must love you, dear readers, to place before you this humiliating peace offering to attone for my long absence. Consider this picture my penance.

This is a picture of me in eighth grade before my jazz dance recital. What the hell kind of dance style is "jazz' anyway? It seems, in my experience, to be a catch-all created for the sole purpose of allowing the parents of those too uncoordinated to continue to study tap and ballet in the adolescent years an opportunity to shell out hundreds of dollars for their daughters (and gay sons) to flail themselves around a dance studio once a week in $100 Capezio shoes (they were in on the pyramid scheme of jazz dance as well) and bad spandex ensembles. All of this culminating in the yearly recital where said parents had to sheild their eyes from the glittering horror of their besequined offspring gyrating on stage not fully in control of their newly developing bodies.

Please take note of the awesomely stylish hair as well. At this point in my beauty history I was growing out an ill-advised layered bob and apparently, had not discovered the face-flattering powers of a side part. And as to the presence of our golden retriever, Corky, in the background? He was never all that bright and must have been drawn toward the sparkly lights reflecting off eighty-five million sequins and the shine of hot pink lycra.

So there you are, dear readers. With this gesture, I am ending my long absence and will begin writing again, in earnest, tomorrow. I hope this makes up for my abandoning you to surf Youtube all day.

And if putting this picture on the internet weren't good enough, my sister and brother in-law also used this photo in a rehearsal dinner slide show/roast of Hubby and myself that contained every bad picture of us ever taken in a festival of second-born revenge the likes of which have not been seen since Cain and Abel.

It's good to be back.