The Awesome Threesome

(This originally appeared as a two-part article in my column in the Port Hawkesbury Reporter...I'm posting it here so that Amy and Roxanne can read it, should they so choose.)
(Which they will, I wager.)


It’s funny how one song can bring back so many memories. It happened to me yesterday. Though the memory was from long ago, I encounter this particular brand of nostalgia quite often, truth be told. After all, it’s not every girl who can claim to have been a hip-hop dancer in a touring dance group.

Yes – you read that right.

I’m not entirely sure what led to the formation of our group, as it were. I won’t claim to have started it, nor, I don’t believe, would either of the other two founding members (Amy Doary and Roxanne Beaulieu). All I know is that one minute we were just your average, everyday 11- and 12-year-olds, making our way through grade six at the River Bourgeois School, and the next minute we were smack dab in the middle of a reign as the foremost pre-teen dance trio in Richmond County. It was quite a meteoric rise to fame, I must say.

We three had been friends since grade primary, and we spent all our free time together. We liked to think we had our fingers firmly on the pulse of popular music, and I suppose we did to a great extent, inasmuch as knowing who Mariah Carey was could be considered knowledge. Like any other girls our age, we would dance around, usually in Amy’s basement, to whichever fare Samantha Taylor was peddling on Video Hits. I can’t recall when things went from recreational to professional, but it was at some point in 1990.

What you have to understand about the now-extinct River Bourgeois School, especially if you never had the occasion to attend, is that there were two separate and very distinct cultures – upstairs and downstairs. While I plan to devote an entire column to this topic in the near future, suffice it for now to say that the upstairs people spent the entirety of their upstairs lives (which, incidentally, lasted from grade primary to grade six) in a seemingly never-ending quest to graduate to grade seven and become a downstairs student.

As you might imagine, never was this quest as arduous as for people in grade six. We could see those grade seven and eight girls parading around in their acid washed jean jackets and Vaurnet shirts and hair scrunchies, and we were no different than they were, save for which area of the school we were allowed to parade them in. And if we were going to be stuck playing our Bananarama tapes upstairs, well then, we were going to do it on our own terms, dammit.

So we set up shop in the bathroom.

In hindsight, that upstairs bathroom probably wasn’t even as big as my current living room (and actually, if anyone reading this has a picture or knows the dimensions, I’d be very interested to find out). Regardless, it was the hub of the upstairs; apart from the toilets and sinks, there was an open area off to the side which served as a kind of meeting place for little girls to congregate between classes. As luck would have it, it was equipped with an electrical outlet.

Do you remember those heavy, silver ghetto-blasters with the red “record” button? I know you do, everybody had one. Every recess and lunch we would borrow the one from the teacher’s lounge and Super Ladies of the 80s would echo through the halls. In that bathroom, and with that ghetto blaster, we honed our craft.

If I had to describe it, I’d say our early work was a combination of Janet Jackson mimicry (we were obsessed with copying the choreography from the “If” video right down to the last Running Man) and outtakes from The Mickey Mouse Club television performances. We fed off each other and, in an effort to best each other’s dance moves and perfect the copied ones, we created a style all our own. In future interviews it would be referred to as “hip-hop jazz style dancing”, but I hate to use labels; we’ll just say it was very of-the-moment and leave it at that.

We had no idea those early bathroom practice sessions would spawn a year-long reign at the top of the River Bourgeois School social pyramid and the beginning of a cultural juggernaut which would later be known as The Awesome Threesome.

I was going to save all this flowery information for the vH1 Behind the Music special, but since I know you’re all waiting with bated breath, I’ll finish spinning this tale next week.

If I can stop laughing.

(PART TWO)

Now, where did I leave off? Oh yes, the bathroom.

It was 1990 and me and my two best friends, also 11 years old, unknowingly thrust ourselves headlong into the world of professional dance by way of copying music videos in our elementary school bathroom. You are now officially up to speed (and only slightly less fortunate if you missed part one).

Every morning recess and lunch hour we would practice, until we found the square footage of our bathroom practice space to be limiting our endeavors. Our French teacher, Madame Boudreau, had taken a keen interest in our ambitions, and was kind enough to offer up her classroom for us to use during breaks.

As it turns out, this venue change was exactly the motivation we needed to get organized. We were a close-knit group of girls (especially considering there were only seven of us in our grade) and no way were we going to share any aspect of our idea with outsiders. Aside from us three dancers, we enlisted the help of Leah-Anne to be our manager – largely a ceremonial role with non-specific duties, though no less prestigious than the title suggests. Joanie was our wardrobe consultant, Kelly was our communications liaison and the rest of the girls (or maybe all of us) share responsibility for naming the group.

Honestly, what can I even say about that situation. We were only eleven. Let’s just let it go.

The condition attached to Mme. Boudreau’s offer was this: if we were going to use her classroom to practice, she would give us something to practice for. We were given a spot in a school variety concert – the pressure was on. What song would we choose? Which moves would we showcase? What on earth would we wear?!

I suppose the song choice would be easy enough: “The World Just Keeps on Turning” by Candy and the Backbeat was the only completed routine we had choreographed and memorized. The routine itself would be a compilation of our best dance moves, perfected and practiced ad nauseum.

The wardrobe decisions were a bit more complex. Fashion in the 90’s was a crapshoot, especially for a junior high school student from a small town. We had terrible ideas and followed even worse examples from television, and the results were cataclysmic. Never was there a better example of bad taste than our very first performance outfit.

The black stirrup pants were a no-brainer; back in those days, they were as an essential a wardrobe staple as a pair of blue jeans. It’s the shirt that remains a cringe-worthy image even to this day. See, our song choice somehow segued into a before-awareness-was-cool message of environmental consciousness, and with the help of Amy’s dad, who owned a screenprinting business, we became the proud new owners of florescent yellow t-shirts emblazoned with a giant globe and “Save the World” in bold font.

That was us – spiral perms, stirrup pants, and obscure pop music. The perfect storm.

While our dance career was nothing short of a community phenomenon, we remained pretty grounded throughout. Imagine our surprise when the media came to call for an interview – and promised a full page spread, with pictures, no less.

We primped (hair, clothing, dance moves, even photo backdrops) and prepped (practice questions, inspired monologues, even body language). It would be our introduction to the world beyond River Bourgeois, we thought; the first recorded account of our rise to fame.

The interview lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of ten minutes and fell far short of the Rolling Stone-esque interview we had expected. Worse yet, she dismissed our hand-painted tarpaulin backdrop in favor of taking one picture in front of Amy’s garage door.

Luckily, we had youthful optimism on our side and didn’t let the disappointing interview get us down. The exposure blossomed into a string of bookings, from variety shows to the Schools Today concert at the mall in Port Hawkesbury, our most notable showcase. We had the world at our feet, truly we did.

The sad truth is that I could go on like this for at least the duration of another article. I won’t, but I could.

I will say this: the highlight of our dance career was the day the grade seven and eight girls asked us to show them some moves. And to this day, one of my prized possessions is the laminated copy of that newspaper article, with accompanying picture.

Yellow shirts and all.