10 Year Reunion of Dancing in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Ten Years ago today I danced in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade! 

My dance studio (Greendale Dance Academy) auditioned to participate and we got selected to be part of the Mike Miller Dance Team! The dance team was a group that was put together every year with dancers from all over the country. Eleven of us were lucky enough to be selected to go! In preparation for the performance we had to learn multiple different dance routines since we wouldn't find out which one we would be performing until the week of!  

On November 18th the eleven of us (and a couple of chaperones) piled into a bus and drove from Worcester, Massachusetts to New York City!! We had multiple days of rehearsals, classes and site seeing to do before the big day. 

We got the opportunity to see two broadway shows while in NYC. We saw Tarzan and Mary Poppins! Both of them AMAZING! I still have my Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious T-shirt from the show (see below)! 

For the actually Macy's performance, I was one of the very lucky few who got to be in the front and center of the MASSIVE dance team! I was one row from the left and one person back! The only time being tall was in my favor! Instead of doing tall people in the back and short people in the front, they did tall people all in the middle and short people all on the sides. So lucky. 

Unfortunately I do not have very many pictures from the experience. Mind you it was 2006, I was 16 years old and 100% living in the moment! 

I did find this picture of our group:

Can you find me!? This was totally my awkward year. Braces ✓ Glasses ✓ Bad Highlights ✓

Maybe it was a good thing that there are not too many pictures!! Lol

I also was able to find this pictures of our costumes from Google:

They were velvety and all sorts of fluffy! 

And speaking of the costumes, Thanksgiving day it rained all day! They made us wear ponchos as we were walking the parade route and we had to take them off when we were on TV. All of our fluffy little pieces got so wet and we looked like some wet, soggy snowflakes by the time the performance was over! As they say… the show must go on! 

My favorite souvenir that I got from the experience was a massive snow globe I bought at Macy's before the parade! 

And it is super special because our group was technically in it!! 

See those little girls in blue and white with pompoms?! They have little MMs on their shirt for Mike Miller!!! How cool is that?! I'm technically in a snow globe! I also really loved that the snow globe was in the correct order of the parade. We were the last performance before Santa came and as you can see in the globe the little dancers are right before Santa! Love it!

I have the entire performance on DVD with really nice quality - but if you are interested in seeing an old youtube version of the performance you can see it Here ( skip to 2:05:40)!!

I can't believe it has been ten years!! Mind blowing! 

Will you be watching the parade tomorrow!? I know I will be!