Savannah Lee

--Bring extra false eyelashes
--Find someone else to actually put them on your child
--Instead of bringing food, save up for room service
--To the competition itself, however, bring three Snickers bars: one for before, one for during, one for after. (These things run six to seven hours, and while your dancer will need energy, she won't want to eat an actual meal)
--Bring an extra Motorola cellphone charger. Someone will need it, and if you give them an extra, you won't have to be stunned the next day when that enormously self-possessed eleven-year-old on the team hands it to you after you completely forgot that you lent it out to one of the teenagers.
--Don't check your luggage at the hotel (the people who did this were stuck in line for half an hour and nearly missed the bus back home)
--If it's around forty degrees in your town when you leave, plan for it to be -5 when you come back.
--Ballet is the oppressed minority of the commercial dance world: most of them hate it, but they can't do what they do without it.
--On the bus, when they turn up the volume on the DVD that they are playing which you have already seen four times, bring earplugs so that you can be spared.
--When did charter buses start coming equipped for DVD anyhow?
--After it's all over and the moms break out the wine--have some.