If you’ve ever wondered what young dancers do backstage in the dressing rooms, it’s not very pretty. Imagine about 40 sweaty, loud, and very bored dancers ranging from ages 9 to 13 all crammed into two rooms, one bathroom, and one very narrow hallway. Costumes are everywhere, makeup is everywhere, children are screaming, people are on the floors, and the only entertainment is a deck of cards and a few coloring books.

I was around 11-ish, waiting backstage in dressing room 2 (All the older girls were in dressing room 1 and the boys had their own room), in full costume and playing solitaire in the corner of the costume closet because it was quieter there. Some other girls came in, saw me, and asked if they could play slapjack. I agreed and we left the closet to head to the green room, where there was more space, collecting a total of 12 players. And so the chaos begins.

Now, slapjack isn't a peaceful game, by any means, but we started out pretty reasonable. As you would expect, however, we got loud. I wasn’t playing anymore and was sitting on a chair against the wall, watching as the other girls played. Eventually, only four girls are left playing.

What happened next all occurred within just a few seconds.

In a scramble to get to the card four girls lunge forward at the same time and crash into each other, one rolls off to the side and gets up, but the one who was furthest from the card falls onto the two girls who had their backs facing me, taking the two others with them into a crash against the chair that I’m sitting on. They hit the chair, it breaks under the force of three 11 year olds hitting it like a squealing, shrieking boulder, I fall down, we all hit the wall with a bang.

An adult comes over to check on us. We’re all fine, our hair, makeup, and costumes are, by some miracle, intact. A chair is broken, sure, but we all lived and no one got hurt. The lady realizes this, then promptly scolds us for being stupid idiot children and also for breaking a chair and makes us clean up the cards that have flown all over our corner of the room. She takes the cards, puts them back in the box, and then makes a new rule that no more than 4 girls can play with the cards at any given time.

 Then we all decide that, meh, cards are stupid anyway and watch barbie and the diamond castle, instead.