When we were younger, my sister Megan and I had a plan. We would buy the old Bells supermarket on Empire Boulevard in the Irondequoit/Rochester gray area, next to Dan’s Crafts and Things. We would gut it, partition it in half, and operate a gymnastics center and dance studio. My side, the dance studio, would be called “Dance By The Light of The Moon,” after a song reference in our mother’s favorite movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. My sister’s side, the gymnastics center, went unnamed save for a few times where she said she would just call it, “Megan’s Gymnastics.”
I was 11 and Megan was 6 when we hatched this plan, so there’s a good reason why Megan never named her side of the business.
I even created a brochure in Print Shop for the business during one of the few times I had free computer time in school, but that was as far as we got. But 11 and 6 year old us were convinced that when we were 30 and 25, this would surely be what we were doing with our lives: teaching dance and coaching gymnastics.
Flash forward to 2012. I just turned 30, and Megan will turn 25 in two months. I haven’t worn my tap shoes in eight years, and she gave up gymnastics in 2000 to play soccer (which she ended up briefly playing in college.) I am an educational administrator and part-time sports writer, and she’s in college majoring in mass communications, with a focus in television production.
Earlier this week, I was scrolling through Twitter while zombie-fied, since my weekend was a blur of taking care of my food poisoning stricken husband. I came across a Tweet regarding the American Cup, a gymnastics competition at New York City’s Madison Square Garden at the beginning of March. And in my sleep deprived and stress filled state, I hatched an idea.
I remembered that my sister was in the process of building her portfolio with a variety of print and video work in order to apply for internships. In my writing career, I have never really covered a gymnastics meet. What if we channeled our little kid selves and joined forces to cover the American Cup and the concurrent Nastia Lukin Cup? Megan would create some great pieces for her portfolio, I would get to cover a gymnastics competition and we would get to go watch live gymnastics together, something we haven’t done since the 1999 US Classic (where we both tabbed then child elite Chellsie Memmel as a future world champion. Call Miss Cleo, because we’re psychic!)
So I proposed the idea to my sister, who, since we shared a bunk bed for a decade, grew up having to hear and eventually learning to tune out all of my crazy ideas. But kudos to her – she listened, and immediately jumped on board.
Hopefully, if all goes as planned on March 2nd and 3rd, we’ll be doing some sort of coverage on two of the biggest gymnastics events on American soil this year. What we’ll be doing is still up in the air – will we just buy tickets, tweet from the stands and write recaps? Will we get press passes and do more multimedia coverage? Like our business dreams of nearly twenty years ago, we have some details to work out. But both Megan and I think our 11 year old and 6 year old selves would think that our plans were, in appropriate 1990s slang, “totally radical.”