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daughter’s hair must be compacted into a bun, and it must be a very tight, dense, ballerina-style bun, held in place by weapons-grade hair gel to keep it from exploding due to the severe pressure exerted on it by your wife, who by this point, trust me, is not in a great mood.
    Once your wife is convinced that your daughter is ready (allow nine hours) it’s time to go to the recital, which will be in an auditorium containing hundreds and hundreds of people who are no more interested in watching your daughter dance than you are in watching their daughters dance. As you enter, you will be handed a program, and when you examine it, you will find that your daughter’s first dance routine is near the beginning of the program, and her second routine is near the very end. In between will be roughly two thousand routines featuring other people’s daughters.
    You would think that, by sheer chance, there would come a time when your daughter’s two dances would be close together, ideally near the beginning. But the dance studio makes sure this never happens, using the same computer scheduling program that the cable-TV company uses to make sure that the technician, for whom you have been waiting eleven hours, rings your doorbell only when you have just commenced pooping.
    Clutching the program, you take your seat, which is near the back of the auditorium, because all the seats near the front have been claimed by Serious Dance Moms who got in line early, in some cases before their daughters were actually born. Finally the lights dim, the curtain goes up, and you begin to watch other people’s daughters perform their routines. Each routine takes about three minutes, or, in Dance Recital Time, six years.
    The most entertaining routines are the ones performed by three-year-old girls, usually dressed as something cute, such as bumblebees, so that everybody, even men who are not fathers of the dancers, goes “awwww.” The bumblebees come out in a line, some looking excited to be out there, some terrified, some lost, some picking their cute little bumblebee noses. But when the music starts, an amazing thing happens: what had been a random-acting group of little girls suddenly transforms itself into a group of little girls who are continuing to act pretty much randomly. Some face the audience; some turn around, presenting the audience with their little bumblebee butts.
    Meanwhile, offstage, their dance teacher is frantically gesturing, trying to remind them how their routine goes. If, for example, they’re supposed to twirl, the teacher will twirl. One or two of the more alert bumblebees will notice, and they will twirl, usually in different directions. Other bumblebees, noticing this, will then twirl, so you have a chain reaction of twirling, along with a certain amount of falling down, standing still, and running offstage in tears. Then the music stops and everybody applauds heartily, and the bumblebees run off the stage, except for the ones who remain on the stage.
    As I say, these are the more entertaining routines. Most of them, however, consist of other people’s daughters prancing around more or less in unison to various styles of music that you would not listen to voluntarily, using the medium of dance to express universal human emotions such as love, fear, joy, despair, and prancing.
    Then, finally, comes the moment you have been waiting for: You fall asleep. At some point after that you feel your wife’s elbow, which is the signal that your daughter’s first routine is about to begin. The lights come up, the music starts, and . . . There she is! You watch in amazement as she performs the routine she has practiced for so long. You are stunned. She’s so beautiful! So poised! So confident! Your heart swells with pride. You can’t believe that’s really your daughter up there.
    Then you realize that it’s not, in fact, your daughter. At this distance they’re hard to tell apart under all that makeup. You look around