The Journey of the First Year (Part 8 - May: Dancescape)

The next weekend, we were headed to another hotel, the Westin Memorial, in Memorial City.  But first, there was a tan incident.  I was trying to save a little money.  I'm pretty sure that's how most tan horror stories start.  Anyhow, I found a groupon for a $20 airbrush tan, and managed to squeeze in an appointment that Friday evening (May 29th).  Everything was looking normal-ish, except that the tan wasn't developing.  After a panicked text message to the airbrusher at 10:00 that night (she was trying a new product and asked us to text her a picture of how it was developing), she offered to let us come back at 7:30 in the morning and she would retouch Shara's tan.

We had an appointment for hair at 11:30, and she was scheduled to start dancing after 1:00.  We dashed over to the tanner at 7 am, got retouched, went back to the house, let it develop as much as we could, then she rinsed off so we could head to the hotel.

After finding the studio manager, picking up her souvenier blanket (obviously because it was freezing in the ballroom), and getting checked in, we headed up for hair and makeup.  Her makeup artist was one of the male pros from the independent circuit, and he was excellent!  I loved his color choices, and she got a lot of compliments from our guys.



She had been feeling a little concerned, since she went into Latin the prior weekend a little self-conscious, and didn't come out on top, and with Latin being the stronger of her styles....

Shara Houston Dancesport Classic May 2015

But she blew everyone in her category out of the water.  All of her rounds were danced with Matt this time, and she quite literally placed first in every category she entered, including her championship round.  They even figured out how to pronounce her name halfway through award announcements.

Even better, all of the competitors from our studio did really well (including our pros), and up against some really strong competition, too.  I was really proud of everyone.  We won some kind of Top New Studio award, or something.

While we were there, we looked around at some of the dresses on display, and even though we knew Shara was going to need a new Latin dress to really move forward competitively, we also knew we weren't going to find it there!