Choreography

In the spring, our little, suburban Lithuanian school organized another program, or "minejimas." Sometimes the minejimas coordinated with the Easter season. I better remember the spring minejimas as a celebration of Mother's Day.

The spring minejimas featured the usual activities: choral singing, folk dancing, and poetry recitations. Some of the older Lithuanian kids—teenagers who no longer attended the Saturday school—played piano or sang solos. The teenagers looked very grown up. The young men wore suits, and the young women dressed in the full-length, formal versions of folk dress.

The dances we performed at the spring minejimas—and at most of the minejimai—were Lithuanian standards that any native would recognize. One year, however, our teachers got creative and taught us an elaborate, stylized dance that was an extrapolation of traditional numbers. Whenever I think of the dance, I laugh because it reminds me of the "choreography" scene in White Christmas.

The new dance must have represented some spring fertility right or a celebration of maidenhood. Only girls participated in the dance, and we carried and "artistically" managed wreaths of flowers throughout the number. The wreaths were made from coat hangers. When we practiced the dance, we used coat hangers covered in masking tape. Our Moms and Grandmothers only covered the wreaths with flowers—plastic flowers—the night before the performance.

I remember the plastic flower wreath dance as a particularly absurd little chapter in my Lithuanian-school career.

Suburban Chicago, May 1965. I practice the wreath dance in our Rec Room. The shiny object behind me is the phonograph; what you see are its speakers.

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Bulger Park, Veterans Park District, Melrose Park, May 1965. We have finished our performance, and we await the applause, with the flower wreaths resting on our laps. I am sitting, second from the right. My friend Kris stands, second from the left.