Everything I Learned About Life, I Learned in Dance Class by Abby Lee Miller

experience seeing Abby let down her guard and have some fun. At the end of the night we went to her room to order room service. Abby fell asleep pretty quickly, but no worries—I enjoyed the famous fried rice from the Mirage by myself before heading home.
    Koree Kurkowski fell in love with dancing at age five. She danced competitively with Abby Lee during her school years, then signed with Royal Caribbean while a senior in high school and performed for about two years with Royal Caribbean and Celebrity cruise lines. She moved to Las Vegas at age twenty after being hired as a showgirl/dancer in Jubilee! (“I was the shortest in the show at that time.”) Other Las Vegas credits include Pin Up, Sin City Kitties, Bite , and Fantasy .
    MAN UP!
    When your kid is on the firing line, will she crash and burn? This is one of the reasons I’m so tough on my students. I would prefer for them to cry in front of me, their mentor, in the safety of the studio, not at an audition, baseball tryout, or ROTC boot camp in front of four hundred of their peers. When you walk into my classroom, I’m going to give it to you straight, just like in the real world, because that’s the only way to prepare you for the real world. Part of my job is correcting flaws. It needs to happen. Better me than the first person auditioning you for a Broadway show, interviewing you for a job, or evaluating you for a promotion.
    Showing a range of emotions onstage in a lyrical performance is wonderful. Performers taking on roles such as Helen Keller or Lizzie Borden require a range of emotions teetering on hysteria. These routines are what we call tearjerkers. It’s great to be so expressive that you make the audience feel your pain or bring them to tears. Offstage don’t sweat the small stuff and get so worked up about every little thing. My mom was always rattled about one thing or another. Relax.
    If you’ve been in my class for years, then you know that sometimes I come in and I’m in a rotten mood. It is a teacher’s job to leave her troubles on the doorstep. The dance studio should be a place to set your spirit free, to forget your problems and just dance like nobody’s watching. Then again, you’ve seen the moms I have to deal with, so let it roll off your back. You know I love you. Don’t tell me your knees are black and blue, and then never wear knee pads or complain because your mother won’t buy them for you. If you carried your sled up a hill of snow ten times and now your calves are killing you, don’t come to me complaining about how sore you are. And don’t tell me your legs are sore from dance class when I know what the curriculum is and I know there is no way your legs could be sore from dance class.
    The parents at the studio think I’m a big ogre. They want to coddle and hug their kids, and shelter them from the big meanie. They tell their kids that I’m wrong and they’re perfect the way they are. I tell the parents that if they want to save their kids from me, take them somewhere else. The parents and the kids know what they signed up for. They’ve been there since they were two years old. The studio was fine when they were three and four, five and six, and even seven and eight. Then the show started. They were happy customers until they had a little money and a little power. Then they became complainers. I am actually nicer on camera than I normally am, because there are things you just can’t say on TV. I would never say anything racially offensive, but I would say, “This is a black piece. It’s about Katherine Dunham,” or I might say, “You need to feel like you’re in that cotton field and you’re carrying that basket.”
    I have a lot of male dancers and I’ll tell them, “You look like a woman,” or I’ll say, “What do you think you’re doing? Britney Spears doesn’t want ten androgynous guys dancing behind her—she wants men !” I can’t make comments like this on TV, because viewers will say I’m