Life, death and dancing in Neosho

May 23, 2002

Dear Leslie,

Neosho, Mo., is the small town in the Ozarks where three of our nieces grew up. Its primary importance to most everyone else is as the birthplace of Thomas Hart Benton, the painter and muralist. Neosho has a La-Z-Boy factory, a Tyson chicken processing plant and a community college but no Thomas Hart Benton museum or well-preserved family home. The old Benton home is gone, replaced by a newer house.

Neosho is all about raising families, but small towns have dark secrets, too. After an 18-year-old boy drowned in a flooded creek a few weeks ago, the police concluded he didn't die accidentally. The girl who was with him and claimed she was the only witness to him slipping into the creek has been charged with hampering an investigation. A 17-year-old boy has been charged with assault.

Police think six people in all were present at Shoal Creek that day. They think the boy was killed because he brought charges against a gang member for a beating he received two weeks earlier. It is hard to imagine a boy with his leg in a cast falling into a creek on his own.

In a small town, six degrees of separation are not required. Everybody knows somebody who knows these kids. Innocence is such a fragile egg.

That's one side of Neosho. The spring dance recital is the other. The recital is a ritual on DC's side of the family. Each of the senior girls gets to make up her own solo dance. Danica had her senior recital two years ago. This year was Devon's turn. She wore a ballet gown and danced to the Beatles' "In My Life."

Our nieces love the 1960s. The walls of Danica's college apartment in Kansas City are papered with Beatles memorabilia. Darci, who's still in high school, showed us a mosaic she made of John Lennon's face.

At a time when the violence of profanity and the misogyny of gansta rap holds sway in popular music, the nieces are hung up on the reassurances of John, Paul, George and Ringo that love is all there is.

Miss Sherry is the impresario behind the recital. She likes to be on stage herself as much as possible. The girls say she can be a terror at rehearsals, and everyone you talk to in the audience complains about how much Miss Sherry's costumes cost. But watching all those little girls do their dances and all their parents taking pictures and shooting videos, you know the world is better off for Miss Sherry.

Sitting in the gym watching Devon's final dance recital was bittersweet, said DC, who has seen many more of these recitals than I have. Rites of passage may mean less to those going through them than to those of us who love them and watch.

In no time, at least to us, the nieces will have little girls of their own. And those little girls will go to dance class, and their little girls will have their own Miss Sherry.

Whether those little girls grow up in Neosho or Kansas City or New York City or Paris, their mothers and fathers will do what they can to protect their innocence and to keep them dancing.

Raising them on the Beatles might be part of the right prescription. Devon and her parents are cruising around the Bahamas right now. You know you've done something right when your daughter invites you along on her senior trip.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.