My about-to-be-17 granddaughter Lauren has been dancing at the Arts Umbrella Dance Company since she was 7. Alas! She is giving dance up and is going to concentrate on working over the summer and concentrating on her clarinet playing. My Rosemary and I are understandably shocked. But as grandparents, little by little we are learning to withdraw and understand that a teenager should decide on the forthcoming future and what to do with it.

These pictures I took a couple of weeks ago at the Arts Umbrella studio on West 7^th Avenue.

I have been taking photographs at rehearsals, back stage and of performances of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company for quite a few years. Working for magazines and particularly for the Georgia Straight gave the needed credentials to take photographs and to experiment with slow shutter blurs or getting the personality of individual dancers on film or digitally. With Lauren no longer at that institution it would seem that any purpose I may still hold for going to photograph performances is gone.

I look at that and these photographs with melancholy but I am understanding (or so I say to myself) that at age 77 I have to let go.

There will be two more performances of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company in two weeks that will have my Lauren in the ranks. I will take pictures. And then no more.

In passing I must congratulate Lauren for having persisted for so long. Dance will somehow be in her blood and she will have inherited a poise and grace that will serve her well in whatever it is she does with her life henceforth.