A teenage dream for dance students

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This article was published 16/07/2011 (5545 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dancing with pop diva Katy Perry on stage was a Teenage Dream come true for several Royal Winnipeg Ballet School summer students on Thursday.

And it all came about not because of Fireworks but because one dancer was thirsty.

A half-dozen of the students, who live at the school all summer, were out shopping in Portage Place with one of their adult escorts on Thursday afternoon when they stopped at the Starbucks in the mall for a drink.

That’s when a dream became reality.

“We were all so excited there (at Starbucks),” said 11-year-old Elizabeth Marshall, of Innerkip, Ont. “A lady who worked for Katy Perry asked us what our favourite Katy Perry song was. That’s when she told us we could get free tickets.”

Excitement quickly bounced between anguish, hope and happiness when their escort initially rejected the offer, but that changed after a quick phone call to a ballet school director.

“We screamed,” said 10-year-old Lily Gillman, who came here from Wainwright, Alta., and whose thirst was what brought the girls to Starbucks.

“We were so loud I think everyone in the mall was freaked out.”

Elizabeth said the director told them they could go, “but she asked how many tickets we could get.

“Katy Perry was standing behind the other lady and she said 20 tickets. But we didn’t know she was Katy Perry then.”

That was about 4:30 p.m. Three hours later, they were sitting slightly behind the stage in the sold-out MTS Centre.

And a few minutes later… well, let’s let the Gurl students say what happened.

“(Perry) told the audience she gave out 20 tickets and asked where we were,” Marshall said.

“That’s when she noticed where we were and she didn’t like where we were. She got one of the girls to bring us down to the floor. We were there for six minutes and then they took us on stage to dance with her.”

The song they danced to? Perry’s cover version of I Wanna Dance with Somebody.

“It was really fun,” said 11-year-old Gillian Darichuk of Calgary.

“We all danced up there and everyone was trying to be next to Katy Perry. I was about two away from her.

“I will never forget that night.”

Alexis Bargen, 12, of Vancouver, made sure she wasn’t in a teenage dream.

“I touched her arm — oh my God, I couldn’t believe it,” Bargen said.

“I had to make sure she was real. No one (back home) will believe me when I tell them.”

Bargen said none of the students recognized Perry at the Starbucks, but they put two and two together on stage.

“She had her hair up and it was ginger colour. I’m used to seeing her with black hair.”

She also had her hair under a sun hat and was wearing sunglasses.

Gillman said the girls all noticed Perry had the same tattoo on her wrist the woman at Starbucks had.

“The tattoo is how we figured it out,” she said.

“None of my friends will believe me.”

Heather Taschuk, an adult counsellor with the RWB who was at both the Starbucks and then the concert, said the night really was a teenage dream for her young charges.

“They were all on cloud nine,” Taschuk said.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca