After watching "Ice Princess" this evening, and eating homemade beef-barley soup, the dotter and OmegaDad are boogy-ing around the living room to Gloria Gaynor, having already done some guy-slings-girl around moves aping the movie.

While my formative years were spent listening to classic rock and soul and folk, I reached the dancing years during the Disco Era.

I have, therefore, a sad, sad fondness for disco.

A cherished memory is when I was working in the Small Mountain University IT department support team...one year, during the slow period after the end of winter semester, someone started blasting "Stayin' Alive" from their computer.  A whole slew of late-30s and early-40s IT support staff appalled and astonished our more modern student workers by disco-ing down the hallway.

What can I say?  We were tainted at an early age.

"Ice Princess" is a bubble-gum movie, all about a young physics whiz (female, of course) who, to wangle a scholarship to the Harvard physics department, takes to digitizing the local (extremely good) ice skaters and working out the phsyics of ice skating.  Then, of course, she discovers an innate and awesome talent for skating, stops wearing her glasses, puts on some makeup, becomes a hottie, and comes in second in the regional competition.

Oh, yeah.

At least she retains her nerdly habit of babbling physics equations when she's nervous, thus turning off the hockey jock and retaining a small modicum of geekiness.

She does, however, give up her Harvard scholarship for her dream of ice skating competitively.

The subtext of the movie is moms who make their kids live their dreams.  The protagonist becomes buddies with the daughter of the local ice skating coach, who, though being coached intensely by her mom, doesn't really want to skate.  The protagonist is being raised by a die-hard feminist single mom who ridicules ice skaters' slinky costumes as yet another way women let The Man keep them down.  In the end, the ice skating coach's daughter rebels, giving up skating, and the uber-feminist college professor sneaks into the regional competition to watch her daughter score.

So, while it's couched in adolescent rebellion, there's a semi-valuable lesson behind the movie.  I am all too aware that what I like to do, the dotter may not.  So here's my pledge:  I will always try to be aware of whether I am pushing something on my dotter that, in reality, I want to do.

If she wants to go to law school, cool beans.  If she wants to be an auto mechanic, equally cool beans.  Just so long as she's the best lawyer she can be, or the best auto mechanic she can be--and that she enjoys what she's doing. 

That's the important thing.

(My Technorati tag add-in is still wonky.  Grr.)