Dedication Night on Dancing with the Stars gives the celebrity dancers a chance to dedicate a performance to the people who’ve impacted their lives most. Between the rehearsals and the choreography, viewers learned a little more about the relationships behind the people they have been watching each week. For figure skater Amber Glenn, that person was her younger sister, Brooke Glenn.
Dancing with her partner, Pasha Pashkov, Amber Glenn told the story of a dark period in her life and the sister who helped her through it all. In their routine, Pashkov represented the frightening force she believed she had to fight alone. By the end of the performance, the sisters pushed him down together.
Amber Glenn’s Dedication
As the oldest of three sisters, I couldn’t watch that ending without thinking about mine. The memories of growing up and sharing moments like watching Christmas shows with them, dressing up in Descendants costumes, and the laughter that started over something nobody outside our little circle would find nearly as funny are some of the things that have helped me through difficult days.
Being the oldest, I think there’s a part of me that will always see my sisters as the little girls following along with whatever I had planned. I want to help them, protect them, and have an answer when they need one. It’s a strange, beautiful thing to realize how often I need them, too.
That’s what made the ending of Glenn’s performance so moving. Watching her face that frightening force, then watching her sister help push it down, gave a physical shape to something that can be so hard to understand unless you’ve lived it. You can be someone’s older sister and still need her hand. You can have spent years looking out for her and find yourself grateful because she’s looking out for you, too.
ODe to Older Sisters
I imagine many older sisters recognized something familiar in Glenn’s performance. Maybe they thought of a late-night phone call, a younger sister who noticed they were unusually quiet, or an impromptu visit that finally got them smiling again. The details might be different, but there’s something recognizable about realizing the person, or in my case, people you want to protect have been helping carry you, too.
Of course, my relationship with my sisters includes arguments, annoyance, and moments where the only thing that seems to make me feel better is moving to a different planet. Anyone with sisters knows how quickly laughter can turn into a fight, sometimes over something none of you will remember later.
However, those moments belong to our story, too. We’ve grown up together. We know the buttons to push to annoy each other, and we know how to put the pieces back together that someone else broke.
Glenn received 38 out of 40 that night, but for sisters who know what it feels like to help each other out of a frightening place, I imagine that ending felt a lot like a perfect score. I know it did for me!
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