The Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company was leaving for Pocatello when dancer Tammy Metz Starr's daughter, Summit, 5, came down with the chicken pox.
"I couldn't get off work, obviously, so I packed her up and took her with me," Starr said during a phone call from the Ririe-Woodbury offices. "We quarantined ourselves in our hotel room. And we were lucky enough to have the sponsor in Pocatello gather a pool of teens to baby-sit while I was working."While Starr and her daughter were in Idaho, her son, Dane, 9, was staying with a baby sitter in Salt Lake City.
"He couldn't miss school," she said. "And I had to go to work."
While Starr is the only single parent currently dancing in a Utah professional dance company, her counterparts at the Repertory Dance Theatre and Ballet West, like all working parents, have to juggle scheduling, baby sitters, day care and work.
"RDT doesn't tour much these days," said Angela Banchero-Kelleher, dancer and mother of 9-year-old Liam. "But when I was first with the company back in 1985, they toured 16 weeks. The second year, they did 18. After my Liam was born, I couldn't do the touring, so I took a leave of absence."
During that six-year break, Banchero-Kelleher got her master's degree in dance at the University of Utah. But even then, the scheduling was a trick at times.
Her husband Bill Kelleher has been a great support through it all, said the dancer.
"He has always had to be flexible," Banchero-Kelleher said of her husband, who works at the Utah Education Network that is housed at the U. "He has also turned down many good job offers so we can both have careers and a child."
Banchero-Kelleher's father, who is retired, takes over when Liam can't be with his father.
"My mother is still working," the dancer said. "But we've got a good schedule worked out. And Bill takes off early one day a week. Tonight, since it's production week for me, dad and Liam are doing the homework thing."
In Ballet West's case, the dancing parents are all fathers -- Zachary Carroll, Paul Murphy and Kevin Carpenter.
Carroll has one daughter, Amelia, 2, and his wife, Ann, is one year away from completing a degree in massage therapy. And with Zachary Carroll's performance schedule, one would assume there would be some problems.
"So far it has been working out," said Zach. "We are fortunate enough to find a wonderful woman who runs a day care in her house in our neighborhood. And whoever is moving the earliest in the morning takes Amelia to her."
Carroll also says he and Ann have a "barrage" of baby sitters.
"We usually have a back-up if something falls through," he said about the baby sitters. "And we've got a back-up to the back-up if it gets really hard.
"But there's no perfect solution," Carroll confessed. "But we knew we wanted to have a child, and we figured we would adapt. And we are determined to make it work, and so far, it has."
Murphy's son Kether, 2, and stepdaughter, Hali, 11, are lucky to have Kimberly as a mother, according to Murphy.
"Their mother is a massage therapist and has her own business," said Murphy. "She is so wonderful to work with. She schedules her appointments around my schedule. She works at night or on the weekends when I'm not performing. And if she does bring the children to a performance, she makes use of the cry rooms in the back of the Capitol Theatre."
The Murphys moved to Salt Lake City from Riverside, Calif., three years ago.
"So far, we haven't run into any scheduling problems," Murphy said. "Even though we don't have extended family here, we manage our time for the kids."
The new father of the group is Carpenter. He has a son named Thomas who was born seven months ago.
"It boils down to having a wonderful wife," Carpenter said about Deborah, a nurse of internal medicine at St. Mark's Hospital. "She's home at night when I perform, so we haven't had to find child-care in the evening."
Usually, Carpenter said, he works during the night and she during the day, so one of them is always with Nathan.
"The times when I do have morning class, I bring Nathan to the studio," Carpenter said. "And there are times when Debby takes him to her work."
On the days Nathan accompanies his dad, the Ballet West staff also helps out.
"Sometimes they'll watch him while I'm in the middle of tech week," he said.
The most recent addition to dancers' offspring is little Lena Forde, who was born to RDT's Rebecca Keene-Forde and her husband Al Forde.
"Last weekend was my first performance back," she said during a phone call from her home. "And I had been doing some teaching before fully coming back."
But all the while, she had been thinking of day care.
"Al and I had interviewed all over the place and were on many waiting lists," she said. "But we found a very neat lady who started a day care in her home."
Although Al Forde is a physician's assistant at the Veterans Administration Hospital, he is never on call, said Keene-Forde.
"So he's with Lena when I'm performing," she said. "I also have a sister in town and a big network of friends to help out when schedules do get loony. But so far, we haven't had any bad experiences."
All the dancers did say that their respective dance companies and organizations have been more than accommodating when it comes to children and their performing parents.
"Shirley was wonderful when we were in Pocatello," Starr said. "She was really supportive and made things easy for me."