A break-in and theft from her car in Napier left a young dancer no time to wear in new shoes before she took to the stage in Dannevirke last Friday.
Dannevirke's Morgan Kernaghan, 19, is currently studying sports massage at EIT in Hawke's Bay, but returns to Dannevirke once a week to teach dance at her sister Melissa Martin's Academy of Dance.
But last week the cruel theft of all her dancing gear, including her ballet and jazz shoes, in Napier left Morgan with little time to "wear" in a new pair of pointe shoes before she stepped out onto the stage of the Dannevirke Town Hall for the Melissa Martin Academy of Dance end-of-year production, A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes.
Morgan has had her ouch pouches in her ballet shoes for seven years and they would have been of little use to anyone else, Melissa said.
"To have this happen on the eve of the production wasn't good," she said.
"We were frantically trying to get new ouch pouches from Auckland which Morgan would dance in without any wearing in."
But although the ouch pouches Morgan needed to go with her new shoes were sitting in Palmerston North at 3.30pm the eve of the show, the courier company said they wouldn't arrive in Dannevirke until Monday, well after the curtain had gone down on the show.
So her mother Glenda had to make a mercy dash to the courier company to get them, arriving back in Dannevirke at 5.30pm, for curtain up at seven.
"Unless people are dancers they wouldn't appreciate the technique that went into that pointe ballet, with steps taken from Swan Lake and Coppélia. The three of them, Morgan, Alex and Hannah, did extremely well," Miss Martin said.