If there is one thing that Carol Kuzdenyi wants to prove, it’s that age is just a number. The elderly woman has been involved with music her entire life, being a pianist, piano and voice teacher as well as a choir director.
However, it’s her dance routine to Usher’s 1997 classic “You Make Me Wanna” that has garnered her the most fame and attention.
Carol’s niece always knew that she was able to bust out some great moves, and she decided to make a video of Aunt Carol showing off her skills. The whole thing was unprepared – it was filmed in grandma’s kitchen and all she needed was a chair to complement her moves.
What follows next is a 50-second dance routine that will definitely surprise you!
The short video has gone unnoticed on YouTube for a couple of years, but then it suddenly went viral with over two million views – and for the right reasons.
“In February, 2010 I was practicing my hip hop routine in my mom’s kitchen. My niece filmed it and put it on YouTube on February 16, 2010 (I had told her not to, but she must have pestered me until I relented.) Anyway, not one person saw it till early January, 2012, and then it went viral,” Carol states on her website.
We can see in the video that grandma Carol is having tons of fun performing this hip-hop dance routine and she’s got a great sense of rhythm and dancing skills, especially for her age. The dance is anything but calm and timid and Carol proves that she still has a ton of energy with this amazing video.
Her sassy hip-hop hand gestures and attitude are pure gold and it looks like she would fit right in as a back-up dancer for a video clip.
Her fantastic energy will brighten up everyone’s day, and aside from the internet, there was one special person that fell in love with grandma Carol as well.
“Ellen DeGeneres ran the video on her show, “Ellen,” on January 13, 2012, and asked me to go on the show. It was a WONDERFUL experience. Ellen was so kind to me.”
After the video went viral, the woman received an invite from none other than Ellen Degeneres for a chat on the show! Everybody just absolutely loved her enthusiasm and it’s an experience that Carol will never forget.
“I took dancing lessons from second grade to eighth grade,” she revealed to Ellen on the show. “I took tap, acrobat, jazz and ballet, but I don’t think that there was any hip-hop at the time.”
She also says she discovered eurhythmics in college and has tried out different dance styles in the past.
“When I went to high school I didn’t [take dance] and in college I took one class called eurhythmics, which is moving to music and I was in the music program, and part of that was doing folk dancing, which I really loved. After that, I didn’t do it again for 40 years.”
She wasn’t too keen on the hip hop genre at first, but one day she changed her mind.
“When I first started to see hip-hop I didn’t like it because it looked angry and everybody who did it looked angry and it really turned me off. “One day I saw it and it looked really beautiful and I thought that if I could move that way that it would be so wonderful so that’s what I did.”
Aunt Carol is a huge fan of the freestyle hip hop dancer Stephen Boss, more commonly known as ‘tWitch’. He’s her absolute favorite dancer in the world and he finished as a runner-up on 2008’s So You Think You Can Dance. tWitch has been a regular on the show ever since.
Ellen had a little surprise in store for Carol.
She invited tWitch over to do the Usher dance routine that made grandma Carol so famous! This dancing duo is absolutely wonderful to see and performed brilliantly together. You can just see the sparks of joy and happiness in Carol’s eyes.
“And then the surprise . . . Ellen had invited my favorite dancer, tWitch, to come on the show. He had learned my routine from the YouTube video, and we danced it together on the show! It was a trip to heaven,” Carol concluded.
Be sure to watch the original dance video below.
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