Jeanine Mason

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Jeanine Mason is 18 years old. She says she "always wanted for my senior year to take a road trip with my friends."

And the wish came true in a big way: She’s on a bus with her friends Brandon, Evan and Kayla. And if they are your friends, too, you can find them and more at the Orleans Arena on Saturday when the "So You Think You Can Dance" tour rolls into town.

"This is the greatest road trip I could have," Mason says of the 40-city tour, which hit the road with the top 10 finalists less than two months after the fifth season of Fox’s popular contest wrapped in August.

It’s a catchy title, that rhetorical challenge. But Mason knew she could dance at least five years ago. The Florida native was 13 when she won a national contest at the Flamingo Las Vegas.

"Vegas definitely holds a special place in my heart for that reason," Mason says. "It was one of the first places I started to realize I was getting somewhere with my dancing."

The real crossroads came when Mason was 9 years old and her dance studio decided not to take her seriously. So did two more after that. "It’s a vicious world," she says, with no bitterness.

Mason goes on to explain: Any studio will give lessons if parents pay for them. And from the age of 3, she was among the many youngsters "just doing it for fun, and they don’t really look for promise."

At some point, though, studios start singling out students who do show promise for special programs. The idea is to groom champions who will later reflect well on said studio’s resume.

"I was at a place where they were selecting students to start training for that program, and I wasn’t selected," she says. "I was kind of crushed because I had started really falling in love with dance."

A fourth studio found a compromise. "They threw me to the corner and had one of the older girls, a senior, start training me on her own." That teacher, Amanda Tae, is now 27 and "still training me to this day."

Even if the 9-year-old version of Mason was short on flexibility, balance and other indicators, "I was able to achieve them, through, I guess, patience with my teacher. It took a lot of work."

Mason is the show’s youngest winner. She auditioned a week after her 18th birthday, the required age for contestants. Four years of watching "Dance" on TV was a long time to her, especially when she recognized other contestants from the competitive circuit.

But the show brought contemporary dance to a mass audience and explained her passion to others. "To me, it was just this amazing way of bringing our world into the living rooms of America," she says.

Before, she would come to school on Monday after, say, a weekend competition in California, and "the kids were like, ‘Where were you?’ They just didn’t understand the concept of me leaving and competing and performing all the time."

Despite seeing friends from the dance world on the show, Mason maintains she wasn’t watching the clock tick until the day she could audition.

"I was just afraid I would fall on my face on national TV," she says. Supporters eventually talked her into going for it, if nothing else to get "an idea of what to work on for next year."

Now she’s taking a victory lap with the arena tour, reprising season highlights such as her steamy duet with Jason Glover to the Jason Mraz song "If It Kills Me."

But all senior year road trips must come to an end. The tour is winding down. "It’s starting to kind of hit us now that we may not ever have this again," Mason says.

Mason will become a part-time student at UCLA in January, hoping to follow her twin passions of dancing and acting into a film career. But Las Vegas might see her again one day.

After all, Jessica King, a fourth-season "Dance" contestant is now part of "Le Reve." And the TV producer, Nigel Lythgoe, has been shopping a combined spinoff of "American Idol" and "Dance" to entertainment buyers on the Strip.

"I’m too young to enjoy Las Vegas," Mason says with a laugh. But even after this early career peak, there’s still time.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.