Michelle Obama just had the honor of meeting one of her littlest fans — and the pair had a dance party to boot!
The former first lady posted a sweet video and photo of herself with Parker Curry — the 2-year-old girl who went viral after admiring Obama's portrait — on Tuesday, excitedly sharing some snippets of their meeting.
In the too-cute video clip, a giddy Parker wiggles to the beat of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” as Obama shimmies along.
“Parker, I'm so glad I had the chance to meet you today (and for the dance party)!” she captioned her post. “Keep on dreaming big for yourself ... and maybe one day I'll proudly look up at a portrait of you!”
Parker made headlines earlier this month after a photo of her staring up in awe at Obama’s new portrait at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., went viral. In the photo, taken by fellow gallery visitor Ben Hines, little Parker looks completely enraptured by Obama’s portrait as a security guard keeps watch nearby.
In an interview with NBC News, Parker’s mother, Jessica Curry, explained that she had been trying to get Parker to turn around so she could take a photo of the little girl with the painting, to no avail.
"She was focused on it and I couldn't see her facial expression from my point of view but Ben Hines, who was on the side, could see that she was just awestruck," Curry explained. "She was captivated. She was focused on the picture and he was lucky to capture a really special moment because I couldn't capture it from behind her. And then she eventually did turn around and she ran off so I never got a really good picture of her with the portrait.”
Curry said that after Hines posted the image online, her phone began “blowing up” with screenshots and texts from friends — some of whom she hadn’t been in touch with for years — asking if the little girl in the photo was Parker.
“After someone tagged me to Ben Hines' photograph on Facebook, he reached out to me with a really long, heartfelt message that ... he had posted the picture in hopes that he could find me,” she recounted. “It was really important, it was his priority, that he find me so that I could (not only) see the photo but so that also we could continue to share the photo because he felt that he was just witness to a really special, really holy moment, as he called it.”
Parker told NBC News that she was drawn to the portrait because she thought the woman was “a queen.”
“It was big and beautiful,” she said of the painting, adding that she herself is planning on becoming a queen “on my birthday.”
“I think that for little girls like Parker, especially little girls of color, having that portrait of Michelle Obama in the National Portrait Gallery shows them that they can do anything and be anyone that they want to be, and that there are no limits or boundaries on what they can achieve,” Curry said.