The Fat/Skinny Cow Snapping Elastic Thing.

I'm prone to having very detailed, yet random dreams. Whether I'm trying on dresses with Grace Kelly in my living room or watching the Olympic gymnastic trials with my mom and Michelle Obama, chances are, I've fallen asleep too soon after eating. After classes yesterday, I had a busy afternoon with three different dreams in the course of three hours! (I thought about giving up naps for Lent. My roommate wouldn't let me. I'd be too cranky.) Anyway, I just remembered what one of the dreams was.

I was in a cow suit doing really terrible pirouettes. We did them for the first time in class on Monday, and boy was I terrible! It kills me to think how good I used to be at this and now I'm a cow with no turn out. And, of course, I was mooing. I know where that one came from too, though. When I was a baby, one of my first words came very nonchalantly from the back of the car as my parents and I drove home from a wedding. Passing a field of grazing cows, I simply sighed and said, "moo." My parents laugh at me for that one all the time. Apparently it was pretty cute, unlike those pirouettes yesterday!

The hardest part about this ballet class for me is looking in the mirror and realizing the limitations that my body didn't have the last time I did these things. It's inspiring me to eat healthier(ish... right Denise??), to stretch, and to drag my carcass over to Halas more often. I only get a little bit of time each week to really test myself in class. I want to make the most of it. So, when I step up to the barre each day, I really am trying to focus all of my energy into my alignment, into presenting my turned out foot like there was a piece of Swiss chocolate on it, on keeping my hips square and my "fanny down," (as my old smelly instructor used to say).

We all wore these purple leotards with an elastic strap that sat right under our shoulder blades. She always used to snap mine really hard before I could even realize she was behind me. "Fanny down, Sarah! I'm going to tie a string from your navel to the ceiling." (It always drove me nuts how she said "navel". I don't know why.) I still feel her behind me when I'm at the barre now. I'm not sure if it makes any difference or not, but Janet is always right there, babbling about fannies and navels and snapping me with my own leotard. You'll probably think it's really odd that I find this comforting, but I do. I know that somewhere inside of me is this little girl who was cocky and knew she was good at what she was doing. She didn't let cow dreams or leotard snapping get to her. Wherever little me is, I'm trying to channel her each time I step up to the barre. Little ballet me is probably the most confident that I will ever be in my life. She's a pretty good role model as far as I'm concerned.

Nobody ever wanted to be in the middle of the living room at the age of four as badly as I did... except for maybe Barbra Streisand.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w5y8TLDXMA


"Accentuate your positive, delete your negative." --Donna Karan

This is how we improve Mondays.

I realized somewhere between the sixth and the twelfth grades that I missed ballet. I only did it all through my childhood and it was the one thing I knew that I was good at and nobody else (outside of my little dance world) was. It made me different. At least, that was my mother's argument when she told me not to give it up; surely I'd regret it later, and later would be too late. "Being different," however, is hardly the best argument to employ with a twelve-year-old. Say "everyone will envy you," "this is going to make you really popular" or "one day you're going to look back and be so happy you listened to me." Well, not so. Instead, I hear, "She told you so."

After ballet I played volleyball. I was spending time with my friends, I was in with the "in crowd", and I had the "oh-she's-on-varsity" mentality. For many years I worked hard, made my way up the food chain, and hated every single second of it. Quitting just wasn't an option, because then I'd have been 0/2. I don't regret sticking with it. I regret not sticking with ballet in the first place.

Then I moved to Chicago from a small city in eastern Washington that nobody ever pronounces correctly. Chicago's about as far away from my high school and volleyball teams and family as I can get. The freedom is exciting, not having to play volleyball is relieving, and dancing again is finally something I can enjoy. I'm starting to realize how young I was when I did all of this the first time around. I had much better turn out than handwriting, I was more comfortable doing a double pirouette than long division, I wore my first pair of point shoes before my first bra, and the last time I wore a leotard I probably weighed eighty-two pounds. Getting used to the mirrors again is a lot more difficult this time. It didn't seem the least bit awkward for me when I was a kid--I grew up around it. I was always the youngest and most confident in my class, and ballet was the one place where I wasn't quiet as a mouse. My classmates in school intimidated me and hardly ever included me, but in ballet I was a show-off. My instructors complimented my square hips and high battements, but I was always the first to be scolded for talking during class.

I wish I hadn't given it up. I think a lot of things in my teenage years that would have been different--my body, my grades, my friends, my self-confidence, and my general level of happiness. At least now, I have this opportunity to try to re-learn something I once loved so much, something that was such an important part of me. Even though it's the most frustrating thing in the world to be wobbly on releve and to have like the worst alignment ever, it's the thing that's getting me out of bed on Monday mornings and I couldn't be happier about it.

"I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size." -Adaptation, a movie based on Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief