LOL! Man, sometimes I just can't get over these old pictures of myself. These aren't embarrassing so much as cute, but I can't help but laugh. Yes, at one time in my life I aspired to become a ballerina. It was a v. brief moment in time. I think there was only the one year (c. 1982-1983) I was in the class at the local YMCA. I remember vividly trying to run on tip toe (en pointe as they say) around their gym with a bunch of other pink tutu-ed little girls. At that age, they don't tell you that it's terribly painful to run on your tip toes like that, that you have to slowly develop ugly calluses, buy expensive ballet slippers (later on). It wasn't really that I wanted to become a ballerina so much as I wanted to wear the flowing skirts, which I found out you don't get until much later. Did you ever see the Hans Christian Andersen movie with Danny Kaye when you were a kid? Towards the end, they show a ballet stage production of the Little Mermaid, which he wrote supposedly for a ballerina that he was in love with. Anyway in one of the scenes the main ballerina wears this multicolored skirt that I absolutely wanted for myself, and maybe that's where I got the idea of taking ballet classes. Instead, I got stuck with that stiff itchy thing that you see me wearing. How I hated the way it felt on my skin.
The thing that sticks out in my mind about this second picture is my pose. When I was younger and I saw this picture, I would be really embarrassed at the fact that my hands and arms were so obviously different from everybody else's. Rather than making a graceful "O"-shape, for some reason, I was trying to touch my wrists to the top of my head. Maybe the photographer had meant us to barely touch our *fingertips* to our heads – and I heard him wrong. Now that I think on it, I can remember thinking to myself, This is really hard touching my wrists to my head. In my effort, I was drooping my head and the photographer kept having to tell me to lift my chin. My more discerning adult eye tells me now that I wasn't the only one that couldn't take direction during that photo shoot, and now that I'm a parent, I know why. (Does that deserve a smiling or frowning emoticon?)My one other memory about ballet has to do with our recital – and not listening. Thankfully I have neither pictures nor video to remind me of what seemed to be a mortifying moment in my life. I don't recall exactly where the recital was held because there was a stage with lights, which I don't think the YMCA gym had. But I remember going up to the stage to do our number and seeing dozens of older ballerinas in their beautiful costumes, i.e. the soft flowing tutus that I longed for, sitting along the walls in the dimness. I don't know if it was stage fright or just my age, but it seems I drew a complete blank on our entire routine. I was at the end, or towards the end of our dance line, and I remember looking down the line towards all the smiling out-turned faces of my classmates doing our practiced dance steps. Because I was watching and repeating their every move, I was one beat behind everyone – it probably looked kind of ridiculous. There's always one though, isn't there? And because my face was continually turned down for so long, I remember I had trouble seeing out into the darkened audience afterwards to do our bow because of the light-glare on my eyes. I didn't dance after that for reasons I've long forgotten.
