Ballet stories; Bad thoughts; kittens

[resonant]

The kidlet had a ballet recital last night. It's a huge event, three hours long, everything from little staggering toddlers in tap shoes the size of jelly beans to adult members of the company doing cool things with tambourines.

Oh, god, am I ever glad it's over.



The school also has a class for adults with various handicaps, some mental and some physical. Their song this year was "Circle of Life," and they were all dressed in black and wearing animal masks. There are three class members in wheelchairs, who were being pushed around in circles by attendants who were also wearing animal masks. And it's Bad Thought Time, because in one part of my brain, this is a lovely way to allow dance to have a part in everyone's life, but in another part, it looks like something out of a David Lynch movie.

Due to quality time with the recital program, I can tell you that in the white-Midwestern-ballet-girl demographic, Elizabeth is the clear name winner; there were seven Elizabeths, one Elizabeth Grace, one Eliza, one Beth, and four Libbys, for a total of fourteen. Grace comes in second, with seven Graces, one Gracie, and the abovementioned Elizabeth Grace. There were also an Anais, a Cassia, a Dailie, an Izair, a Lark, a Rowena, and a Ximena.

And there were kittens at the ballet this week. They were only four weeks old; their mother had been killed, and they'd been adopted by one of the full-metal ballet families, so you had three slinky teenage sisters in leotards and those weird knit hip-shorts wiping stray poop off the kittens' fur and smooshing mites out of their ears and trying to teach them to pee in a tap-shoe box filled with cat litter, while the kittens flailed with their paws out and their mouths open in soundless kitten oh noes.

I'd love to have a kitten, but by the time these are old enough to adopt, we'll be out of town. Alas.

Comments

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Actually, your description of the handicapped ballet sounds like Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron!

[the-star-fish.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow, it really does!

::shudder::

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Wow -- you're right. (That story comes back to me at the oddest times.)

[betagoddess.livejournal.com]

Yikes! What a helluva long evening when all you really want to see is the short bit your kidlet is in!

LOVED your description of the rest. LOL. =>}

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

It's insane, is what it is. There's an equally long rehearsal the night before, but at least it starts a little earlier, and it's easy to persuade the kidlet to leave when her last act is over.

[betagoddess.livejournal.com]

What we do for our kids! =>}

[minnow1212.livejournal.com]

Grace was my grandmother's name, and it's very amusing to see it come back into vogue.

>Dailie<

...that's a new one. Poor girl.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

It's funny about Grace -- it's still in the transitional point in my head. My mental picture of Grace shimmers between a well-groomed seventy-year-old and a cute little curly-headed toddler.

I already went through this with Lucy and Sophie and names like that, but Grace is the newest one.

I don't know Dailie, so I don't know how it's pronounced, but I fear the worst.

[laurelwood.livejournal.com]

Ooh, Izair! How is it pronounced?

Interesting about the million Elizabeths. (At my school-of-employment there's a Betsabeth, which is a variation I've never seen before!) Around here, the big revival name seems to be Emily/Emma/Emilia.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I don't know how Izair is pronounced!

I don't see a lot of Emilys, and I've never met an Emilia, but there was a big boom in Emmas about fifteen years ago. Kidlet's favorite babysitter is an Emma.

Elizabeth surprised me, because it was big in my age group, too, and names don't usually recycle that fast. But all my Elizabeth friends were nicknamed Beth, never Libby. (Someone pointed out to me that some of those Libbys may be short for a post-9/11 boom of girls named Liberty.)

[rustler.livejournal.com]

Wow, my kidlet's first ballet recital is next week (must be the season!), but thank god it's just going to be ages 5-12 with no animal masks.

And all the kids here, boys and girls, are named Dylan. *g*

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I think it is the season -- but I wish our ballet would schedule theirs a week later or a week earlier so it didn't overlap with the last week of school.

We have a similar surplus of Ryans, male and female.

[imkalena.livejournal.com]

full-metal ballet

*carefully wipes screen*

[misspamela.livejournal.com]

My kiddo is starting ballet in the fall and now...I'm afraid. *g*

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

It may be different where you are, but around here the classes are about two-thirds normal families and one-third families that take ballet Way Too Seriously. Which is why when I put my seven-year-old in second-year ballet, I found I was committed to attending a four-hour recital with a four-hour rehearsal the night before.

[laurenmitchell.livejournal.com]

Sounds like an awfully long night for the little ones to go through...

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Not to mention their parents!

Really it wasn't too bad for us, but they had some classes of three-year-olds who were performing after 9 p.m., which is just cruel. At that point, you're just going, "OK, nobody peed and nobody lay down on the stage and cried, so I guess the evening was a success."

[laurenmitchell.livejournal.com]

After nine?

Okay, I don't have a huge amount of personal experience with three-year-olds, but I've yet to even meet one who was awake after about seven-thirty unless it was to go to the toilet. Why on earth wouldn't they schedule the little ones first and then they could potentially be taken home after their performance if they couldn't keep going?

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

It was awful. But as I say, these people take ballet way too seriously. It seems to be important to them to mix up the order (so you get advanced students alternating with beginning students), and everything else falls by the wayside.

When my kidlet was three, it was very easy to keep her up after nine -- but you definitely paid for it, because once dinnertime was over her frustration threshold got lower and lower and lower ...

[volari.livejournal.com]

KITTENS!!!

::massive soft-spot::

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I so want a kitten, but I'm afraid our grand old lady cat would not be happy, and we're all about making the cat happy.

The kidlet says, "Well, when our cat dies -- which I don't like to think about -- but then we could get a kitten."

a very David Lynch Christmas!

[kormantic.livejournal.com]

Animal masks.

You are far braver than I.

Re: a very David Lynch Christmas!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

No, if I were really brave I would have opted out in the face of Adorable Kidlet Disappointment and Pouting, rather than putting up with it and rewarding myself with LJ snarkage later.