All The Grace of a Cantaloupe (Not Antelope)

I am the clumsiest and least physically graceful person on the planet. How clumsy am I? Clumsy enough that my husband worries about and teases me for my clumsiness. He has an autistic spectrum disorder. Like, he was in special clumsy kid classes in elementary school. No, really. We joke that it's a miracle we haven't killed each other yet, and that it's only a matter of time before one of us accidentally stabs the other while cooking and goes to jail.
Ugh.
I mention my utter lack of grace to illustrate the fact that I am sort of frustrated with class these days. And my teacher is straight-up frustrated with me, as well. Last night she made me re-do tombé pas de bourrées across the floor about four times in each direction. She has been giving me special instructions when we are preparing for a combination "if you want to, RPrin, you can just do one piqué turn." while everyone else is supposed to do two. Standing directly in front of me during petite allegro and obviously getting flustered with my inability to make it look effortless. The problem is that I can do the steps, I just can't do them quickly. It doesn't help if I only do one piqué turn, you see, because by the time I am done with the preceeding waltz turn I am already half a beat late.
Just... just argh.
She often wonders at my strength en pointe and my weakness on flat, but it's not strength that I have trouble with. It's speed. When I speed things up it just becomes a mess, more akin to badly executed tap dancing than classical ballet.
Sigh... anyway. So it's all been rather disheartening lately and my motivation levels haven't been at their peak. The fact that I just smashed my head against the corner of a bookshelf is not helping.

Papier Mâché and Related Nonsense

I splashed (a tiny amount of) water on my pointe shoes while lounging on the couch this evening (they were close at hand because I am supposed to be wearing them around the house to break them in. I made it for about three hours today and then my ankle went "BITCH, PLEASE" and I knocked that shit right off.) and I went "ARGH ARGH ARGH OH NOOOOO! MY PAPIER MÂCHÉ SHOES! THEY MUSN'T GET WET! HOLY CRAP! BRING ME SOME TISSUES AND A TOWEL AND PERHAPS ALSO SOME SMELLING SALTS BECAUSE I THINK I AM GOING TO PASS OUT OH MY GOD"
and my husband was like "What? I thought you were kidding about pointe shoes being made out of papier mâché."
And I was all "NO OH MY GOD WHY WOULD I EVEN JOKE ABOUT THAT?"
Maybe next time I will get modern plastic shoes and save myself the horror. After all, I am pretty damn clumsy.

Also: sort of ballet-related only not really? I was watching the ancient 1955 TV version of the Scarlet Pimpernel at the time, which stars Marius Goring, AKA Julian, AKA the Love Interest That You Aren't Sure Whether You Like Or Not in The Red Shoes. See? Sort of ballet-related. 
But not much.

One Of Those Days

So last night was one of those nights. You know the ones, where nothing works properly. And we got stuck with this fairly straight forward combination of glissades and assemblés (and if it includes the word "assemblé" then it can pretty much kiss my booty-bum in the first place. Every single movement made me hurt like it was going out of style), but then we switched to doing everything in reverse which screwed me up and I failed to complete a single one successfully even though she made us do them in sets of four THREE TIMES. BAH. Also, it didn't help that I got sandwiched against the wall standing uncomfortably close (like, not enough room for all of us to stand with our arms in second) to the two new girls in class, who honestly have no freakin' right to be in beginning ballet. If you have been taking class four days a week for 10 years then take your triple pirouettes and get outta my line of sight, bitches.
I mean "bitches" in the nicest possible way, of course.*
C'est la vie. As they say.
On a different note, I finally learned which "school" or "method" of ballet we are learning at my studio: Cecchetti. Not wildly unexpected, it's probably the most popular style in the US. I only found out when our teacher told us that Cecchetti looks for turned-out palms rather than the prettier (in my opinion) turned-down palms of Vaganova. Honestly, though, for adults I don't think it matters all that much. I still don't know what technique the first studio I went to teaches. They had a sort of strange third arm position.

* if you happen to be one of the new girls, don't take offense. Colorful metaphors in the name of artistic expression and all that. As I often say: if you've got it flaunt it. But, please... spare a moment to think about those of us with little to no natural coordination.