A Rose by Any Other Name (with too many asides)

My pointe class recently acquired a new student. A 12-13 year old. The only trouble? We have the same name. Now, my parents were kind enough not to name me Sarah or Christian (yeah, so I kinda grew up in California's bible belt and there were a LOT of Christians, believe it or not) so it's rare for me to be in that situation. Sometimes at the theater we get a character with my name and then I complain for an entire month (you know how even when you aren't really listening to someone's conversation you can instantly recognize your name being spoken and you sort of go on the alert? Yeah, so imagine that happening every twenty minutes for eight hours a day), but another girl with my name? So rare. It happened to me once at work, when we had an intern considerably younger than me (though she pronounced it sliiiiightly differently). My name, okay? My name? No one had ever heard of it until I was ten. Then ERRYONE started using it and it's become really common for people under 20. So this was bound to happen eventually. Still. It's weird. And this other RPrin and I will be doing our thing and the teacher will shout a correction to one of us... and then we both try to do it, regardless of whether or not there was anything wrong with us in the first place... and then everyone gets confused and the teacher goes "AAARGH! No! Not RPrin! The other RPrin!"
Anyway, it's obnoxious.
Last week after MiniRPrin had gone home and I was lingering to fit skirts for a few girls who are doing a performance at a dentist's convention (I know, right?) my teacher called me "the real RPrin"
That's right, little girl. I'm the REAL one.
Snerk.

Shut Up and Dance

Sometimes, invariably at the barre, the teacher will show a combination and it all looks simple enough. UNTIL. Until someone has a question about it, and the answer confuses someone else, and the explanation of the answer confuses the first person again plus four or five other people. And the teacher says "okay, enough! Let's just do it and see what happens!" and someone who is More Serious Than You argues that without understanding the proper choreography the entire thing is wasted... and by the time we actually get around to attempting the silly thing no one has any idea what is going on. EVEN THE TEACHER. And now everyone at the barre is doing something different and all you can hope for is a quick transition to the next exercise. Because DAMN.

Also: PMS

Popped Ballon

Right now petite allegro and I are not getting along. Okay. No. I should say "Petite allegro is killing me."
It is sucking the very soul from my tiny, withered husk.
I see my little improvements in other things. I can do double frappes, now. I have mostly figured out the front, back, side, front (whatever the hell that is called) pattern for barre work. I try to keep my spirits up with this stuff. But petite allegro. Man. It's so defeating.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with the component parts. I can do glissades and assemblés (patooie!). Pas de chats and jetés. But... at the kind of tempo I am being asked for I can basically just trip over myself repeatedly. I just sort of flail around randomly and try not to run in to anyone until the music is over and I get to stop. Apparently we are supposed to be aiming for "ballon" which is basically a fancy French way of saying "you don't hit the ground like an elephant" but right now I can't even get myself OFF the ground in the first place. I kind of look like I'm doing a very confused tap dance for a minute or two. A little soft shoe routine.
Ra-ta-ta-ta-TA!

Gratuitous Ballet Moment

I ... have no idea what is going on here. But, it kinda makes me want to buy a Kia?

Originally found on The Ornamented Being

Skullhead Bonyhands

Since we were discussing unusual source material for ballets recently...
Did you know that there is an Edward Scissorhands ballet?
Did you want to know?
I am torn between thinking "awesome!" and thinking "god, really?"

To tell you true I have only ever seen the movie once, when I was in 8th grade, and I have never seen the ending. Does he die? Does someone die? I don't even know. Maybe they all live happily ever after. It's not that I wouldn't be down with seeing it, it's that no one really wants to see it with me and I always forget about it when I am alone with netflix.
That blonde hair on Winona Ryder kinda drives me nuts, though!

Anyway. Edward Scissorhands. Now you know. 

I gots the crazy moves

So I may or may not have recently been sort of grumping about how I am stuck in level 2 ballet class until the end of Summer, when I can move up without a conflicting work schedule. But then tonight the substitute teacher was all "okay! Now we are going to do pirouettes!" and I was like "WHAT?" and then EVERYONE ELSE IN CLASS totally pulled off a gorgeous pirouette. Out of thin air. I had just about gotten the preparation part down. Tendu to second! Tendu to fourth! I can do this! Pow! Passé, baby! And then I was supposed to ... what? To actually manage to spin around? Like... all the way around? WHAT?
And then maybe I almost fell over. Twice. The teacher said "were you trying to do a double, there?" and I sort of cringed and said "no" and then she said "oh, there is kind of a dip in the floor, there, maybe! You just got caught in the dip!"
I sure didn't see any dip. Dress it up however you want, the fact is that I just screwed it up.
It was pretty lame.

Two Posts in One

I have been stuck using the portable barres at the studio, lately (which is a story that involves me being annoyed with someone else for not understanding ballet etiquette, and this story is SO bitchy that I am refraining from telling it) which is irksome because a) sometimes there isn't quite enough space on them so you get stuck hanging over the end or trying not to grab on to the hand of the person on the opposite side, b) sometimes they get set up sort of wonky so that they aren't at a 90* angle to the mirror (or the seams in the floor) so I spend the entire time feeling off-center, and c) they are metal so I create a loud CLANG! every time my left hand touches the barre. Either I am just super-conscious of my own clanging or no one else is having this problem. This is grown-up class! Where are your wedding rings? I am not dissing anyone who takes theirs off, it's just that I am lazy and forgetful and so I basically never remove mine. In the bath tub, doing dishes, digging around in the garden, changing the oil in my scooter, baking bread... whatever. There are reasons I do not wear fancy diamond things with bits all sticking out.
ANYWAY.

 Cemeteries are one of my great passions (I have a lot of great passions, okay?) and in the world of Pinterest I recently discovered this photograph:

Which claims to be the grave of Marie Taglioni in the Montmartre cemetery. And I thought : "OOOH AWESOME!" It's kind of gross but also very beautiful. It's become a sort of shrine for dancers, the pile of decomposing shoes an offering to the memory of the first famous modern ballet dancer. Definitely something to see someday, a pilgrimage site for the future.
But, I was intrigued enough to do some research online and discovered that there is some confusion about this particular grave site. It actually isn't Marie Taglioni's grave, but the grave of her mother (who was a dancer, though not the kind of celebrity her daughter became). So... all those shoes are in the wrong cemetery. In fact, Marie Taglioni's actual grave is in the Père-Lachaise cemetery (where all sorts of other famous dead people reside). Here is an article but it's all in French. My own French is pretty rusty but I can work out the general gist of it.
This is what Marie Taglioni's actual grave looks like:

Much less dramatic but at least there are some shoes up there! If I ever visit France I would definitely make this a destination and add a shoe to the site.
The downside to living in the western US is that our history goes back about 150-200 years and then drops straight off. We have some really interesting cemetery history, but it's nothing like the incredible history of Europe's cemeteries.

Everybody POLKA!

So, let's see. A few months ago I noticed that the vicodin I occasionally have to take to get to sleep wasn't working as well anymore and asked to be switched to something else for a while while my tolerance died down. They put me on Ultram (tramodol) which... Well. Hmm. There isn't an obvious pain reduction but it does help me sleep. Unfortunately it gives me such vivid - but vividly mundane- dreams, that I often don't know what I dreamed about and what really happened. For example, I have a distinct memory of purchasing two crates of bubble mailers online for my business. But after a month of waiting for the damn things I went back and checked through my email, both bank accounts, and my PayPal account... and there is no record of the purchase. So, I guess I had a dream that I bought bubble mailers? I guess?
Anyway.

We started doing polka steps in class last night and they look super easy but I was having trouble making my feet do what they were supposed to. Or maybe I was swinging when I should have been hopping or... I don't know. I am going to have to try practicing this around the house over the week. I think I will put on my Dolly Parton collection (DON'T YOU JUDGE ME!) and prance around the living room for a while.
Provided, of course, that I didn't just DREAM about doing the polka in class last night...

My Humps My Humps My Lady Lumps, As They Say

I was just checking my page stats. Apparently "rheumatology hot booties" is a Google search term that leads to Rheumatic Princess. I am unsure what it implies about my readers, I just thought I would share!

Accepted Wisdom

So I have read a couple of articles lately that say you should not stretch before a workout. One even included this amazing and colorful quote from none other than fitness guru Jack LaLanne : "Warming up is the biggest bunch of horseshit I've ever heard in my life. Fifteen minutes to warm up! Does a lion warm up when he's hungry? 'Uh-oh, here comes an antelope. Better warm up.' No! He just goes out and eats the sucker."
But as any dancer can tell you, stretching is important! Right?
Well, maybe yes, maybe no. My teacher advocates stretching (at least the calves and thighs if nothing else) after class/running/etc. And stretching is important for overall flexibility and extensions, yes?
Well, it turns out you should really only be stretching after you work out, rather than before, and not just plain cold, which is what I usually do on days when I have no class. But... hmm. I can't really jog or even walk much these days. I labor along with a very short and relatively mild bike ride most Friday mornings, but we are talking a few miles at most (as opposed to the 20+ I used to be able to do). And my hip joints pop so very uncomfortably and disconcertingly every time they hit a développé or grand battemant. So maybe I will just keep up with the hip stretches before class and then only do the other stuff afterward?
Ugh. So confusing.

No, Your Other Right Leg

That was what my teacher had to tell me at one point tonight.
Sigh.

So, I took a different class tonight than I usually do. One that is just a liiiiiiittle bit more advanced than mine. Like, six months and I will have this stuff down, but right now not so much. This was my first experience at attempting chaînés turns at any tempo other than painfully slow. There has got to be an in-between stage, though, because if I try to do them fast I just whirl away like an out of control ground flower on the 4th of July.

Barre was good. Solid. And then there were combinations in which we had to insert pas de bourrée in the middle of doing a bunch of other stuff. And do port de bras while also trying to remember which foot is supposed to be doing something. Anyway, that was interesting. Challenging. I am going to seize "challenging" instead of saying "oh mercy me, but it was so terribly difficult and I was all aflutter. Now, I must go lay down, as I think I have the vapors".
Or. You know. Something. I think that one got away from me.

Also, still struggling with assemblé. I am not getting better at it. Because I HATE IT. And so I don't practice it. See, I finally feel like I have gotten the hang of turning pas de bourrée, and I even feel confident about not tripping over myself too much during waltz steps. But, I practiced those. Because they are fun! And they look interesting! And they don't suck! Not like assemblé. Because assemblé is dumb and poopy and smells like pee.
That's right, assemblé. You suck.
Assemblé can't come to my birthday party, and that's that.
NOBODY LIKES YOU, ASSEMBLÉ.

Your Shoes Are Killing My Spirit

So... what is the thing with wearing pointe shoes to beginning ballet class? There are three ladies (out of about 14-15 some nights) in my class that are wearing pointe shoes, now. One has them deshanked that I know of, and says she is wearing them to build up foot strength without going up in them. One girl is definitely wearing those things as is, because she is Showing Off before class (I am not saying that in a snarky way. If you've got it, babe, flaunt it). The other... I am not sure because I don't pay much attention to what other people are doing in class to be honest (I just always notice that they are Super Candy Pink). It's all focusing on keeping my own sorry butt from falling over.
Anyway. I was just wondering what is up with that.
I think, if I had pointe shoes that were fully functional I would probably be too careful of them in a regular class. Not want to go in to demi pointe too much because I would not want the shanks to get broken before their time had come.
Also, I want my future first pointe shoe purchase to be The Event Of The Season. With maybe a glass of (pink!) champagne afterward and blurry iphone photos posted to facebook with comments like "HOLY SH*T LOOK AT WHAT I JUST BOUGHT GUYS I AM A SUPER TWIRLY BALLERINA NOW OMG"
But, anyway. That is just me.

YouTube Has Failed Me

I cannot for the life of me find a youtube video that demonstrates waltz steps like the ones I have been struggling with the last three weeks. I can find super pro choreographed performances and I can find people sort of dancy-walking (up, up, plie, up, up, plie) but that is what we were doing in pre-ballet! The closest I can find are these 12 year olds kicking my ass serious style. Also, promenades! We just started promenades this week! They are awesome! Everything is awesome when you are me, I guess.
ALSO: Check this dude out. He is totally doing a pas de bourree. Dudes on the street! You are doing ballet!

Ballet For Dummies (Meaning Me)

You almost certainly heard about the incident that occurred at a local college campus recently. This is the college where my mother went to school, and where she would take us to feed the ducks or to attend festivals devoted to sustainable living and world peace. Anyhow, so this terrible thing happened. Tonight my ballet teacher appologized for being a little out of it because she had been at the campus all day protesting. I knew I liked her!

In other news, I think my chassés and glissades are getting a bit better. At least when compared to the new and confusing thing we did tonight: waltz steps. Crazy difficult! Mostly because by that point my feet were hurting so bad that trying to hit demi-pointe was tortuous. We did not do pas de bourrée en tournant tonight, which is sort of a shame. I had done really really badly at the turning part last week so I spent some time practicing in my kitchen and living room and I felt sure that I could do at least passably (or, at least better) this time. There is no way I can practice this waltzing jazz, though, because I can't even remember it! You step and you turn and you... do some painful thing with your feet... and then you brush back or maybe forward and you... I have no freaking idea. Oddly enough I really enjoy the moving steps. Pas de bourrée is probably my favorite thing that we are doing right now.

Oh! I did some of those changements tonight! About half of them, though I did a full set earlier in the class, so that has got to count for something.