Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

Every year come recital time we have a few solid weeks of experimentation in the classroom while the choreographer (my teacher) works out her game plan. And every year we seem to end up doing endless turns around the room in a circle. This never works. Never. It makes people dizzy to the point of colliding with one another. It never looks good, and it's tortuous to practice until it does look good, so eventually it just tapers off and we forget it for another year. I'm hopeful we have gotten it out of our (AKA my teacher's) system for the current year, but we may be stuck with it for another month or so until it really sinks in that this isn't happening.
Stop trying to make this happen. It's never going to happen.

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.

How can they see with SEQUINS in their eyes?

For the past several weeks we've been doing this horrific dégagé combination at the barre. It involves counting and it's ridiculous and no one ever gets it right. Well, last night I freakin' NAILED that son of a bitch. That is right, STONE COLD NAILED IT. Well, on the first side, anyway. The left side will get there in it's own sweet time. Which isn't to say the rest of class went beautifully, but you have to seize your triumphs when they present themselves.

Last night I actually saw my teacher wearing pointe shoes! It was pretty astounding. Usually you won't catch ballet teachers within a mile of a pointe shoe, regardless of the class they are teaching. In fact, I could have sworn I once heard her say she wouldn't be caught dead in them (I believe the exact words were "wild horses could not drag me back in to pointe shoes") but there she was! Also: girlfriend straight up uses scotch tape on her toes. That ranks up there with folded up cheap paper towels, which I have also seen.
While she and the pointe students (I am the only person on flat in that class, now. Don't I just feel special) were all sitting on the lobby floor putting on their shoes I was standing alertly in the corner, absorbing their ribbon-tying instructions on the not-even-at-all sly. She looked at me and said "aw, RPrin. Do you feel left out?" and I was like "naw, naw. It's all good. I am learning from you guys" and she mentioned that she did not want to put me en pointe while I am still working at the theater (the season ends next month, and I go back to maybe-sorta earning a living from home for the next nine months) because it would be "a recipe for disaster". I wonder, do I really seem that harried and out of it right now? I mean, I AM harried and out of it, because I have to tube feed a cat at 6am and midnight every day. But STILL. I like to think I present an image of having my shit together.
It makes me think of one of my favorite songs (which, holy crap, we are staging at work this Summer. I am pretty excited.) I try to live the dream, man:

Obviously I am not doing such a great job of it.

praise in high places

E-mail I got from my teacher this morning:
"You are looking stronger and stronger in class. I'm really impressed by your progress. I keep forgetting to tell you this when you are in class, so now I've done it and you know what I'm seeing."
WHAAAAT?
Girl, you know I am one of the worst people in class, but thank you anyway.
It all went to my head a little bit and I found myself volunteering to alter and hem four slippy-slimy satin circle skirts by Tuesday. That's right, people, the way to make me volunteer to do gross chores for you is to say nice things about me. As a particularly ill-contrived* ex of mine used to say "flattery will get you everywhere".

* the relationship was ill-contrived, not him. I mean, maybe he was, I don't know. I didn't feel comfortable asking his mom those kind of questions.

Built For Tutus

So we had all congregated in the lobby after class one night, and as is our norm some of the students were talking to our instructor. It's coming up on recital time, she reminded us, and we should start thinking about signing up! Well, said one of my classmates, I'll do it if I get to wear a tutu. And our instructor said, heck yes! If you want to wear a tutu you can TOTALLY wear a tutu. Rheumatic Princess, she says gesturing to me as I stumble in to my pants, would look GREAT in a tutu!
Hmm. I wonder what part of me has the look of "tutu" about it. She can't claim to not see that my proportions are all backwards. After all, she sees me in tighter clothing than anyone else EVER. Truly, I am pretty sure that I could get a tutu bodice to fit me with no problems. Because, thank god, dancers rarely have much by way of boobs and I am certainly as ethereal and waif-like on top as I am brick house-like on bottom.
Well, regardless of whether it would look good on me or not I intend to own a couple of tutus eventually. I figure as soon as I hit pointe I am buying a congratulatory rehearsal tutu, and then when I move in to a house with a separate sewing room I am buying the fabrics and beetle wings for my lifetime tutu. Because why the hell not.