Fucking Pointe Shoes, Man...

You know how everything that has the word "wedding" attached to it automatically sells for double the cost of the exact same thing without "wedding" in the name? Like, if you go to a grocery store and say "I need a birthday cake for fifty people" they will charge you $100 for it, but if you say "a wedding cake for fifty people" they will tell you it's $250? Ballet is the same way. If it has the word "ballet" in it or is sold at dancewear stores it is going to cost you SO MUCH more than the same thing at Hardware Hal's or Francine's Fabrics. To wit:
After a few short months of use my latest pointes died ingloriously. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me, but it does irk the crap out of me. So I decided to go the jet glue route in hopes of a few more weeks without major damage being done to my bank account.
So, did you know that pointe shoe glue is basically just jet glue? And that jet glue is basically just SUPER GLUE? Instead of paying $15 for shoe glue at the only dance store in town (which is still half an hour from my place and has the WORST parking "lot" I think I have ever seen) or ordering jet glue from Amazon and waiting a week for it to arrive I just raided my husband's glue-and-tape drawer (to be fair I am the one who organized it in to it's own drawer. Look, we have several dozen rolls of packing tape in this house but I can never find an open one when I need to ship something) and found the tubes of super glue we had purchased for attaching the cat's claw caps. TA-DA!
There is just something about disemboweling an $80 pair of shoes with a razor that makes the poor kid in me ("we're not poor, we have each other!") cringe a little bit. But I can highly recommend tearing in to a pair to see what is going on in there. For instance, I discovered that my right shoe is feeling noodly because it has developed a fault-line of near San Andrean proportions right across the arch. Which means that any day now the damn thing will snap right in half while I am trying to do something important. That sounds safe AND comfortable. YAY!
New shoes. New shoes need to happen. SOMEONE please build a new dancewear store in central CA. One that sells plastic shoes and has ten charming young fitters available at all times.

Don't Glue It, You Have Sew Much to Live For!

You know what is awesome? Slipping on the carpeted stairs (because you are wearing slippery satin shoes with fuzzy socks on top) and falling all the way to the ground floor, hitting every single stair along the way. Every. Single. One.
Did I break in my pointe shoes, or did I just break myself? It was one of those things where you think to yourself "you know, this is really dangerous and I could really hurt myself" a split second before it all goes wrong. I am lucky I didn't break anything.
That happened last night. Today I feel... like I just fell down a flight of stairs, honestly (also stupid, I feel really really stupid). Both elbows are skinned and bruised, my butt looks like I was hit with a two by four (actually I was hit with half a dozen two by fours...), and I appear to have majorly pulled every single muscle in my upper back/neck/shoulders. You know that whole port de corps en ronde thing? Yeah, that SO isn't happening right now.

On the recital costume front:
I was sent home tonight with this... thing (there is no nice name for it) and told to remove the junky lace apron and ugly trim across the front (it's going on an ugly step sister in Cinderella, BTW) and to generally clean it up (at work we call that "making it pretty" which is just a nice way of saying "this thing needs some serious help. Please. Stage an intervention")

Only problem? As soon as I got it in my lap with a seam ripper in hand I discovered the awful truth. It is all attached WITH GLUE. Uuuuuggggghhhhh...