how i started dancing
Hello world
hmm, that’s funny. I think the blog is about sending out to the unknown, but then i post on facebook so my nearest and dearest, and rarely and barely get to read it. Okay. Let’s pick something good to say.
My favourite story about puking on someone while having sex with him. That’s so old. Luckily I haven’t done that in years. 11 to be precise. 23 started out badly. Thanks god for 34.
The thing that gave me the idea for this, aside from various friends who encouraged it as part of my recovery process, was reading Julia & Julia: a year of cooking dangerously. I am a veretarian, so i had to read over some of the entries very quickly so as not to absorb the viscerality of extracting marrow juice from the leg bone of a cow.
When I was in Scotland also 11 and 10 and 9 years ago we drove around quite a bit, exploring the countryside, and almost always stopped the car to hop out and visit with the hairycoos as they were called whenever we saw them. Shaggy and redheaded, they kind of remind me of the guy I puked on…scruffy, red-headed, big eyes, low voice.
Right, so I decided that if Julie could start her blog about cooking, I could start mine about bending my knee and weight bearing, and my gradual return to dance.
How I Started Dancing
When I was five, I wanted to take dance classes because I wanted to be a ballerina I guess. I went to one, maybe two classes and hated it because you had to do what everyone else was doing. After two classes I withdrew and proceeded to make up dances in the living room for the next six years. Happily.
Then, all of a sudden in grade seven, all these girls in my class at school showed up with pointe shoes hanging out of their bags. I went home and demanded that I take dance classes. I thought it was preposterous that I wasn’t; it was on par with child neglect as far as I was concerned that I hadn’t been taking dance all along. My mother calmly explained to me that I had taken dance class when I was five and had hated it. I have a vague memory of trying to turn flips on the ballet barres while everyone else was sitting in a circle in the middle of the studio. So I didn’t like being told what to do then. Now is different. I’m eleven after all, and I’ve been making up dances in the living room. I am ready to be a ballerina. Time is wasting, if I am going to be a ballerina we had better get started.
So, off we go to a neighbourhood studio. The kind that is in the converted main floor and basement of a house in the Glebe. My teacher looks like she should be the hostess at a retirement community in Florida. Her hair is long, dyed a vibrant strawberry blond – or tangerine – and always in an updo, that is not so much of a ballet bun but a beehive. She wears big bright fake flowers in her hair. She is plump in a very pleasant way and wears a shiny long sleeved body suit and a ballet skirt. I think she eats a lot of bonbons.
Anyhow, she is my ballet teacher, and I am ecstatic. I am taking ballet, except that since I have never taken ballet I have to be in a beginner class and all the other beginners are seven and eight years old and I am eleven. An eleven who is wearing a training bra with a bunch of children that do not come up to my armpits. Luckily after the first class it is deemed that I have natural ability so I am moved into an intermediate class with girls my own age. I am ecstatic again. And then, even better, the girls in my class are going to go on pointe. And so am I.
