haven't written here in a while - i've been writing elsewhere and working and working. and dancing. but mostly working.
m____ and g___ have a friend retired from ABT who has taken class intermittently at the studio. she's finishing up med school and we hadn't seen her around in a while, but they recruited her to do the arabian number in nutcracker. the female role usually goes to a pretty flexible person, and s____ is certainly very, very, inhumanly flexible, so it made sense. (she's in the ABT video dictionary for ballet terms, showing grande battement - trust me when i say this is an inadequate demonstration of how limber she is.)
last night after we finished with snow rehearsal, s____ showed up to learn arabian. i assume she is somewhere in her late 30s. she was messing around with her partner, c___, trying to figure out what they could do for the pas de deux. she stood on one leg and put the other one up a la seconde - at six o'clock. everyone gasped. (i don't know why, because we all have seen her in class and we know how insanely flexible she is.) she was like, "oh, come on, guys. this is all i can even do now. maybe i could just do this for thirty-four counts." i was like, "yes, and we'd all be mesmerized."
"do it again," someone requested. she was like, "i can go further, actually." she stood on one leg again and put the other one up a la seconde and actually put it up past six o'clock - she was more at nine-thirty. we were all like, "AUGHGHGH," and she stopped and said, sort of mock-sheepishly, "that's not even how far i can go." then we watched her put on her pointe shoes. she has insane feet - super high arches and high insteps. at the barre on tuesday, g__ had asked her to demonstrate a grande rond de jambe jeté en l'air, saying it was like an anatomical lesson. her rotation, her extension, her feet...we are all aghast.
i walked out of the studio with lauren, who told me that s____ said she'd actually lost flexibility as she'd gotten older. as in, she used to be more flexible. "i don't know how that's possible," lauren said.
all the parents coming to pick up the high-school girls from rehearsal had their faces pressed against the window, watching s_____ too. "my daughter told me i had to get out of the car to come see," one mom confessed. "you don't think she has great feet?" the daughter said.
"oh man," i said, "she has such a high instep. she wears a lot of warm-up junk in class, and at the barre she's always wearing these really chunky pink socks, but - " and lauren grabbed my arm and we shrieked at the same time, "but you can still see it."
it being her freakishly high instep, which maybe was only obvious to me and lauren. we sort of fell on each other laughing. and then i went home.
.
this morning i was boiling water for tea in the office kitchen, and through the window i could see a bluejay and a robin - or, at any rate, a blue bird and a red bird - under the neighbor's lemon tree. for a minute, i was transfixed. this is a cliché. but i was not all the way awake yet and i stood stock-still, completely absorbed in bird-watching. birds aren't really my thing, but i had a moment of epiphany with regard to why people buy birdseed. and this made me think of grandmotherdear and her bird feeders and her butterfly plants. and this made me think of uncle vin's eulogy for her - "she loved having life at her fingertips" - which had startled me, given the last ten years of her unhappiness, but i understood it was true.
