Romantic Saturday

I am not what I seem, ha, ha.  It's just that all this fitness stuff makes you feel, well, sexy.  It is Saturday and here I am watching television and typing on the computer again.  I see couples walking around and it makes me feel a little left out, but then the feeling goes away because I do have hobbies and interests.  It is depressing that women are judged by their popularity -- even in high school, if you didn't have a boyfriend, you were a failure.  I remember my teen years, always having crushes on boys who turn around and date the cute, blonde girls and how it hurt me that I was always the one watching...

So away I went to beginning dance class, which was packed.  I want to take the easier class because I wanted to wear my pointe shoes for as long as possible.  I survived the adagio and then when we had to do pirouettes and chasses in center, I took them off because I did not want to create chaos among the groups.  Even the adagio was challenging with pointe shoes: tendu front, plie, tendus side to second position, plie releve in second position, then do pirouette(s); then releve in 4th position, then do pirouettes, rotation, pirouette(s) en dedans.  I had not done pirouettes on pointe in a long time and, surprisingly, they were better than before, because of all of my gym workouts, which made me strong.  The teacher said at barre that the minute you let go of your center, it's over.

Absolutely.  The center (core) is everything.  I am still working on mine and really have noticed the difference.  The other center combination was chasse efface 2x, chasse pas de bourre pirouettes; then we did jumps, 1st, seconde, echappes with beats; then across the floor, chasse croise battement; chasse efface battement -- then the battements became fouettes.

Most of the class centered around barre exercises, which is the way most beginner classes are.  There were a few balances in passe, arabesque, and attitude, something I found particularly challenging on pointe.  Visualize a spiral, the teacher said to another student when we did the attitude balance.  I find that being on pointe is such a strange experience in terms of balance and muscle control of the body; that is, you use your legs so differently and must be rotated and really symmetrical.  The hardest thing for me was doing decent tendus with straight, pulled up legs because if your legs are crooked on pointe, it looks terrible...

Then I swam at the gym and practically fell asleep in the steam room because it felt so good to let my muscles just go limp.  I am turning into a swimmer -- now I churn throught the water just like the swimmers I had watched when I first joined the gym and wondered how they did it.  I look, well, normal, like a swimmer, that is, not just someone who is in the water moving around.  I wish I could look like a dancer, like the ones I watch and wonder how they do it...

Then I went home and had an interesting conversation with a man in the elevator as we were going up.  He is a teacher who chooses to work in a poor neighborhood, even though he could have remained in the suburbs.  We talked about the importance of status and class and he remarked that the poorest people are even more status conscious because of their lack of resources and materialistic symbols.  We discussed the fact that children who want to succeed cannot belong to their community that does not support them and yet they cannot belong to the elite social class either because they are not accepted.  But he wore a wedding ring, already taken...