Knit Sisters

Over the weekend, in addition to enjoying a number of delectable meals composed of broiled, skinless chicken, oyster crackers, and multivitamins, I also finished my NSF proposal. My guts immediately showed a marked improvement, making it abundantly clear that the NSF hates my guts.

The feeling, readers, is mutual.

Zeno took to camping out surreptitiously in my office chair during my ginger ale breaks:

I was helping you by checking your citations. I swear!

I caught him there again today:

Man that works as hard as I do all night—wink, wink!—needs his afternoon nap, know what I’m sayin’?

You may have noticed the beautiful Clapotis that forms such a lovely backdrop for this invasive pest of a cat. My sister made that for me from handspun. It is absolutely wonderful. I understand why Zeno wants to sit close to it, but I do not approve.

But enough about that fool cat. Back to our weekend! So in between sparring bouts with both my grant proposal and Zeno, I also participated in a ballet class at my gym. As you know, I like to learn new things and enjoy new experiences, and I had been eyeing this class for some time. My sister and I briefly took ballet lessons as children, so I figured I could more or less manage, especially given that a ballet class at a gym ain’t exactly auditions for the ABT.

You may have also realized that at certain moments I am overconfident in my abilities.

My fondest hope now can only be that my disastrous flailing, my uncoordinated flinging about of limbs, my thuddingly earthbound attempts at leaps were of some comic value to the other women in the class. None of them actually pointed and laughed, but that merely indicates that they have good manners. Or absolutely no sense of humor.

But no experience is wasted on the lifelong learner! I learned, for instance, that even if you are an unspeakably bad dancer, the muscles in your legs will ache in funny spots the following day. I am wearing these aches as a proud mark of having given my all in a futile enterprise.

In fact, I’d really like to have a small trophy to commemorate my dancing days. Something on the order of the one I got at the age of ten after a fruitless and intermittently humiliating season of t-ball. While other children received the “Most Valuable Batter” or “Most Valuable Outfielder” awards, I and others of my accursed kind—the unathletic child—received a small trophy with a cheap plastic batter atop. The little plaque glued to its fake marble base read, “T-Ball: I Tried.”

Ballet: I Tried.

The afternoon’s other lesson was this: there is a reason why slightly round (but still lovely, of course), middle-aged (but still vigorous, heaven knows) women are not actively sought out by the American Ballet Theater and the New York City Ballet and the like. And the reason is that when we dance, we look like great, lumbering hippopotami. No one, frankly, would pay a dime to watch it, unless he badly needed a chuckle.

I had an idea about how to turn my dancing into a money-making venture, though. Any of you who think you might be dancers of my stripe are welcome to go in on this. Here’s the plan: we hire a recital hall and we advertise free admission to a sensational new dance performance.

Yes, admission will be free. But they’ll have to pay, and pay dearly, to be allowed to leave.

Believe me, we’ll be rich women before the night is through.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Plays well with others. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.