No, wait. This couldn’t be happening. Gym shoes and shorts for ballet class? It should have been toe shoes and tutus.
“Mom, these clothes aren’t right”
“They’re on the list.”
I sat cross-legged in my gym clothes on the floor of a small studio in a rickety Victorian house. Nobody was happy, nobody was smiling: we all wanted to be ballerinas in ballet shoes and tutus. Even the ballet teacher, Mrs. Wu, was a disappointment. She wasn’t even Chinese, and we had wondered if the gym clothes might be a Chinese thing. Mrs. Wu was just an ordinary woman with a pixie cut and black stretch pants.
Mrs. Wu smiled. This was the big moment. Soon she would teach us to plié, perhaps in first position, perhaps in second… I knew this from reading On Your Toes, Susie, a Scholastic Book Club novel that had inspired more than one of us to take ballet.
Mrs. Wu had other plans. No dance moves for us. No plie, no twirling, no twisting and torquing. First, we had to gallop around the room. That seemed pointless. Then we had to lie down on our stomachs, arch our backs, and reach our hands back to clutch our feet and rock. She told us to rock like a rocking horse. She had a thing for horses.
We had all dreamed of dancing in pink shoes and tutus. We didn’t even have the dignity of wearing tights and leotards.
After class I told Mrs. Wu, “I think I’m in the wrong class.”
“The wrong class?” A line furrowed her forehead.
“I think I need a more advanced class.”
“We all begin at the beginning,” she snapped.
My mom allowed me to resign from ballet. Mrs. Wu was the only ballet teacher in town, alas.
Years later…
I’m buying a snack in a tiny store downtown. Two charming, slender people, a man and a woman in workout clothes, are carrying a basket around the store and finding nothing. The store carries celery, ice cream, and beer. It’s that kind of store. Every day it’s a different journey.
“Excuse me,” the slender doll of a woman said with tears in her eyes, “but could you tell us how to get to a supermarket? You see, we don’t have a car. And there’s nothing to eat here. See?” She raised her eyebrows at the brown celery.
“Oh, it’s easy to take the bus. I don’t drive either.” I wrote down the bus routes to two different stores. “You can catch either one at the corner.”
“Oh, thank you! Thank you! We don’t know anyone in town.”
It turned out they were ballet dancers, new to a professional company. I was very impressed and bet their teacher was not Mrs. Wu!
Every time we saw each other at the store, we talked about celery. We compared it with the crisp celery we could get pretty much everywhere else in the world
“But this brown celery must be special, it’s so expensive!”
One day they gave me tickets to see them dance in Romeo and Julie. They danced the lead roles.
“Oh, thank you!” I was awed.
It was a beautiful ballet and I was amazed by their talent.
It was my proudest ballet moment.
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