Man. What do I categorize this under? “Yoga”?
How This Could Have Happened
1995: I’d wanted ballet lessons for as long as I could remember. In 1995, at the age of twelve, I got them.
It was my stepmom who spearheaded the whole thing. She took me to our local Capezio. I picked out my own pair of soft pink shoes, a black leotard, pale tights and a white chiffon skirt. Every Sunday she dropped me off at lessons, and an hour later she picked me back up.
When I wasn’t in class, I gazed arduously at those soft pink shoes. I practiced the warm-up exercises in the hallways of the junior high, and in the back stage during drama club meetings, pointing my toe out to the side, raising an arm, circling back.
I felt at home in ballet. There was nothing about it that wasn’t pretty, controlled, quiet. My friend Johanna had been a ballerina for most of her life already, and when she showed me the tapes of her performing as a mouse in a production of “The Nutcracker” I nearly cried with jealousy. I wanted to be in “The Nutcracker” so badly. You could have made me a candy cane.
1996: “I don’t think you’re quite ready for level II,” the instructor told me. “I think it’d do you some good to take another level I class.”
We were standing outside the door to the classroom. I looked in at my level-II-ready classmates, running and giggling or sitting strangely in the middle of the room, sucking a thumb. When they weren’t taking ballet class, they were amusing themselves with other necessary schooling appropriate for their age group: preschool, kindergarten, first grade. Our age discrepancies had always been clearest to me in the long mirror that stretched across our classroom, where, during flights from one end to the next, I could observe my head bobbling at twice the height of my peers’, like a baby giraffe in a pen of piglets. Whenever we swung our legs back I had to make sure I wasn’t about to knock some distracted, Lifesaver-mouthed princess’ teeth out.
I thought about that. I thought about a whole new troupe of them, the same age next year, and me a year older: thirteen, fourteen years old in a sea of toddlers.
“So what do you think? Do you want to take the same lessons again next year?” my stepmom asked.
What Do You Want? When Do You Want It?
I’ve been trying to figure out why I go to protests. Do I think they’re going to change anything? Unseat a president? Stop a war? Change a law?
There were over four thousand of us packed together in a hollow of the city, Boston skyscrapers framing our tiny antics. The City Hall Plaza is an interesting place to be for its paradoxes — you are dwarfed by its architecture, a concrete upside-down pyramid that gets wider as you look up, like a broad-shouldered thug. It’s hideous, imposing, the kind of building that would house Big Brother. But it’s also in the middle of downtown, so that you are surrounded on all sides by other, taller buildings, which despite their superior height manage to lurk as City Hall’s toadies — and there is a feeling of empowerment inherent to placing yourself in the middle of anything.
Boston City Hall is The Boss. You have come here for The Final Fight.
The cynic in me says protests are nothing but a party for like-minded people. But in a space like that, when you all cry “equal rights, now” your voices bounce off all the surrounding glass reaching into the sky and meld into one, giant voice, and that’s you, you can feel it, shaking an entire city. (View the full album here.)
Like a Kettle to Keep You
When it’s not raining . . . read Young? From Issue 5 of A Public Space — “I Don’t Burn” by Kevin Young:
Dear Darkness — consider this
my last attempt
to reach you. My previous
few missives
having boomeranged back
unread, postmarks blurred
A First Time
I’ve told this story before, but figured it warranted retelling, especially considering The Fray‘s current call for submissions. Sex n’ death! Yeaaah!
I was seventeen years old, and we had just gone to the circus. Not some two-bit, tired-elephant circus either, but A Circus, hailing all the way from France with its haunting melodies and impossible contortionists. A single ticket had been two days’ pay at the gift shop where I’d waited away the majority of my summer. I had been half-pining for him from behind those glass counter tops in Minneapolis for two months while he’d spent the summer at Jewish camp — where, as he would later confess, he had dated someone else. Someone more Jewish, which I suppose could have incited jealousy in my shiksa heart. But at the age of seventeen I was much more casual about these things.
“So, are you still with her?” I asked simply. “Nope,” he said.
After all of the acrobats had finished twirling in the air and erupting fireballs from their painted lips, Noah* drove me deep into suburbia, Minnesota, where I’d planned on sleeping over at my friend Melissa’s place — past the glowing Mall of America and still further along that dark, stretching highway. When he pulled into the empty parking lot and I reached into the back seat of his parents’ car to grab my purse, he suddenly kissed me: a lovely, long soft kiss. I nearly fell onto the asphalt as I closed the door.
“Melissa,” I would later announce, standing on the soft, snowy carpet of her room. “Noah and I . . . just . . . kissed.”
“Is he your boyfriend now?” she would squeal.
“I think he’s my boyfriend now.”
She would clap and jump, and I would clap and jump, swoon on her bed, and smother myself with pillows, and lose myself in daydreams, and relive that kiss, over and over and over. It was in fact a very nice kiss, even by current standards.
Suddenly I sat straight up. “Oh my God,” I said. “Melissa, I have a boyfriend, and I don’t even know what a penis looks like.”
She screamed.
“I mean, I’ve seen drawings — like, diagrams or whatever, with the vas deferens and all that. But what will I do when . . . when . . . I don’t know . . . ”
“When you give him a handjob or something?”
“Aaagh!” I cried. “And I don’t even know what color they are!”
Melissa instructed me to calm the freak down.
“We have the internet here,” she said. “We can just do a search for . . . penis.”