Ballet Recital

Rider College Auditorium
Lawrenceville NJ
May 21, 2005 1 pm

Natalie was a Butterfly. She danced very beautifully, and I've got the entire thing on digital video.

But ballet recital is really intense not for watching your own kid, but others. Aged from 3 to 13, packs of girls (and a few boys too) are ushered onto stage for a chance to shine, to dominate their peers, to space out, to nail it, and whatever else peer groups and audiences can make egos in various stages of formation do. There are all types, the ones who've clearly practiced and kind of have it but have no rhythm, the ones who wander around freely, forgetting everything they were taught but being cute anyway. For the older kids, there are those who are absolutely in command, they can dance and everybody else watches them, trying to latch hold to their rhythm. Mostly kids are just looking at each other, or the teacher if they're thinking, trying to figure out what to do next.

But emerging social hierarchies are utterly evident. You can project forward to high school pretty confidently: who's gonna be popular, who will be on the margins, who'll be in the middle. Puberty may reshape things a little, but probably not but so much in aggregate.

It's also telling to watch your kid year to year. Last year Natalie pretty much glowed and led, this year she's a little more diffident and restrained, looking at her neighbor more and more. Better technically, for whatever that's worth.

But it was wrenching to watch all the girls out there this year, thinking back to Leslie's gymnastics when we were growing up and all of the girls in that circle: Gerda, Maura and Michelle Dillon, the legendary Ari Aponte, Laura Putnam, Terry Nida, Lisa Higgs, the Burgle girls. It seems "like yesterday" when it was them up on stage, and now what? Chemo, divorce, lord knows what else. It's life, it's normal, I know, but sometimes it's heavy.