ballet

There are two TVs in the waiting room of the local dance studio. This past Tuesday night, one of them showed a room full of advanced-dancer teenagers. They wore cutoff shorts, knee length tights, and one-shoulder T-shirts, and stood slouching around the room looking disinterested. Then their teacher turned on the dance music and they snapped into a precision team, executing a well-oiled routine.

As the small group of mothers watched the TVs, the dance studio owner spun for us the tales of each teenager’s woes. This one’s brother had lied to his parents about her. That one was grounded from driving her parents’ car. And the hormones, she said. The hormones!

On the other TV was a room full of little girls in pink and purple leotards, hair pulled tightly back, nervously watching their teacher in their first ever ballet lesson. My daughter was in that room. The little girls stood in a straight row, and I watched as their teacher taught them first position, then second position, and they all held their hands just so…except one. Katie couldn’t do first position hands, second position hands, because she had to play with her skirt.

She’d been dancing that afternoon ever since I finally said, “Okay. It IS time to go to ballet now.” She danced while she ate, danced as we did her hair, danced her way into and out of the car. She’d been singing, “I haaave a purple leotard and piiiink tights…” But as soon as she put on her brand new purple leotard with silver swirls and a purple skirt attached, her hands had not been off that skirt. Nor, it appeared from the waiting room TV, were they ever during her first ballet lesson.

At least from what I could see on the practice room hidden camera, Katie’s first ballet lesson appeared to be every inch the little girl party she’d been begging for for months. They danced in beautiful, heartbreaking, awkward lines and circles. I glanced at the other TV, knew that only time separated those two rooms full of girls, and felt relieved that Katie was still in the pink and purple room. I felt a little guilty about feeling that way, a little smug in my custodianship of an unspoiled little girl, and grateful for the years between now and then.

The classes ended, the TV screens cleared of dance students, and Katie returned to me, flushed and happy. I asked her how her class was, and she said breathlessly, “I want to go home and sleep and when I wake up, come back and do ballet until I get tired again, and every day I want to do ballet!” And I was walking to the car with her, there in that beautiful little-girl moment, and thinking, how simple and wonderful the world is when a purple leotard will make you completely happy. I think that the purple leotard had almost made me completely happy, when she stopped and turned to me there on the sidewalk, hands on her hips, and laid this one on me.

“Madeline has a princess backpack and mine is only pink. Why do you want me not to have a princess backpack and just to have a pink one?" The accusation in her voice completely shrank me. Popped my purple-leotard bubble. And then I realized maybe I got a little carried away. All that growing up? Maybe it’s not going to take as long as I think.