The Ballet

So, Thomas took me to the ballet this weekend; it was sort of combination birthday/mother's day gift.

I haven't been to the ballet in a long time; not since my best friend in high school died. (She fell asleep at the wheel graduation night and drove her car off an overpass. She hadn't been drinking or anything, she was just worn out. And as she was a brilliant, witty, friendly, pretty and talented sort, the whole event went to cement my opinion of the general completely unfair nature of the universe...) Anyway, Tracy used to be a ballet dancer and we (my mother and I) went from time to time to see her in various performances...

A few weeks ago, I was paging through the paper - have I mentioned I subscribed to the paper in an attempt to start being more frugal by clipping coupons? Thus far, it's been a good investment. In three weeks (the paper costs me $10 a month) I've clipped over $18 worth of coupons; and not coupons that I have to stretch to use, either, but ones that are stuff I would have bought anyway - (Ok, that was a very long aside...) Anyway, I was thumbing through the paper and there was an advert for Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet.

Further investigation (Small bit of trivia about me; I am a russophile. I love all things Russian - well, except politics - decorations, art, music, history, culture. Love it. I minored in Russian History in college sort of by accident. I was just taking classes that I was interested in and my advisor pointed out that all I needed was one speciality history class in a field aside from Russian Studies and I'd have a history minor already completed. My primary professor who taught most of my Russian Studies classes was enomoured of me, said he'd seldom met someone who understood Russian culture as well as I did, and I was the only student in the last decade to whom he'd awarded an A+ on a term paper. This did not, I might add, endear me to my classmates.) yielded the information that this would be one of the first performances of Prokofiev's intended ballet.

"Living people can dance; the dead cannot." This was the rather utilitarian explation offered by the freat 20th centure composer Sergei Prokofiev as to what possed him to alter the fate of literature's most celbrated loves, Romeo and Juliet.¹

Simon Morrison, a professor at Princeton University and famed musicologist, discovered in 2003 that Prokofiev's original score included different music and a surprisingly happy ending. Stalin-era censors edited out twenty minutes of music, thickened the orchestration and restored the tragic ending, resulting in a performance that was almost unrecognizable from Prokofiev's opus.

The Virginia Arts Festival is one of the few openings for this new ballet; a master's dream restored. In fact, the performance we saw actually preceeds the ballet opening in New York. For me, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity...

So, I asked Thomas, "If I wanted to go see the ballet, what might you say?"

Thomas frowned for a moment, then shrugged. "I've not been to a ballet since I was in high school, when my sister used to dance. I've no idea if I like it or not. Sure, we can go."

So, we went.

As I'm not a professional reviewer or familiar enough with the ballet to accurately describe the performance, I won't. I'll simply say I enjoyed it immensely, and Thomas's comment was "It wasn't the worst thing I've ever done, and the music was good." That's hopeful enough that I might be able to persuade him to do this once or twice a year.

Also, I got to dress up, and that was good.

This is my new dress; a size 6!! My shoes, while they do match the dress nicely, were unfortunately, a half-size too large, and made walking a bit dicey... why did no one tell me that losing 80 pounds would make it so that I lost two complete shoe sizes? I'm now wearing a seven, and all my old shoes are 9s. (Fortunately, I wasn't much into shoes when I couldn't wear heels, so I didn't have to replace too many pairs... in fact, I own more shoes NOW than I did a year ago...)

In any case, I had a good night... I felt pretty and thin for the entire evening, even after the dancers came on stage. And we were very, very close to the stage, so I got a very good look at how thin they were, and while they might be more muscular than I am, I don't really think that Juliet was all that much smaller than I am.

I found myself playing the Fattest Woman in the Room game again, but it was oddly different. I wasn't the fattest, nor was I the thinnest. And strangely enough, it didn't matter. I felt pretty, I looked pretty, and that was all that was important to me.



1. Leona Baker, Romeo and Juliet, Alive and Dancing

Decked Out

My birthday was last week (Happy Birthday, me) and as usual, my enthusiasm for this fact was at an all time low. I don't know, really, why my birthday bothers me so much, but it does.

And it's one of those weird, contradictory sorts of things; I don't want people to make a fuss about it. At the same time, if people forget about it, I'm grumpy. I do apologize to all my friends for whom I have been ungrateful, annoying, and otherwise cantankerous about it.

(My husband theorizes that it's my mother's fault, because my birthday parties as a kid weren't for me so much as they were for her to show off the amount of money my dad made, and frequently involved inviting people I didn't like to my party. Seriously. The girl who wouldn't let me wait on her porch for the bus, even when it was pouring down rain while everyone else from the block sat inside and watched tv? Came to my birthday party - sans present - every. single. year. My birthday parties tended to be pretty fancy for the time; my mom did things like rent out the local video arcade, or took everyone to the movies, or Kings Dominion... and the cakes were fantastic. The one year we did the video arcade? My cake was a giant pacman, with a smaller cake as the power-dot and cupcakes as the point-dots. Pretty nifty... and yet, I'd spend the whole party sulking because Donna was there, making sure my guests didn't actually talk to me, breaking my presents, and telling me how ugly I was. Or that so-and-so CuteBoy from school thought I was a slimy, diseased little gecko. Oh well, at least she was creative.)

Anyway, I did get some really spiff stuff for my birthday and I'm quite happy with my gifts...

From one friend, I got a heart-rate monitor/pedometer watch. This thing has some serious bells and whistles... I'm still figuring it all out, but it does record my steps, check my heart rate, keep track of milage, displays my calories burned, etc. I've had a couple of problems with it, the first of which is a design flaw and the second of which is my inability to actually remember how to use any sort of complicated gidget.... the first problem is that the step-meter turns itself off after 15 minutes of inactivity; which means if I'm sitting at my computer desk for a bit, I have to remember to turn it back on. The second problem is that I'm constantly, accidentally recording my current heart rate as my resting heart rate. I think (I'm not sure, but I think) that this is botching up my calories burned number, since if my "resting" heart rate is recorded as 120, it doesn't think I'm working very hard when my heart rate is 150.

She also gave me a bottle of sunscreen (yes, thank you for the hint, my sunburn is much better...) and a flashlight for my walk.

My other friend got me a waistpack for my walking that carries one water bottle and has a multitude of pockets and straps. I'll be road-testing that on Sunday, but so far is seems pretty good. If nothing else, it'll STOP me from hurting my collarbone with wearing my shoulder-bag incorrectly. (I've got a nice wear-spot on my chest... dang, when did I get these bony things just under my neck? weird! weird!)

So, I'm all decked out for my walking!

Nineteen...

I think my Wii Fit Scale is on crack, since last week it told me I was up, and my official weigh in ended up being down, and ditto this week. I expected to go in to my weigh in and have Fran make that terrible little face; I call it the Weight Smile. She sort of tilts her head to one side, take a deeeeeeep breath, then lets it out with a very quick, "You'reupalittle,notmuch,tho,just.6
andthathappensyouknow." And then she smiles. It's a painful grimacing mockery of a smile, and honestly, in the last 18 months that I've been a member of weight watchers, I think I've grown to hate that smile more than anything else.

But instead, I was down 1.4 pounds. This is good; and at the same time, bad.

I have lost another daily point.

(On the plus side, this should be the last point I ever lose, since I don't intend to try to lose more weight than will take me to 130 pounds. Or at least, I don't intend, officially, to get my weight down below that...)

Down to 19 points a day. That's approximately 950 - 1,330 calories a day.

I don't know why moving down fifty calories a day is worrying me so much.

Maybe it's because I don't know many people who are down in that weight range. Most of the people I know who are at their goal weight are lots taller than I am; Thomas, for his maintenance range, eats about 38-40 points a day. (I know, he doesn't really count...) Other people I know in maintenance weigh in around 140 - 180 pounds... (lucky tall people!) and are eating 22-27 points a day, or have given up on points...

Sometimes I feel like I could pile all my food for the day onto one full-sized plate and a "normal" person could eat that as an entire meal. (You know I used to...)

It's a little frightening.