True Confessions

Every so often, Brittainy and I get on to the subject of sports and activities. To her amusement (and my retrospective surprise), we have discovered that at one time or another in my childhood I participated or was given lessons in a wide range of activities: practically everything except skiing and polo. Here's a partial list:

Girl Scouts
Cleaning (no really, Mom had me go out with professional cleaners a couple of times)
Cooking (in our family this is a three-year crash course which also involves food shopping)
Sewing (yes, I can and have made my own clothes: a few of them)
Flying (honest; they let me steer the plane for a few minutes. SCARY!)
Golf
Tennis
Interior Decorating (including painting and making curtains)
Flower Arrangement
Knitting
Crocheting
Spinning and Weaving (don't ask)
Yoga
Pilates
Air Hockey
Ping Pong
Archery
BB Guns
Paintball
Soccer
Canoing
Kayaking
Sailing
Whitewater Rafting
Marksmanship (they let me fire a handgun, which was heavy, at the CIA. I was very proud of hitting my man-shaped target right in the heart.)
Horseback Riding
Flute
Theater (lots of theater and acting over the years)
Hairdressing (don't ask about that either)
Voice/Choir
Piano
Ballroom Dancing
Swimming
Fencing
Volleyball

It's been a long and varied history, and I'm sure I've left a few things out. Spelunking, backpacking, and wall climbing, for instance. But the first love of my young life doesn't appear on this list either. You're going to laugh, gentle reader, but my first love was ballet.

Yes, ballet. Tutus and slippers and all the rest of it. Between the ages of seven and nine I was permitted to attend a very fine ballet school in Boston, and got to see the Boston Ballet perform the Nutcracker, and was a snowflake and a little Russian girl and all that sort of thing.


I blame my enduring love of dance and music on this early exposure. The reason I mention it now is because one of my all-time favorite ballets, which was made into what is easily my favorite Disney movie, is being re-released. I refer, of course, to Sleeping Beauty.


What I love best about the movie---besides the fact that they miraculously got the cultural feel and the worldview more or less right---is that they used Tchaikovsky's original score from the ballet. And it's coming out again, and is an enduring classic, which just makes me happy. :-)

There are a few things I'd like to do before I die. One is to travel to England and Scotland, the Holy Land and Greece. Another is to ride in a horse-drawn carriage (silly, I know; you'd think I would have done that by now). And the third is to see a ballet performance of Sleeping Beauty.