Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank by Celia Rivenbark Read Free Book Online Page B

ballet. Like most ballets, the plot is paper thin but, hell-o, what can I say? The male lead gave me new interest in ballet. On account of he was FG. Fully gorgeous, I mean. I saw Baryshnikov perform years before he was reduced to playing one of Carrie’smany boyfriends on
Sex and the City,
so I know a little about how a well-placed man in tights can give you a, uh, deeper appreciation of ballet.
    Coppelia
is pretty to watch, I suppose, but the plot is maddening: handsome dude falls in lust with a mannequin, thinking she’s real (he’s purty, but he’s dumb); his fiancee finds out and gets jealous; fiancee exposes mannequin for the fake she is; handsome dude and fiancee have huge church wedding and live happily ever after.
    Okay, how stupid do you have to be to go ahead and marry a man who just dumped you
for a mannequin?
But this is ballet, friends, and it’s all part of the damn magic.
    I don’t “get” ballet. Take
Giselle,
for instance. In this one, a simple peasant girl named, well, Giselle, falls in love with a nobleman in disguise. When she finds out who he really is, and that he’s betrothed to another, she has, like, a giant hissy fit and dances herself to death. Literally! Of course, because it’s ballet, nothing is as it seems, and Giselle’s love survives being buried. Unfortunately, she never manages to shake the Evil Queen. (Ballet is real big on Evil Queens.) She goes back to the grave, and her true love grieves for her forever and ever. This doesn’t exactly put us all in the mood for pie, now, does it?
    Or what about
Firebird,
another famous ballet, in which a guy named Ivan wanders into a “mysterious forest” inhabited by a magical firebird. Ivan cons the bird out of a “magic feather” that will keep him safe from the evil in the garden,including spells by mad magicians and such. I know. I’ll bet you could’ve used a magic feather the last time you were “enchanted” by a mad magician, too, huh? Anyway, the fire-bird returns to help and lulls the forest monsters to sleep. In return, Ivan agrees to smash the magic egg that has cast a spell of evil over the forest forever. In the end, life gets really good in the forest, though there is no mention of cable.
    All of this is fine if you’re into it, but I’d much rather watch Denzel in
Man on Fire
for like the bazillionth time. That part where he puts the explosives up the bad guy’s ass and then sets the timer and hands it to him? Now
that’s
entertainment!
    The princess loves ballet, though, so I attempt to be supportive.
    Over the years, I’ve discovered that there are two kinds of ballet moms at our school: First, there’s the kind that stays the whole hour watching anxiously through the cut-out window, enjoying every inch of little Cherish Rae’s progress while monitoring the student-teacher ratio in case she needs to complain to the director. Which she will.
    And then, there’s the other kind, like me. We use that same hour to buy an entire week’s worth of groceries, careening back into the parking lot just as class ends and the kids are getting their hands stamped with cute little red-ink ballerina figures.
    When she was really little, I used to try to con my kid. “You were great!” I gushed, trying desperately to hide theeighteen bags of groceries that had magically overflowed into the backseat. Well. Her father believes there’s a grocery fairy—why can’t she?
    There’s also the carpool fairy, which would be me, if you can envision any fairy being twenty pounds overweight and wearing a shirt her kid tie-dyed over UNC sweatpants.
    I’ve chauffered my daughter all over town this summer, not just to ballet. I have to admit that I’m going to miss, sort of, the backseat chatter that has kept me amused and confused.
    You see, little girls have a ginormous capacity to giggle at things that no one over ten would ever “get.” My personal least favorite is the game where one says, “I one an elevator,” and the next