Happy Birthday Mom!

 A very special Happy Birthday to my amazing mom today!

She has an incredible strength to her and I am eternally grateful for her constant love, support, encouragement, generosity, and role-modeling. She is a wonderful mother not only to my brother and I but to all of her many dance students who love her so. Thank you, mom, for all you do. Have a wonderful day!

    

PS- These are really awful pictures...for some reason we don't have a single decent picture from the past 5 years together, haha...

A Ballet Birthday

Happy Birthday to my best ballet teacher...KAT WILDISH!

Happy Birthday Mom!

Since I can't sing it to her in person (except maybe via phone, but I can't sing haha) I figured it would be best to wish her happy birthday on here!

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear Mom
Happy Birthday to you

Miss you Mom! Love you :)

Another Ballet Birthday (this time, not mine :)

This post is kind of irrelevant, but I couldn't resist sharing these pictures.

Good times out for Kat's birthday :)

Home, (Bitter)Sweet Home

(me and the family - brother, grandmother, mom)

This past week was literally my first time having more than two days off from life in exactly one year. Between rehearsals, extra school courses, internships, and everything I haven’t had a chance to breathe until now. To start of my 3 weeks of freedom I went home to Boston to visit my family whom I haven’t seen since Christmas (imagine, they’re only an hour flight away and I never see them!).

Since leaving home four years ago I’ve always missed everyone but dreaded making the trip to visit home. It’s just something about reverting back to the old ways…even for just a short period of time. Going from big city independence to small town boredom isn’t necessarily something to look forward to. There’s not much to do in our area, and since I don’t have my driver’s license (God bless public transportation) I can’t really be free.

However, this past visit was really nice. Unlike most visits, I had no looming pressure of school or performances ahead, so I didn’t feel like I was missing anything by taking time off. And being summertime, all of my family and friends had time to reminisce. We had a lot of laughs and it was a nice break.

(friends reminscing and dancing in my living room)

We celebrated my (belated) birthday, and I got to visit my mom’s new dance studio (it’s quite pink inside, like tradition…the last studio was pink for 50 years!). I got to see all my friends I grew up with and even relive some old dance routines (haha).

(me dancing in my mom's studio)

As I was growing up in my small town driving 2 hours a day to commute to ballet I always regretted not being born in a big city. Looking back, though, as a New York City resident (with high rent and hardly enough space to stretch out) I love that I have that alternative to look forward to for a change whenever I visit. No matter how far I go in this world, that place will always be my home.

(my mom and I)

Another Ballet Birthday

performing Little Swans in 'Swan Lake' at an intensive on my 14th birthday (me on far right)

Today was my 19th birthday. Not only do birthdays make me feel like life is passing all too quickly before my eyes, but they make me think back to how I spent my past birthdays. I’ve had a lot of laughs over the years, but there isn’t a single birthday I can remember that hasn’t revolved around dancing.

The earliest birthdays I have concrete memories of are around age 8 or 9, when I would have my close group of friends over (which remained the same set of people for years) for a sleepover. Maybe “normal” kids play silly games or watch movies at their parties, but growing up under the dance reign of my family‘s studio, my parties were quite different. We would MAKE movies! I remember assigning each of my friends to a different dance in our remake of “A Chorus Line.” In another one, we all did a dance and lip sync to our favorite singers (I admit: many a Spice Girl theme…). Though not musical in nature, another of our birthday films that stands out in memory is “Who Killed the Rabbi?” at my make believe Bat Mitzvah on my 13th birthday (don’t ask hahaha)!

As the years passed, however, I started attending ballet intensives for increasing amounts of time over the summer and was almost always away for my birthday. My first summer away was for two weeks at a performing camp in upstate Vermont, beginning on the Monday of my birthday. Not only was I thrilled with the immediate independence I had by turning 12 years old away from my parents, but I was so happy with the surprise party my counselor, roommates, and new friends of 24 hours had thrown me! I still remember the moment when they locked me in my room to set up the common room with balloons.

I spent one more birthday at that camp before attending a different camp a year later: one where I would soon spend 2 full years of my life. My two summers here were perhaps the most fun I had because I made 3 really close friends who remain pen-pals to this day. For my birthday during both summers they completely surprised me by cleaning and decorating my room with streamers and confetti. Also, the year I turned 14 I got a later curfew for “coming of age” and so we went to get ice cream late (8pm?) just because we could. Another summer I remember staying up until midnight on the 30th with my roommates just so they could sing to me when it officially turned 12:01am on my birthday.

More importantly, during these years (as well as all birthdays since) I was always dancing. We would have a regular full day of classes and rehearsals at whatever camp I was at, and most of the time I was too shy or quiet to tell the teachers of my birthday. I would treat these ballet days like any other day of work, and only celebrate later back at the dorms. Even though other dancers had their birthdays during the intensive and got to wear special leotards or have the class sing to them, I always seemed to remain quiet during ballet. Even my birthday couldn’t disrupt the work.

Unfortunately (or, maybe fortunately?) this remains true years later, today, on my 19th birthday. I spent the day working at ballet, even though I did not attend an intensive (for the first time in 13 yrs) this year. Though the little kids at the ballet camp I’m working at sang “Happy Birthday” 3 times and I received several homemade presents and cards, it was still work. Yesterday in open class they sang to me as well, an unexpected surprise. But later this afternoon, for reasons unknown even to me, I decided to take the open ballet class that I don‘t particularly enjoy anymore. Maybe I felt it was tradition that I dance on my birthday, or maybe I just felt like I shouldn’t take a day off.

Either way, it was work. Dancing, and being in the dance world in general, has become work rather than play - even on a birthday. It’s interesting to see that on a day of celebration I still feel the annoyances, frustrations, and pains of ballet - and at the same time, there’s nothing better I can imagine doing on my birthday than dancing. It is the element that has remained a constant throughout the years.

a birthday before the ballet days