showcase pictures

Some pictures from Sunday's little showcase, and dinner afterwards :)

my visiting family and friends from class...all together! (can't see half the table here...)


my partner for swan lake, gregory


no pointe shoes...that's why i look so short on the right there :(


weird one, but some random moment during my gamzatti variation

mini performance & dinner

Tonight was our little student showcase performance, and it was quite fun.

I'll write more tomorrow, but it went well overall. My variation was a little shaky but it came together. Our group piece from Swan Lake was fun, though. We had a nice little audience, bigger than we were anticipating, and in general it was good.

Some of my family came to visit, so afterwards a whole bunch of us went out to dinner to celebrate the performance and a belated celebration of my graduation. There were a lot more of us than planned, but it was really nice to have both my real family and my ballet family (ok, corny) there together for once. We had yummy Japanese food and laughed a lot.

More details (and photos hopefully) to come, but big thank you to all who came to support us and to my friends and family!

happy almost new year

Wow, last post of the year!

2007 has come and gone, quite quickly actually. It's certainly been a year of ups and downs, but it is definitely ending on a high note.

I'd like to take this time to thank all of the people who have made this year special, especially the last few months...I hope they know who they are. I am so grateful to everyone who has helped me along the way, given me opportunities to prove myself, and showed me who I can be. There are too many people to name individually, but a big hug and thank you to all my family, friends (near and far), and just everyone.

I have lots planned for 2008, but one of the biggest lessons I learned this last year was that plans are not set in stone and sometimes it's better to just have a general direction you're headed in and let the wind take you where it will.

Another lesson of the year: People can be your greatest asset or biggest hindrance, but only if you let them.

With that said, my new year's resolutions:
1. be more optimistic
2. let go of things that keep me down
3. take more time to stop and smell the roses

I found this quiz thingy online and just thought it was interesting what qualities make a year good or bad. My answers:

Compared to this time last year, you are:
Happier (much, much, much)
Less happy

Compared to this time last year, you are:
Healthier (minus the bursitis)
Less healthy

Compared to this time last year, you have:
More money (I got paid for the 2 things I love doing)
Less money

Compared to this time last year, you have:
More friends
Less friends

Compared to this time last year, your career prospects:
Are better (graduation soon!)
Are worse

Compared to this time last year, your life is:
More exciting (tenfold)
Less exciting

Compared to this time last year, you are:
More optimistic about the world
Less optimistic about the world

Compared to this time last year, you have:
More things to be thankful for (far more)
Less things to be thankful for


Happy New Year 2008 to all! Hope it's a good one :)

back in the city

Every time I get my first glimpse of New York City's skyline when returning from a trip, either to rehearsal in CT or home to Boston, I get the same excitement and chill I first got when I moved to the city.

Except tonight, the chill was from a cold coming on :(

Yes, it's that time of year, and I'm getting a cold from being rundown. Can't imagine why. But I'm trying hard to fight it so I can make it through the rest of the semester alive.

Besides a sore throat and headache, my Thanksgiving break was nice. Visiting friends and family was good, and having some time away from my cramped apartment full of work was refreshing. I also got time for my body to rest before the final push of Nutcracker month.

[pretending to eat all the pie on Thanksgiving. yum]

[one of my dogs, Lucy, who is so cutely posing with the huge xmas tree we just put up]

[we -- well, my mom -- always decorate for christmas soon after thanksgiving for parties and such, and because the house is crazy we go ALL OUT. This would be just part of the massive Nutcracker collection that lines the entire counter]

Went back to rehearsal today...only one more Sunday left til we're onstage! I really can't wait. Mohegan Sun seats 10,000 people! That's almost more than all the theaters I've ever danced in put together -- and I've been in some big places.

Besides that I have some other things to look forward to. The big internship I interviewed for last week left me a message before break offering me the position for the spring. I have my big article due this week. I'm finishing up my last issue (before I graduate) of our school paper The Monitor. I'm being interviewed for this new dance website balletconnections.com and may possibly get another writing gig from that.

As always, a ton of stuff is going on. I thrive on opportunity, but let's hope this cold doesn't keep me down.

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 :)

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