Nutcracker

I am woefully behind, as usual.  Lots has happened that I have fanciful delusions I will be able to catch up and write about, including our amazing trip to the Philippines. For now, however, my loyal readership will have to content themselves with this quick little post.

Violet and I recently had the opportunity to take in a production of the Nutcracker ballet.  The local civic youth ballet company apparently holds an annual Girl Scout night, where they perform only for area Girl Scout troops.  I am friends with the leader of the Daisy troop  at Jack's school, and she happened to have two last-minute cancellations the night of the performance.  Jack had absolutely no interest in going, but Violet had been dying to ever since her friend (one of Jack's classmates' sisters) said she was going also. The performance started at 6:00, and I heard from my friend the tickets were available literally at 5:00.  I crammed Violet into a Christmas dress, shoved a granola bar in her face by way of dinner, threw her in her car seat, and zipped on down to the theater just as quickly as the terrible rush hour traffic would let me.  We scored an awesome parking spot and arrived with several minutes to spare.

There was a brief synopsis of the ballet in the program they handed me, so I tried to explain to Violet what was going to happen on the stage.  She was exponentially more preoccupied with bouncing up and down on those spring-loaded seats they always have in theaters.  She was having a hard time keeping hers down, because she is so little, and I finally had to maneuver myself so that one of my legs was resting on the corner of her seat cushion to keep it from popping back up.  She was still trying to figure out the chair situation when the lights went down and the music started up.

I had warned Violet early - and often - that she had to be completely quiet during the performance.  No talking, whatsoever.  It is a lesson that we constantly reinforce at church, and it is one that she has taken to heart - mostly.  It turns out that my mother and mother-in-law's granddaughter has a very hard time NOT talking for any length of time, go figure.  When Violet was much younger, we tried to compromise by telling her to whisper if she needed to tell us something.  That quickly backfired, however, because Violet has the loudest, most sibilant whisper you've ever heard.  I think it's louder than my regular speaking voice.  More than once, she has embarrassed us by shout-whispering, "I don't like this!" during a lull in the service.

And so it went during this Nutcracker performance.  Even though she promised me, "No talking! I'm not going to talk, Mama!" it wasn't five minutes into the show when she whispered at the top of her lungs, "I want to go home!"  I had been prepared for that possibility, though.  I was actually sort of hoping for it, since I had a prior engagement at 8:00 that night, and I was shoehorning this show into my already packed evening.  I told Violet to give it a few more minutes.  If she still wanted to leave, we would go.  However, once the music and dancing really started in earnest, she changed her mind and we made it through to the end.

Don't get me wrong, she still whispered and fidgeted throughout the entire performance.  But if there were any performance where that type of behavior would be ok, this was it.  In fact, there was a girl sitting behind us (we were in the fourth row) who apparently wearied of seeing the same two dancers come out for solos.  The Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier dance a pas de deux in the second act, then the Sugar Plum Fairy comes out for a solo, and finally the Cavalier comes out for his solo.  When the Cavalier came out the second time, before the music reached its full volume, the little girl behind us sighed loudly, "Not again!"  So at least Violet didn't do that.

I don't know how much of the ballet Violet really understood.  The one part that has stuck with her is when Clara's little brother, Fritz, breaks the wooden nutcracker in a jealous rage at the party.  The day after the performance, Violet kept saying, "Remember when that naughty boy broke the nutcracker?  Why he do that?"  When people ask her what her favorite part was, she answers, "When the boy broke the nutcracker."

The ballet ended at around 8:05 PM, which was well past Violet's bedtime and, more importantly, past the 8:00 start time of my other commitment.  I was packing up, but Violet noticed that all the dancers had come out on stage and audience members were lining up to have them sign their programs.

She asked, "What are they doing?"

I told her that the dancers were signing programs.

"I want to do that!" she said.

Considering how late we were, I told Violet, "No, honey.  We don't have time.  Besides, those are just regular kids like you.  You won't even remember who they are in a couple of days."  (Since this was a production of the civic youth ballet company, most of the principal parts were played by children or teenagers.  A couple of exceptions included the hopefully thick-skinned Cavalier.)

She seemed satisfied with that, but she asked me to take a picture of the boy who played the Nutcracker prince.  It seemed an odd request, but I just wanted to get out of there at that point, so I complied.

As we walked to the car, she told me, "I wish I had gotten to say hi to that boy."

"The Nutcracker boy?" I asked in surprise.

"Yes," she said.

"Oh, um, well, you can write him a letter," I said.

"Yes," she said, "I will write him a letter.  I will draw a picture of his face.  You can write the words."

I asked her if she liked any of the girls who were dancing.

"No," she said, "but don't tell them.  I will just draw a picture of the boy that I like.  I will draw a picture of his face."

I thought she would fall asleep as soon as we got in the car, but she chatted about "the boy I like" and "the naughty boy who broke the nutcracker" all the way home.  The teenage years should be fun.