Girl Scout Troop Trip to Boston: On Friday, We Explore the Aquarium and Attend the Ballet

Our last full day in Boston was another sausage day in the hotel breakfast room. Moral of the story: eat ALL the bacon when it's there, for you never know when it will be your last bacon.

We had a bit of a lighter itinerary on this day, because I wasn't sure how long each of our planned activities would take. First up: the bus to Airport Station, the subway to Aquarium Station, and then a short walk to the New England Aquarium!

My college kid and I have been low-key obsessed with eels after listening to this Gastropod episode together--

--so we were both delighted to see a real, live eel minding its own eely business:

Here is more interesting information about eels, because I know that now you, too, care a LOT about them.

Also, a scuba diver:

And seahorses! 

Did you know that seahorses are extremely challenging to keep happy and healthy in captivity? Their food pretty much has to boop them on the nose before they'll bite it, and if anything upsets them in the slightest they'll simply die about it. But, of course, it's not like the oceans themselves are generally humane places for sea creatures to live anymore, either. They like having stuff to hang onto, though, so this little dude seems pretty okay with life:

This piranha and I became best friends:

And here's a super rare blue lobster:

I'm also low-key obsessed with lobsters ever since that time I drove through the Maine woods for several hours while listening to an hours-long radio program on their local NPR station about the dwindling local lobster industry. Thanks to global warming, the range of the lobster is steadily moving northward, so much so that eventually New England lobsters will no longer be an American product!

Along with seahorses, jellyfish are my other favorite ocean creature to watch:

After a long morning at New England Aquarium, the troop walked over to Faneuil Hall Marketplace for a late lunch--

My cheesesteak was so bland that I wondered if I'd missed a sauce station somewhere, but I was starving so I hoovered it down anyway.

--and to finish everyone's Junior Ranger badges!

Because Junior Ranger badges aren't the comfiest thing to wear on the back of one's Girl Scout vest, I bought Boston National Historic Park patches for the kids to wear, instead. And I bought myself the 1993 National Park Passport Stamp Set because it features Boston National Park. That was one of the two souvenirs I purchased on this trip!

Does it count as a souvenir if a kid buys a bunch of candy, but then eats all of that candy before she gets home? Because that happened, too...

At one point I was supposed to be meeting up with my own two kids in Faneuil Hall Marketplace, but I lost them. I texted them to ask where they were, they texted back to ask where *I* was, and in response I sent them this photo:

The teenager arrived within a minute.

I hadn't been sure about how long visiting the aquarium and finishing up the Junior Ranger badges would take, so when everyone had their Junior Ranger badges in hand by 2pm, we had tons of free time left until our 7:30 Boston Ballet performance of Cinderella. The kids had a mini meeting and decided that people could head off to do their own thing until then, and we divvied up the chaperones to support them. I ended up with my own two kids and an afternoon agenda of bookstores and the Boston Massacre Site.

The kids were navigating, though, so first we walked a complete circle and saw Faneuil Hall again!

And then we figured out how to simply put away our phones and stay on the Freedom Trail path, and that led us handily right to the Old State House--

--and the Boston Massacre Site:

We'd only missed its anniversary by exactly ten days!

We were actually walking towards Old South Meeting House when we saw Commonwealth Books in a little alley to our left, and we ended up staying there for a looooooong time:

Here's the teenager examining a book that I excitedly brought to her and which I would actually end up buying. It's an 1899 first-edition book about our collective Special Interest, Gilles de Rais! The author definitely thinks he's a serial killer, which I do NOT, buuut the book has handmade pages, many of which remain uncut, and is in overall beautiful condition and a total steal at $35. I'm not really the book collector that the teenager is, but I couldn't pass up such a lovely copy on one of my favorite topics:

We had quite the trek over to the next bookstore I really wanted to see, but it was worth it because Porter Square Books was the BEST bookstore I think I've ever been in! It was super comfy with nice bathrooms (yay!), and check out the awesome displays:

This one was a display of each of the Boston Bruins as a book:

Lol at these poor guys!

I learned here that there's a new sequel to The One and Only Ivan! The One and Only Ruby is on hold for me at the library as we speak.

Fun fact: my college kid STILL won't read The One and Only Ivan! She says it's because it's "overhyped," but you and I both know it's because it has animals that are sad inside it. 

Even after all the wandering and candy eating and bookshopping, we still had time for one last stroll along the waterfront--

--and then just one more quick visit back to Granary Burial Ground because the college kid hadn't seen it on this trip yet and *I* hadn't seen Paul Revere's grave!!!

The burial ground was closed by the time we got there, so I Google Imaged what Paul Revere's grave looked like, then we peered at the burial ground through the bars of the fence until we spotted it. Success!!!

Time to go to the ballet, then!

Citizens Opera House is in walking distance of Granary Burial Ground, and it is the prettiest building I have ever been in. The auditorium is absolutely stunning, and I didn't even think to get a photo of the ceiling, which is even prettier!

The ballet was also the prettiest thing I've ever seen! I really thought that I'd seen myself some ballet, with all the university productions I've been to, but whoah. I. Have seen. NOTHING compared to this. I barely even followed the fairly simple plot of "Cinderella," I was so enchanted by just the sights and sounds and pretty dancing. My only regret is that they only showed Cinderella's carriage for, like, five seconds, and it was the prettiest part of the entire ballet!

Interestingly, the ballet had the traditional casting of male dancers in the roles of Cinderella's step-sisters, but they didn't do any gender-related jokes with it, and the program had a blurb about their choice and the ballet's partnership with the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. I've been much more aware of the possibilities of men dancing en pointe this year, as our local university has a male-bodied dancer who dances en pointe with the corps in university productions, and my partner, the teenager, and I went to a performance of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo recently, also hosted by the university. Considering that this school year the teenager danced in a new Nutcracker reworked to remove its yellowface and heteronormative gender stereotyping, AND a new La Bayadere reworked to remove all its racist components, it feels like there is suddenly a revolution going on to wake up the world of ballet to all the possibilities of diversity in representation... just in time for my kid to graduate and miss out on most of it, dang it!

Ah, well. We can still enjoy the ballet world's growing diversity in representation from the audience, if not from the stage and the wings.

I think the kids were well-paid for their sophisticated choice of the ballet, in that they all seemed to have loved it, too. We left the opera house along with all the other fancy people--

--and went back by subway and bus to our comfy hotel rooms for one last night. 

The next day, it was one last hotel breakfast (still no bacon, sob!), one last airport shuttle, one last adventure through security, and two more flights home. The kids had each earned a Girl Scout badge, a Junior Ranger badge, and a fun patch. They'd navigated airports and TSA, mapped their way around Boston, figured out public transportation, and learned the social scripts for Italian bakeries, Chinese restaurants, and throwing tea into Boston Harbor. They ate new foods, tried new activities, talked to strangers, and visited a college campus. 

In other words, it was a perfect trip!

Here's our entire trip:

• Day 1 in Boston: Underground Donut Tour, Old North Church, Paul Revere's House, New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston City Hall Plaza Playground, Boston Public Market, and the North End
• Day 2 in Boston: Tours of Harvard and Simmons, Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and Chinatown
• Day 3 in Boston: New England Aquarium, Faneuil Hall, bookstores, and Boston Ballet

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Three New Ballet Skirts, or, It's So Fun To Sew with Slippery Fabrics /s

 

The world of children's ballet is a Whole Thing, y'all. And I'm not even talking about the body politics or the stresses of casting or the superb posture training. My teenager has danced in the same pre-college ballet program since the age of approximately four, and so you'd think the uniform would be pretty standard. Leotard, tights, and shoes, and you can even skip the tights if you're dancing Russian-style.

But no. Every year, and sometimes every semester, is just a new, annoying way to spend my money because these people cannot seem to make up their minds about how they'd like the children to dress! At one point in time, several ages wore the same leotard color, so that switching to a new leo color was a momentous achievement. Then they decided that every level should have its own color. Annoying to buy all new leotards each year, but at least there was something of a resale market. Then they decided that kids could only wear camisole-style leotards, so we all had to go buy new ones. Then they kept everything the same for a year, which was cool, but in the last month of classes decided that the kids should wear a completely different color of leotard and ballet skirt just for the recital--here, by the way, is that white leotard and skirt that my kid wore exactly once. Then they decided that you could wear any style of leotard you wanted as long it was the right color, but they had two different levels wearing two different colors of green, and do you know how hard it is to tell online if a leotard is more mint green or forest green (this one is neither mint NOR forest, it was determined)? And don't even get me started about the level that had to wear "grey"--Friends, there are a lot of greys in the world! Then there was a year in which they did uniform by ages but grouped several ages into a single class, and that's how we discovered that my teenager is the only teenager exactly her age in the program, because she got to be the only black leotard in a sea of burgundy, and guess how much she did not love that.

Over the years we've gone from kids can wear ballet skirts to every class (everyone bought SO MANY skirts) to kids can never wear them ever (after, of course, everyone had bought and owned and loved 4-6 different skirts) to now kids can wear them on Saturdays. I think. For now.

My teenager is, as you might imagine if you've ever known somebody who submitted daily to a strict dress code, thrilled by the upcoming Ballet Skirt Saturdays. Because I can never just buy something and be done with it, I found this pattern for an asymmetrical SAB-style ballet skirt from DsSewingPatterns on etsy, ran it by the teenager, she approved, and then I bought it and we went fabric shopping.

Because fabric shopping is the funnest part!

Four-way stretch isn't really my jam, nor is sewing thin, slippery mesh and tulle, but the teenager had a fabulous time picking out a few fabrics to try, and she was so excited to have me sew them up for her that she literally stood next to the table as I worked, just, like, watching me stitch while listening to my Dolls of Our Lives podcast. I felt very attended to! 

Luna helped, too:

Fortunately, this is one of the best, easiest, and most straightforward patterns I've ever used. The magic is in the cut, which, as you can see if you look closely at the template below, IS asymmetrical!

This means that you can wear it truly asymmetrical, with one side longer, or the way my teenager likes it, with the longer part at the booty for a little more coverage.

The photo below is technically my muslin, although I have a Depression-era fear and loathing (thanks, Mamma and Pappa!) of wasting fabric, so I got the teenager to choose something on clearance that she would still reluctantly wear. She's got those October Saturdays pinned down now!

I did alter the pattern quite a bit in length after sewing this muslin, which is why you should always sew a muslin. Fortunately, the saving grace of this thin, slippery, asshole fabric is that at least it doesn't ravel, so I could just trim the bottom to my preferred length and didn't even have to hem it, hallelujah.

That spiderweb fabric also worked out perfectly when turned inside-out to make the black waistband on this, the most glorious of all ballet skirts:

My teenager and I are absolutely enamored with this skirt. To be honest, she's probably not gonna wear any of the others as long as this one is around. It's a sheer black mesh with these flowers and sequins appliqued on it, and it. Is. Stunning. Now imagine it in motion!

I'm just going to show you a few more close-up photos of it, I'm so proud of it:

Y'all aren't going to believe this, but over winter break the pre-college ballet department reorganized the levels AGAIN, so after having all the kids in my kid's class wearing black leotards all semester, even the ones who were technically supposed to wear burgundy, and me thinking that my kid was going to be wearing black leotards six days a week for the next two years and therefore buying her even more black leotards for Christmas, now they've decided that everyone should go back to... BURGUNDY. You know, the color that LITERALLY NOBODY WORE LAST SEMESTER. BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL WEARING BLACK. A CLASS FULL OF KIDS WHO NOW OWN SEVERAL BLACK LEOTARDS THAT FIT, AND THEY WANT THEM TO BUY SIX DAYS' WORTH OF BURGUNDY LEOTARDS INSTEAD. JUST FOR THE SECOND SEMESTER OF THE EXACT SAME CLASS FULL OF THE EXACT SAME CHILDREN.

I participated in the Great Burgundy Leotard Scramble of 2019, and I am not going back to that nightmare scenario of battling every other parent in the class for the, like, five burgundy leotards, total, that exist in the world--burgundy is not a popular leotard color for the ballet world at large!!! They can put whatever they want on their dress code, but they have pushed me, personally, too far. I bought my teenager a shit ton of black leotards back in August, and a shit ton more black leotards over Christmas, and two shit tons of black leotards is what she will be wearing to class next semester whether they like it or not. 

Sigh. Do you want to make bets on how many classes until I cave?

An Officer and a Mouse Dance Onto the Stage: Ten Photos from Nutcracker 2022

 

Another Nutcracker season is done and dusted! My anxiety eye twitch hasn't yet gotten the news, nor has my brain at approximately 3:00 every morning, but any moment now I'm sure all the stress of that most stressful week of the year will just magically drain away and leave me ready for some relaxing holiday cheer.

A sampling of the week's greatest triumphs and greatest WTFs:

• I found out that the wig department has been having children share wigs, and that this has apparently been going on for YEARS. How on earth there is not a ballet program-wide lice outbreak every single December is beyond me, although the semester does end less than a week after the show wraps, so maybe parents never connect the dots as to why their kid suddenly has lice two weeks before Christmas.
• When the kid playing Fritz in all performances and with no understudy got sick midway through the third of five performances, another kid had to step into the role with zero prior rehearsals, and that kid freaking NAILED it. The kid's wig was terrible, though. All the kid wigs are terrible.

The weirdest thing that happened, though, was the Thursday evening premiere performance. I dropped my kid off for her warm-up class, then figured I'd walk around campus for a while, get a little exercise before sitting down for two hours. 

My walk, though, was super weird. Normally, the university campus is bright and welcoming, and I've spent tons of evenings moseying along the paths around the buildings and through the woods and by the creek while feeling safe as houses. But on this night, campus most strongly resembled the opening seven minutes of a horror movie. I'd be walking along a brightly-lit path, then take another step and be in a pool of absolute darkness. Thirty feet ahead the lamps would be lit just like normal, then turn a corner and suddenly I was thrust back into darkness. I took my entire walk, but I was definitely about to be murdered by ghost-wolves or skeleton creek pirates the entire time.

I circled back to the parking garage to drop off my headphones and collect my ticket, then headed over to the theater. But it just kept being weird! As I was walking out of the theater's parking garage, whole well-dressed families kept walking in, clearly having just left that same theater. Was there some kind of early sensory-friendly Nutcracker for children that had just ended, I wondered? And maybe I didn't know about it because they didn't need their starring dancers, Mouse #2 or Officer #5?

And then as I got closer, I started seeing in some of the family groups small children wearing their hair in the very distinctive bun on the top of the head, hair slicked down smooth hairstyle that the program dictates for Soldiers and Angels. But... they were all leaving the theater, as they would if the show was over and their parents had picked them up from the check-out table next to the Green Room and they were headed home.

Had... I lost time? Was I, in fact, having a mental break? Had the ghost-wolves put me in a trance every time I walked through their darkened domain? Because indeed, the front of the theater was PACKED with people, all leaving. 

As I reached the theater, confused and wondering if I was safe to drive home or if my kid had brought her license or if I needed to call Matt and tell him I might have had a seizure and he needed to come get us, an usher popped her head out of the closest door and said, "Hi, are you here to see The Nutcracker?"

"Um, yes?" I said.

"It's been cancelled."

In that moment I was a parody of teenager textspeak, because I literally said, "Wut."

The bemused usher just sort of gestured around and said, "There's a power outage?"

And that was the moment that I actually looked at my own environment and noticed that oh, yes, there WAS a power outage! The theater was dark! No marquee lights, no spotlight on the two-storey Nutcracker statue in the lobby, DUH no street lights! I'd actually dropped my precious child off at a darkened theater and hadn't even noticed, had been walking in and out of the zone of the power outage for an hour and hadn't noticed the occasional building with blackened windows.

I went down to the basement to find my kid, forgetting that I own a pocket flashlight in the guise of a cell phone but still somehow by the grace of god not falling down a completely black flight of steps--yay, me!--to find SO many sobbing Soldiers and Angels at the check-out table, poor babies. My own kid was well enough, happy to have the assurance of the department that they'd find a way to re-run this canceled show.

And they did!

My teenager danced her heart out in all five performances, as well, this year, dividing her time between Team Mouse--

--and an Officer in the Nutcracker's army:

Neither role is meant to be particularly showy or special, but still. When you're an Officer, after all, you get to dance en pointe in front of an audience of thousands--

Suffolk Silhouette pointe shoes are the truth and the light!

--and when you're a Mouse, not only do you do a mousely pas de deux with your Mouse partner as one of only three people on the entire stage at the time (the third being that brat Clara, and all she's doing is sitting in bed so she barely counts), but you're a guaranteed kid favorite at every intermission walk-around:

And, of course, as always, the real treasure is the friends you make along the way, so even when they make you dance in pants and a coat and a hat, or a fat suit and a giant furry head, being a Nutcracker kid is still a guaranteed ticket to the best week of the year:

I chaperoned little kids backstage while getting to take an occasional break with my own kid who's now too big to need a chaperone--

--but mostly I hung out here and there, babysitting the world's heaviest ballet bag--

The kid isn't devoted to any one hairspray (I just buy her a big ole can of AquaNet seasonally), but MetaGrip bobby pins mean everything to her.

--watching a succession of curtains rise and fall--

--and having an occasional glass of pre-show wine while putting my butt in a seat for five Nutcrackers in 48 hours:

And now the kids' second-to-last Nutcracker year is over. It was messy and stressful and delightful. I love watching my kid dance, and I love seeing what a magical time she has with all of her sweet ballet friends. 

Just... knock on wood for me that all those shared mouse heads are lice free, okay?

Hot Chocolate and Captain Kangaroo: My Most Must-See, Trouble-Free Nutcracker Productions

Oh, just sprawling across a bank of institutional chairs and trimming one's pointe shoes with a pocket knife... you know, as one does!

Okay, did you traumatize your children or sprain yourself side-eyeing all of the weird and troubling Nutcracker productions, and now you need to look at something nice?

Yes, I might mostly fixate on the weird ones, but there ARE tons of wholesome Nutcracker productions out there in the world. Some productions are just charming and fun, with all sketchy innuendos and racist and sexist tropes deleted--you can watch these without having have any uncomfortable conversations with your children. Some productions have made especially thoughtful choices that demonstrate true equity and inclusion and mean you get to have GOOD conversations with your children--yay! And some productions stay weird, but also in a thoughtful, empowering, purposeful way--these aren't for children, necessarily, but they're interesting and entertaining for adults.

San Francisco Ballet: The Nutcracker

San Francisco Ballet boasts the first complete US production of The Nutcracker, performed in 1944. So watching any of their Nutcracker productions would be notable, but the 2004 production, in particular, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson, is super wholesome and adorable. For a pleasant change, Drosselmeyer does not give off a single insidious, creepy, villainous or sketch vibe of any sort, and actually manages to successfully play the role of an eccentric artist who's just excited to show off the cool stuff he makes, and then solicitously chaperones Clara on an overnight field trip and gets her back home safely. 

Here's a bootleg of the 2007 production on YouTube right now:

The production's conceit that Clara goes to visit the 1915 World's Fair is cute, and it makes the world showcase of Divertissements make sense. My favorite part is near the end, when the Sugar Plum Fairy briefly turns Clara into an adult ballerina so she can have a proper pas de deux with her Prince, and it's sweet but not romantic, and Clara wakes up as a child back in her bed again in the morning. 

Other fun moments: the Arabian female lead popping up out of a giant genie's bottle, a Prologue slideshow of iconic 1915 San Francisco sights, and ribbon dancing!

New York City Ballet: The Nutcracker (revised 2017)

The Nutcracker choreographed by George Balanchine is iconic, and after you've watched it once, ever afterwards you'll notice in every other production you ever see parts that were "borrowed" from his vision. Ahem.

Unfortunately, part of his iconic production that's often borrowed is more of that stupid racist imagery. Chinese Tea is particularly gross, with all the racist stereotypes and unflattering caricatures that you can imagine all just sort of stuffed into one very short number. For that reason, I don't recommend the pretty widely available 2011 New York City Ballet production, available on DVD and right now via this bootleg on YouTube:

Skim through the bootleg if it's still up, if you want, to check out the bullshit costume on the male lead of Chinese Tea. So unnecessary and offensive.

However, New York City ballet revised Chinese Tea in 2017, so now if you're lucky enough to be able to see it live, it will be uniformly delightful! I've long wanted to see this particular production, and I'm not even going to tell you how often I watch the Candy Cane dance from it:

It's part of the good vibes watchlist that I pull out when I'm bummed, along with Tom Holland lip syncing to Rihanna and the "How Far I'll Go" performance at the 2017 Academy Awards.

This updated Nutcracker, or excerpts from the DVD version, pairs with one of our favorite ballet books for children, A Very Young Dancer:

I read all of the Very Young series when I was a kid, and when my own kid was, herself, a very young dancer, I checked it out for her every year during Nutcracker season. It's about a child in the School of American Ballet who plays the role of Clara in the New York City Ballet's Nutcracker. It's written very simply, from the child's perspective, with a lot of black-and-white photos that make one feel like they're really getting a behind-the-scenes look at the school and the production. 

Joffrey Ballet: The Nutcracker

Joffrey Ballet seems to be very diligent about protecting their IP, so this is another production that I'm unable to find a bootleg for, nor can I find the 2017 PBS documentary, "Making a New American Nutcracker," about the Joffrey Ballet's production.

However, seeing this production remains on my bucket list because, as far as I know, the Joffrey Ballet is the only large-scale, prestigious company that includes a role in The Nutcracker deliberately designed for a child in their Adaptive Dance program:

I would LOVE to watch children with different abilities sharing a professional stage and performing a role that respects and includes them. I'd love to see every production behaving so thoughtfully with their casting.

Debbie Allen Dance Academy: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker

One year when we had Netflix for a month so we could catch up on Stranger Things (something that we clearly need to do again so I can watch Season 4!), the kids and I also watched Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, and now we super want to see it live someday. Will also did a biography project on Debbie Allen around that time, and Syd took some of her free online dance classes in the early days of Covid, so we're very much fans of Debbie Allen and her non-profit dance school.

Again, they do a great job protecting their IP (ahem), but they've got some approved clips of various numbers on YouTube.

Here's the Candy Cane dance:

Here's the Bollywood number:

Syd would be SO excited to learn a really fun and exciting genre like step, hip-hop, or Bollywood in concert with her classical ballet classes. It's just so cool what Debbie Allen is doing for the children in her program.

Captain Kangaroo: The Nutcracker Suite

So, if you've got little kids, this is the cutest thing EVER. In 1958, Bob Keeshan made a record in his Captain Kangaroo persona in which he narrated the story of The Nutcracker, including adding lyrics to some of the numbers, and it is charming! 

You can still buy the vinyl--

--but fortunately Archive.org also has the entire record available for streaming and download. 

I didn't discover this album until the kids were too old to appreciate it, but if I'd known about it, I'd have spent every December of their baby through preschool years with it on constant repeat--it's THAT cute!

Somerville Theatre: The Slutcracker

Okay, you know this isn't for kids. But for an adult, what a way to work through the Nutcracker trauma of your youth and/or the Nutcracker trauma of your time parenting a child ballerina!

Somerville Theatre's The Slutcracker gets amazing reviews every year, and it looks like the most fun, lighthearted, irreverent spoof of everything sketch and suss in every Nutcracker production you've ever experienced. 

Once again, I do have a ton more Nutcracker productions that I could drone on and on about genuinely loving, but not only do I have Mouse milkmaid braids to do again in a few minutes, but some MAJOR wig drama went down during last night's dress rehearsal and so I also, as you can imagine, have about fourteen different chat threads to maintain and a lot of roasting to do.

Happy Opening Night, Friends! May the Mouse Army prevail!