To Philadelphia and Back in 22 Hours

How are we already here again? Two years ago exactly, my older kid and I were on a whirlwind tour to see one last college before she made up her mind about where she was going to go to school. 

That feels so long ago, but also like it was yesterday, you know? That kid I took on her last college tour before Decision Day was still a kid. Just two years later she's still my baby, but she's no longer a child. She finished growing up there at college when I wasn't there to see it.

Now I'm supporting my younger kid as she makes the same kind of agonizing decision, and she's simultaneously the most grown-up, confident, sophisticated human I've ever had the privilege to know and also my precious four-year-old in a thrifted velvet dress, butterfly wings strapped to her back, mashing dandelion flowers into a pretend pie in her backyard mud kitchen.

How can I let that tiny little sprite out of my sight, much less drop her off and leave her at a college 700 miles away? Wasn't it just last week that she sat on Santa's lap and told him that she wanted a kitten for Christmas?

How about we just try not to think that far ahead for a bit. Let's just think about not forgetting where in this massive Economy Lot we're leaving the damn car:

Then we'll just think about the following:

• airport security
• napping during the flight
• finding the SEPTA station at the Philadelphia International Airport and buying rail tickets for later (the station in the college town apparently doesn't have its own ticket kiosk? Because... reasons?)
• booking and riding in my very first Lyft (super smooth process, but our driver did treat us to an anti-Philadelphia screed while also spurning the highway in favor of only surface streets, making the ride take so long that the Lyft app sent me a push notification asking if I was okay or was I in peril)
• getting dropped off at the campus gates and then immediately hoofing it to the nearest Starbucks for caffeine and a breakfast wrap
• taking one sip of my chocolate cream cold brew and realizing as soon as the stimulant hit my brain that we were about to be late for the Welcome event
• hoofing it back to campus at double-speed

And then, of course, exploring this beautiful college campus and learning about the school and meeting some students and staff and watching my kid make friends with the other kids on the tour. 

This school has a literal cloister why?

The kid is more of a sucker for the Collegiate Gothic architectural style than I am. Who wouldn't want to have class inside a castle?

Just between us, and knowing what y'all know about this kid, I'm pretty sure the fact that this school is basically a poorly-disguised cult for worshipping Athena is its biggest draw for her...

Statue of Athena, at which the students leave offerings. Tell me it's not a cult.

When we were given a little free time, the kid and I OBVIOUSLY beelined straight to the library. College libraries are some of my favorite campus buildings to explore!

Check out the original statue of Athena up high where students from the rival college can't reach her, and also plaster casts taken from the genuine Parthenon metopes on display at the British Museum. I'm just gonna leave this right here.

So envious that they have a whole room of puzzles! They also have a craft club with its own permanent, dedicated studio and an art club, also with its own permanent, dedicated studio. 

I read this book in grad school!

I'm telling you, the owl iconography is INTENSE. I kind of wanted to ask how this impacted their enrollment of students from certain Native American nations, but I'd already asked soooo many weird questions that I felt I should probably leave some weird questions for other people to ask.

Tell me that this is not a shocking number of owls, though?!?

I am SO glad that I'm not seventeen years old and trying to figure out where I want to go to college. The amazing choices that she has are a blessing, a luxury, and a direct result of the hard work this kid has done and the phenomenal person she is, but it's also an awful burden to have to decide.

Let's spend the next few hours not thinking about it, and instead thinking about how to navigate the SEPTA system, especially because Jefferson Station booted us out into a shopping mall with no discernible exit, and it took us at least 20 minutes to find our way out to the street. Also, while I was standing at one of the big maps and figuring out our route, a kind stranger came over to gently point out that I was tracing the trolley line and not the rail line. Because apparently Philadelphia also has trolleys!

I'd wanted to see Chinatown, browse a couple of bookstores, walk around the Independence sites, etc., and we had plenty of time to do that, but I'd neglected to take into account that by the time we got downtown we'd have been up and at 'em for approximately 14 hours, and shockingly for me when confronted with a tourist site, I was starting to fade.

Imagine! ME!!! Forgetting to so much as take a snapshot of the Chinatown Gate as we walked under it! Unwilling to walk a few extra blocks over to the bookstore I'd Pinned! Too tired to make the extra effort to take a close-up photo of Independence Hall!

Not even the facts of my own exhausted near-tears and the kid who dances on pointe six days a week admitting that her feet hurt could stop me from paying my respects to Ben, Deborah, and Francis Franklin, though:

That was the last tourist thing we did, though. After that we trudged straight back to Jefferson Station, caught the train back to the airport, did the whole security theatre dance number one more time, and collapsed at our gate, where the kid proceeded to sleep as soundly as if she'd been in her bed back home for the remaining two hours until our flight.

I, on the other hand, finished my book (Peter Darling), started another (Beartown), and discovered that, gasp, the Philadelphia International Airport only stocks Pepsi products?!? NOOO!!! Mama needs her Diet Sprite!

I reluctantly nursed my... Starry? WTF is a STARRY?!?... and made it last until we got back to our home airport, at which point I'd forgotten that I'd even taken a photo of our parking spot. Thank goodness for the teenager, who just flat-out remembered where we parked in her head, and who loudly sang our personal mash-up of "Party Rock Anthem," "California Girls," and the entire Percy Jackson musical with me to keep me awake for the drive home. 

I want her to go to absolutely the BEST college, y'all, and also I never want her to leave my side for a second. 

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Pavophobia and Trampoline Punk: A Senior Year Trashion/Refashion Show

Once upon a time, there was a four-year-old who was super into drawing pictures of pretty outfits she'd thought up. She also like to take her mom's fabric scraps and cut and tape them into fancy clothes for her Barbies. 

One day her mom, who still got the local newspaper because it hadn't yet been sold to a conglomerate whose sole goal was to bleed its assets, saw a call for entries for the town's second annual Trashion/Refashion Show. It invited people to design their own outfits from trash and repurposed materials, and if they were accepted they'd get to model them in a runway show benefiting the local sustainable living center. It seemed like a good project for a homeschooling preschooler and her crafty mom, so the mom asked her kid if she wanted to design an outfit and help sew it and be in a real fashion show.

The kid did.

This was her design:

This is what her mom sewed:

And this is the kid getting her photo taken right before she walked the runway:

That was fourteen years ago, y'all. I don't even know how this didn't go the way of gymnastics and aerial silks and Animal Jam and horseback riding and My Little Pony and Girl Scout summer camp. But every year, leaving the theatre at the end of the Trashion/Refashion Show, the kid would be talking about what she wanted to design the next year, and then every next year when the call for entries came out, there she'd be drawing her design for me, and after the age of nine helping me sew it, and after the age of eleven sewing the whole thing, and after the age of thirteen taking over writing out and submitting her entry, too.

So somehow the years have passed until now, along with her Spring ballet recital and our Girl Scout troop's Bridging/Graduation party, this show has become another last thing for her Senior year of high school.

It's a weird feeling to be a secondary character in someone else's good old days. 

As the kids are getting properly grown up now, I've realized that these kid years are my good old days, too. So because this is also MY last Trashion/Refashion Show, or at least the last one that I'll experience this way, I asked the kid if I could go back to our roots and design and sew an outfit for her to model. She said yes, and I immediately set about discovering for myself how inadvisable it is to sew a garment for a human to wear out of a broken trampoline. 

Like, that webbing is SHARP!

This is what it looks like when the kid and I are both working on our entries on the same weekend, because we both procrastinated until the very last minute.

I ended up cutting it with the kitchen shears because I was too afraid to let any of my proper scissors near it, and tbh now I probably need a new pair of kitchen shears. The plastic threads in the cut ends of the webbing cut ME the entire time I was working with it, and they poked through all the seams and cut the kid until I covered every single inside seam with duct tape.

And there was only a certain amount of sewing I could possibly do by machine--

--before I had to just get out the hand-sewing needle and embroidery floss and resign myself to hand-stitching all the fussy parts while cutting myself up even more thoroughly.

The dog looks perturbed in the below photo, but even with all that I was happy as a clam, making a big mess in the family room in parallel with the kid making her own big mess. These ARE the good old days!

Remember that skull quilt block from November? I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with it, but I did happen to sew it from a thrifted blouse and my old wedding dress--

--which made it a refashioned item, which means that I could applique it onto the back of the trampoline webbing dress jacket. And then I cut the bodice off the wedding dress, turned it backwards so the cool fake buttons went down the front, added some spaghetti straps, and that became the dress shirt for the garment:

The trampoline webbing pants were a nightmare to sew (and a nightmare to wear, ahem, if you happen to enjoy being able to bend at the hips and knees) and I kept them super simple, but I did cut the triangle rings out of the webbing and hook them together to make a chain to add a little detail to the otherwise plain black:

And here's my Trampoline Punk!

Trampoline Punk image via Bloomington Trashion

Here's the kid's own design, Pavophobia:

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

And then one last walk down the runway together for old times' sake:

Model/Designer Walk image via Bloomington Trashion

Some of the kid's friends always come to watch her show, and afterwards I always take them all out for ice cream. Because this was also the Eclipse Weekend, though, every place was paaaaacked even at 9:30 pm on a Sunday. It was bananas! But finally we found a spot where the line at least wasn't out the door, and although they were out of waffle cones they still had one last waffle bowl left, and then a giant group left and we were all able to wedge ourselves around a little table in the back corner behind a bunch of local college students whose friends had all come to town for the eclipse:

The kids mostly talked amongst themselves but because they're nice kids and they've all known me since they were seven, they kindly included me in their conversation, as well. A year from now I'm definitely going to have to find my own friends to eat rainbow sherbet with on a certain Sunday night in mid-April, but this one last year I just enjoyed the heck out of it, like you're supposed to do in the good old days.

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An Easy Alteration To an Amazon Dress

 

Remember the teenager's end of the school year ballerina murder mystery party? One of the reasons why it was so fun is that it was not just a murder mystery, but ALSO a pretend high school Homecoming dance! 

Which means pretend high school Homecoming dance clothes!

This was, quite honestly, quite a lot of the appeal of the party for my own high schooler, since she's never been to a Homecoming dance... nor does she particularly desire to go to one, frankly, but dressing up and dancing with one's friends is SO fun.

Our local Goodwills do have a terrific selection of dresses, including plenty of beautiful formal ones, but dang, have they gotten spendy! Our local locations used the Covid lockdowns as an excuse to take away the monthly storewide sales, and when they reopened it was with higher prices and no more discounts, not even Color of the Week, grr. So even though I'm very much an advocate of thrifting and upcycling, I wasn't big sad when the teenager said she'd rather buy a cheap, fast-fashion, sweatshop-manufactured dress from Amazon. If it was gross, we could just return it and hit up Goodwill, after all.

The kid picked this one--

--and actually, it was pretty nice! The velvet and lace both looked good, the neckline had a well-constructed binding, the stretch fabric gave the garment good drape without needing darts (which means I didn't have to worry about misplaced darts), and the fact that it wasn't lined really just meant that I didn't have to work too hard on my alterations.

It definitely did need alterations, though. The length of the hemline and the sleeves were good, but the shoulders were way too long for my teenager's torso, and the waist was too roomy. We probably could have sized down, but the needed alterations were so easy that I could make them in less time than it would have taken to package up the return. 

For alterations this easy, I had the teenager put the dress on inside out, then I pinned the dress to fit the way she wanted it to.

I'm so glad I bought those plastic sewing clips that everyone was raving about on Tiktok!

I pinned the waist to fit, using the pins to mark my sewing lines and thereby skipping several traditional steps. Same for the shoulders, although I unpicked the top of the sleeve first:

To take in the garment, I just had to sew along the line my clips marked:

The sleeves were already slightly puffed, so I just regathered them to make them a little puffier, then pinned them and reset them into the shoulder. 

This was SUCH a quick alteration, and it really worked to show me that it's not the quality of the fabric that makes a garment look good, but the quality of the construction. The dress, pulled on straight from the package, looked okay, but it also looked as cheap as it was. But after doing nothing more than taking in the hems to fit my teenager's specific measurements, that cheap dress looked really good! It fit great, and therefore it looked great. 

A few weeks later, at my mending group's monthly afternoon when we sit in our public library and mend clothes for patrons, I used the same technique to alter a pair of work pants for a young adult who'd just started her first real white collar job. She'd purchased some khakis from Goodwill, but didn't like how wide the legs were. I had her put them on inside out, stood her on a stool, used my handy pins to narrow them the way she wanted, and then sewed along the pins. She tried them on again, and they looked great!

I'm telling you: easiest. Alteration. EVER!

A Dozen Teenagers Went to Homecoming and Solved a Murder

 

At the end of the school year, I was SUPER stoked when my teenager asked me to help her host a party for her ballet classmates. Y'all know how sad I've been that my kids no longer want birthday parties with all the trimmings, and I've been missing those themed parties with decorations and food and activities and kids. 

You'd think, then, that the teenager would be thrilled to have the expertise that she'd asked for, but that kid had the nerve to proceed to shut down ALL of my excellent party ideas. DIY paint-by-numbers and tea party food in the front yard? Too much work. Bounce house? Too babyish. Drive-in movie? Too public. Paintball? Too competitive. Murder mystery?

The teenager (mostly) stopped glaring at me, and instead asked for details.

Spoiler alert: this murder mystery was the BEST party idea ever for teenagers. It wasn't expensive or difficult, and maybe it's the fact that these are kids who live for the stage, but they were SO into it! It was delightful to watch them have such a delightful time, and everything went perfectly.

I purchased the Horror at Homecoming mystery, teen version, from Night of Mystery. This particular packet has everything that teen ballerinas could possibly want in a party--not only is there a murder, and a mystery to solve, but the framing device is a school Homecoming dance, which means that the kids get to dress up... and they get to dance!

You're supposed to be able to host the game AND keep the identity of the murderer a surprise even from yourself, but since I was hosting this for the kids, it was very helpful to be able to read through the entire packet and familiarize myself with all the secrets. Because I know all the kids attending, I could also rig the game a little to play to their various strengths--some kids enjoy being the center of attention and some don't, some wouldn't mind having to read stuff out loud and some would, and most importantly, none of the sibling sets would appreciate having their character mired in a love triangle with their sibling's character. Yuck!

The murder mystery packet is a LOT to sort through, and you have to have a firm guest list before you can really start, so my teenager had to actually pass out the invitations a month before the party. We gave kids about ten days to RSVP, then I made my teenager spend a few days nagging the holdouts for answers, and only then did I assign characters to kids and make the "official" invitation packets for her to pass out to the guests. Each invitation packet had the invitation, some murder mystery basics, that kid's character sheet, and a school newspaper with important info. To that, I added a couple of notes that the guests should plan to arrive within ten minutes of the party's start time, and that if they realized they couldn't make it, they should contact my kid ASAP. And then I proceeded to have a couple of months' worth of anxiety dreams about the murderer or victim, neither of whom would know how important their character was ahead of time, simply not showing up to the party!

There were no no-shows, hallelujah, but I had my college student on hand at the party as a swing, just in case. And there was a kid who ended up giving a last-minute yes, but fortunately I had a spare character to give her. Whew!

The only materials that you *have* to have to run the party are a million printouts, including a couple of sticker sheets for name tags, and envelopes. But we wanted the party to look as much like the cliche version of a school dance as possible--and I've really missed party planning!--so we might have gone somewhat ham, as the teen ballerinas say. We bought a bunch of serving ware and photo backdrop crap from Dollar Tree, I got out all my stash scrapbook paper to make all the kids' envelopes and accessories look mitchy-matchy and fancy, and Matt did a ton of design work to turn the print-out photos of "evidence" into real-live actual pieces of evidence that looked awesome.

And it turns out that Burger King does not care how many crowns you take from their store. We got enough for each kid, and my college student and I spray painted them all gold.

The plan for the party's pacing is so smart, with each guest receiving a sealed set of "objectives" when they arrive, and then another set after the murder. The objectives include certain things to say or do to certain other guests, and certain ways to respond if a guest says or does some certain thing to you. I LOVED this, because it got the kids immersed in the game right away, got them acting and interacting, and gave them plenty to do in between the dancing and snacking and chatting.

But it made me anxious about timing, because some of the objectives are important to the plot, so I felt like I needed a way to know when people had completed them, which wasn't something included in the game. 

My kids still have one instant camera and several packs of instant film left from that hot minute in their childhoods when they were obsessed with instant photos. We've actually made regular use of the camera and film throughout their years homeschooling, but I decided that I would not be sad to have the rest of that film used up, so I crafted a Homecoming decoration to go next to the photo backdrop:

I found a foam board in the closet, and used scrapbook paper and twine to decorate it for Homecoming. I added another set of character name tags to the board, and left enough room for an instant photo above each tag. The idea was that when a kid had completed all of the objectives that she was able to complete in the first round, she should take her Homecoming photo and add it to the board. As an added bonus, this board, with all the cute pictures of all the guests, made an absolutely adorable souvenir for my teenager to take home afterwards.

After the murder, I'd planned to reskin the board to highlight the victim and label everyone else as suspects, but in the excitement of the murder and the kids trying to solve the mystery I completely forgot! 

Regardless, the kids all used the instant camera a ton, and they all took home plenty of cute instant photos of themselves and their buddies. Totally worth bringing it!

I wasn't completely opposed to hosting the party at home, but since it *was* meant to be a school dance, we thought it would be cool to host it somewhere that had more of a school dance look, so we rented the gymnasium in one of our local community centers for an evening. Because it was a city space it was rentable for a terrific price, and we had a full kitchen available, bathrooms that we didn't have to clean, a ton of room, tables and chairs, a speaker system, and just enough of what I'm assuming were volleyball or badminton net posts standing in a corner that Matt could set up the twinkly lit dance floor of my dreams:

We even made a custom Mayhem High Homecoming dance playlist, because that's the best part of party prep!

Here's a secret: the kids loved the songs and did a ton of dancing, but just between us, all of the work to think out how to mark out a dance floor and getting Matt up and down a ladder to set up the twinkle lights for the dance floor and compiling a playlist and figuring out the speaker system was actually just so *I* could dance:

Actual footage of me dancing, taken by my dancing partner who is also dancing...

Matt needs to take me clubbing a LOT more often than he does.

So, you guys. The parties that we host always go pretty well, mostly because all of my kids' friends are wonderful people, always thoughtful and polite and participative and sensitive to making sure everyone around them is having a nice time. But this was the BEST party we have ever hosted, the absolute funnest party ever, and again, all because of these kids. Teenagers are a whole other species, you might be aware, and you can never quite tell how they're going to respond. If these kids had been mortified about the idea of acting, and didn't want to dress up and pretend that they were at a Homecoming dance, and thought the idea of solving a murder was boring and didn't want to try to figure it out, this would have been the worst possible party. 

But instead, it was the BEST party! All the kids were totally in character, acting their sweet hearts out. They came ready to attend the Mayhem High Homecoming dance, and danced and ate snacks and cheered for the Homecoming King and Queen and gossiped and stabbed each other in the back and danced and blackmailed each other, all in character, all seeming to have a marvelous time:

The kid whose first round objective informed her that she was the murder victim played her part up to the murder like a freaking rock star, then fell down dead right when she was supposed to, to much shrieking and mourning:

She played the second act in the role of her ghost, and earned the prize for having the most money left at the end of the game primarily by guilting people into donating to her funeral, I'm given to understand.

Because I knew all the secrets, I watched the face of the kid who was the murderer as she opened the envelope that revealed that secret to her, and damn, that kid's face did not change expression at ALL. I wish I had half that poker face! She then proceeded to play out the second act by dropping so many red herrings and false clues that only one kid successfully pinned her as the murderer by the end of the game.

All the other kids played their parts like champs, so in character that it turns out many of them had made up backstories and thought up extra details and fleshed out story arcs--it absolutely worked to completely confuse the "official" plot of the mystery to such an extent that I'm not surprised that only one kid ended up guessing the real murderer, but OMG they seemed to be having the BEST time.

In the end, everyone got to fill out a ballot to accuse the murderer, state how much money they had left, and vote for their favorite characters in a couple of categories. We revealed the murderer with much fanfare, and gave out prizes for correct guesses, most money, best costume, and best acting. For party favors, everyone got a Homecoming crown (thank you, Burger King!) and we set up a candy buffet for kids to fill take-home baggies on the way out. 

If you're running a similar party for teenagers, here are my tips:

• Have extra materials on hand for kids who didn't do their homework. I printed extra character sheets and school newspapers and brought them to the party, because party guest prep work turned out to be everywhere on the spectrum between "my parents quizzed me on my character for a week!" to "I lost all my stuff the same day I got it." When a kid said they didn't remember their character, it was easy to just hand them the second copy of their materials without making a big deal of it.
• Have extra characters on hand. This is important to figure out in advance, because Night of Mystery, at least, has you purchase the game for a specific quantity of characters, both a minimum and a maximum. It was a bit tricky to buy a pack that had wiggle room, but not being able to accommodate a last-minute RSVP or unexpected kid showing up would have fueled my nightmares for the rest of my life. I had a couple of extra characters on hand that I could easily add to the game if an extra kid or two showed up to the party, and we were able to assign a character to a kid who gave a last-minute RSVP without fuss. 
• Have a fun framing device. A school Homecoming dance was perfect for the kinds of activities this group of kids likes, and it gave them space to also enjoy being at a party.
• Build in plenty of extra time. I wasn't really sure how long it would take the kids to complete all the parts of the murder mystery, so I set the party to last a full hour longer than my longest estimate, figuring the kids could use the extra time to just have fun together. That was perfect because it took the kids a LOT longer to complete the second act of the game, in particular--they got so invested in their backstories and character interpersonal drama and various shenanigans that they got VERY distracted from actually collecting the evidence, but since I'd built in all that extra time I could just let them enjoy themselves. The game finished with half an hour left before the end of the party, which was kind of perfect--the kids ran around the gym and took tons of instant photos and had a blast talking through the game while Matt and I got a bit of a head start on cleaning up.

This is the first party I've held at an alternate location since my college kid's first birthday party, and dang, if I had all those years of kid birthday parties to do over again, I might never have had a birthday party at home at all! Packing up all the crap to take with us did take a while, but we didn't have to deep clean the house and make the yard look nice. It was a little stressful to set up the entire party in the hour we'd allotted ourselves, but I wasn't setting up for the entire week before the party, either. It was also a little stressful to clean up on time and pack the car back up, but then I didn't spend the entire evening and next day cleaning my house all over again and washing a million dishes and taking out the garbage. 

Imagine: a Homecoming dance, a murder mystery, two dozen cupcakes, several pounds of candy, eleven happy party guests and one happy host, me on the dance floor, and I didn't even have to mop my floors.

Sexy Coffee and Racist Tea: Weird and Troubling Nutcracker Productions

Once upon a time six years ago, there was a very tiny toy soldier bravely marching into battle under the direction of her Nutcracker General to fight off the Mouse hordes. 

Several promotions later, that child soldier has grown into an Officer, dancing her first role en pointe in our local university's production of The Nutcracker. But just between us, the Mice really have the more righteous cause. So don't tell the Nutcracker General, but his Officer will be spending half her time secretly as a Mouse, menacing that brat Clara and bravely fighting her sometimes-comrades, the soldiers. 

I think the Mice might have a real chance to win this year!

It's time, then, for my third-favorite holiday of the year: Nutcracker season! 

Here's a Fun Holiday Game For You: Find the Weirdest and Most Troubling Nutcracker Productions

If I was still working on a PhD (if only PhD programs could be twenty years long, because it took at least fifteen years before I thought of my first original research idea that would have made a good thesis, ahem. And now I get good thesis ideas on the daily!), I would 100% be writing my thesis on regional Nutcracker productions as cultural artifacts that reveal and complicate our society's understanding of gender, sexuality, and race, as well as the male gaze when directed at female-presenting adolescents. 

Particularly that last one, ahem. I thought our local university's production was a little heavy on the child predator grooming a future victim vibes, and then I watched literally any other Nutcracker ever choreographed. Most of the productions I've seen have been choreographed by men, and they seem to have a very hard time visualizing a relationship between a male and female, even one with a fifty-year age gap where the female is supposed to be, like, twelve, that's not somehow gross. 

Other Nutcracker cliches to look out for include how heteronormative and cisgender are the children's casting, costumes, props and choreography; is the "Arabian Coffee" dance meant to be "sexy" or not; and how racist does the "Chinese tea" dance present? Our local university's production is pretty racist; it was only a very few years ago that they stopped putting a Fu Manchu mustache on the male lead, recently enough that I still worry every year that it might show up again.

Here's an interesting mini-documentary about how Ballet West addressed racism in the tea dance a few years ago:

Joffrey Ballet now also does a dragon dance, and a nearby university's production invites a local martial arts school to do some sweet moves onstage during that number. 

Every November, then, in the lead-up to The Nutcracker, it's my personal mission to find the weirdest and/or most troubling productions. Partly, I just think it's interesting to see how different choreographers handle the exact same music and same basic plot. Partly, it's just me processing my sour grapes--like, sure, they make my kid dance in pants and ugly wigs every single year even when wearing that pretty party dress and having her hair in curls was her one dream and they 100% gave her height-related body dysmorphia for a while when she finally caught on that it was always the shortest girl who scored Clara, but hey, at least nobody's in blackface in OUR production! But partly, I also like to see how our various societal tropes are expressed in this one cultural commonality. You know, who's doing something different on purpose, and why? Who thought they were doing something different but it's just an even more overt expression of that same cliche? Who's tapped into a way to empower and include artists and audience, and who's actively fighting against equity and diversity?

Dutch National Ballet: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

Many years ago during Nutcracker season, we found a Nutcracker production on YouTube that has, to date, the most bonkers plot twist imaginable: the Mice WIN the battle against the Nutcracker and take all of the child soldiers captive, including Clara's own brother, Fritz, who was commanding the toy soldier army. We were all, like, "Okay, that was weird," and moved onto the Snow Scene, after which Act 1 ends with Drosselmeyer leading Clara and the Nutcracker Prince into... his film projector, I think? There, for some reason, the Mouse King and his army appear again and this time the Nutcracker defeats him and now all the Divertissements dance while Clara and the Prince act cute and Drosselmeyer bops in and out occasionally like a matchmaking Gollum.

So we're just happily watching the Divertissements when Arabian begins with a guy cracking a whip, and then onto the stage stumble enslaved people wearing ragged clothing and chains. The male lead starts his dance, but then one of the enslaved men tries to escape and is dragged back by one leg and starts to dance this weirdly homoerotic S&M pas de deux with the Arabian lead and we all realize--OMG, that's FRITZ!!! Fritz has been sold into slavery to the Arabian dancer! He's got makeup bruises and his clothes are ripped and he's in manacles and now he's rolling around on the floor while the Arabian dancer thrusts over him and it is WILD. 

Every year since, we've tried to find this specific Nutcracker, but never ran across it again. But a couple of nights ago, in a completely hysterical fit of insomnia, I was all, "This is my mission. I will not rest until I have found this fever dream of a Nutcracker." I Googled various search terms involving Nutcracker, Fritz, and "abducted," "enslaved," and "kidnapped," etc. And finally, I cracked it! Welcome, Friends, to the Dutch National Ballet's production of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, choreographed by Toer van Schayk and Wayne Eagling. That YouTube version we watched absolutely was a bootleg of a 2011 filmed and streaming version (if your state university library has a Medici.tv subscription like mine does, you can watch it there), but at least right now you can also watch the 2021 production here. 

Also notable about this production: there's real ice skating in the Prologue and Apotheosis, Fritz tries to spy on his sister while she's changing clothes, and they skip Mother Ginger entirely.

And a random fun fact: after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Bolshoi Ballet's prima ballerina denounced the war, fled Russia, and now dances with the Dutch National Ballet.

Mariinsky Ballet: The Nutcracker

This is a fun one to watch, even before it gets super weird at the end, because the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg is famous for holding the very first production of The Nutcracker in 1892. Fun fact: audiences HATED IT! They thought, in particular, that it was so stupid to have children dancing in a professional production. Especially funny considering that child dancers are now The Nutcracker's biggest draw. The Mariinsky must have learned its lesson, because even though there are a few children's roles in this production, even Act I Masha and Fritz are played by full-grown adults acting like children. I love when they age Masha up for Act II so that she can do some proper dancing, but otherwise, full-grown adults acting alongside children while pretending to be their same age is a little Adam Sandler for my tastes.

This is the production choreographed in 2001 by Mikhail Chemiakin. At least right now, there's a 2007 production of Mariinsky Ballet's The Nutcracker available on YouTube:

Its portrayal starts off very comic and kid-friendly, with lots of funny noses and giant props and some pratfalls in Act I, and a low-key Voldemort-looking Drosselmeyer who obviously seethes with jealousy every time Masha and the Nutcracker Prince make goo-goo eyes at each other. Drosselmeyer also seems to maybe be in some kind of charge of the mice, who don't look very mouse-like and I really hope they're not actually caricatures of Jewish people. 

To get to the actual BONKERS part of the production, though, you have to hang on until the absolute last seconds of the performance, when Drosselmeyer raises a curtain to reveal that many of the characters are actually the treats in his candy shop. Masha and the Nutcracker Prince, who'd just finished up a joyful and romantic dance right before the curtain closed, are now revealed as the candy toppers on a giant wedding cake.

And y'all, crawling all over the cake and actively eating it as the curtain finally closes ARE THE MICE. THEY ARE LITERALLY GOING TO EAT MASHA AND THE PRINCE. 

My guess is that Drosselmeyer got fed up and figured hell, if he can't have Masha, might as well feed her to the mice.

Also notable about this production: the Arabian female lead is dressed in a skin-tight snakesuit and accompanied by snake puppets, and the poor Nutcracker Prince has to keep his horrifying Nutcracker mask on for an ungodly long time. There's also a DVD of a different Mariinsky Ballet Nutcracker production, originally choreographed by Vasily Vainonen in 1934, that's more wholesome than weird. Syd and I saw this in the theatre with her ballet buddies one year, and it's adorable.

New/Adventures: Nutcracker!

So, were you thinking that it might actually be easier in the long run just to traumatize your children with a terrifying Nutcracker production as young as possible so that they don't ask for expensive ballet lessons? 

Well, have I got the Nutcracker for you! 

Instead of casting children, let's cast adults who make big, childish movements and huge facial expressions in an uncanny valley version of childhood.

Instead of setting the scene in a wealthy household hosting an opulent Christmas party for all their rich friends, let's have Act I take place in an orphanage with a co-ed dormitory full of miserable adult-children. The grown men acting like little boys will also wear nightshirts that expose their legs to the upper thigh.

Instead of giving the kids dolls and drums and a random nutcracker, let's give them creepy shit like a ventriloquist's dummy and a working pistol. Fritz will literally shoot an orphan with the pistol, and the dummy will come to terrifying life just before the orphans revolt and one of them saws the head off of the headmaster, who is dressed in leather and wields some kind of stick... a riding crop, maybe?

Welcome to New/Adventure's Nutcracker!, choreographed in 1992 by Michael Bourne. It's not for children! 

Again, we watched this production several years ago on YouTube, in what must have been an excellent year for Nutcracker bootlegs, but right this second it's also available via a bootleg on Vimeo. 

If you don't watch the production with your kids, it's got some interesting moments that make it pretty fun. I can't completely figure out if it's Clara's little orphan buddy or the ventriloquist dummy who eventually is reincarnated as the Prince, but regardless, he's reincarnated shirtless, and their pas de deux would be charming and low-key sexy if the full-grown adult playing Clara didn't have to keep making those weird little kid faces and gestures. The overture to Act II that's normally danced by very little children playing angels or trees is danced by adults with wings wearing pajamas. Maybe they're dead orphans? It's also fun seeing how much sexual innuendo and camp and just plain bizarreness they can work into all of the Divertissements. 

In the end, Clara wakes back up in her orphanage, but who's hiding in her bed? Why, it's that hunky Prince again! 

Also notable about this production: Clara gets to dance blissfully with a whole troop of shirtless dudes, and she looks like she's having a fabulous time. The Arabian and Chinese dances aren't at all racist. And the Russian dance is, I think, a gay football theme?

Okay, I thought that I was going to monologue about all of my weird Nutcracker finds all in one place, but I actually have to go put a certain Mouse's hair up in milkmaid braids and then change into my black clothes for backstage and then drive her to campus for her stage rehearsal and then go chaperone the Party Scene children during dress rehearsal while my Mouse fights a battle and then check all the Party Scene kids back out to their parents and then collect my hopefully victorious Mouse and then drive us home and then eat Pizza Rolls in bed while watching hockey and then fall asleep without washing my face, so let's talk about weird Nutcrackers again later, okay?

And if you write your PhD thesis on the subject, send me a copy!

You Should Watch The Shining With One of Your Teenagers (While the Other One Hides in Her Room)

Her spooky contribution turned out to be last-minute roasted vegetables, because apparently the spookiest dinner of all is one that doesn't follow proper nutritional guidelines!

That was the night that we intended to watch The Shining, but alas, in the end I could not convince Will that vintage horror isn't actually scary--she used to be so much more gullible when she was younger! So it was a week later, over Chinese food that we bought with the excuse that I needed the specific type of break-apart disposable bamboo chopsticks for our gingerbread Cuneiform project, that three of us finally got around to watching the movie that two of us had been highly anticipating.

I was especially excited because I'd just finished reading both The Shining (started on a Friday while subbing in a high school Agriculture classroom for the day and finished the next morning because I just about could not put it down) AND its sequel that I had not even known existed, Doctor Sleep:

I'd certainly read The Shining before, because I was a hyperlexic kid who tore through Stephen King in elementary school (kudos to my grandparents for never censoring a book! We shall believe that this was for philosophical reasons and not because they DNGAF what I did as long as I wasn't bothering them). I also saw the film version multiple times on cable (see above re: grandparents and lack of censorship). My takeaways as a kid were that both were memorable and likeable, but not terribly loveable.

Lol, I guess all that stuff about alcoholism and mental health and abuse sailed right over my head, thank goodness!

So, the book version of The Shining is actually brilliant. Doctor Sleep is even better. And the film version of The Shining is also brilliant, and different enough from the book that it's still surprising even if you just read the book a week ago.

I read somewhere that Stephen King, an alcoholic, wrote The Shining at a time when he was actively, heavily drinking. And that's why Jack, who ostensibly spends 99% of the book sober, still acts drunk and has no positive coping skills to manage his sobriety. The main character of Doctor Sleep is also an alcoholic, but, like the Stephen King who wrote him, he becomes sober and, like King, utilizes AA and its resources. That sobriety, in turn, leads to the protagonist making different choices than the Jack Torrance of The Shining could have. The depiction of the alcoholic character in each book felt very real, and it's fascinating to me that it comes so directly from the author's own experiences. 

My teenager is the perfect age to appreciate the way that the film version of The Shining is a WHOLE MOOD. OMG the scenery. OMG the sound. OMG the interior design. OMG THE CARPETS!!!

I mean, look at the little organdy dresses that the Grady children wear! I 100% had almost the same dress in peach. 

You know how when your kids are tiny, you're so excited to see their little faces when something magical happens? Christmas morning when they realize that Santa came, or the first time they see Cinderella's castle at Disney, or you break open a geode? You guys. When about halfway through the movie I casually asked my kid, "So what do you think that whole 'redrum' business is all about?" and she was all, "I dunno it's weird though," I was SO EXCITED to see her face during the big reveal! 

Top Ten Memory for sure!

The scene where they throw around the n-word sucked, though. They said it once and we all went, "WHOAH!" Then they said it again. And then a third time just to push the point, I guess. AND that's one of the parts that they lifted straight from the book, so... yuck.

The next day, this commentary track sustained me through coffee, breakfast, housecleaning, putting away Halloween decorations, and just some general Sunday-level puttering:

I kept having to go find people, though, to interrupt their own Sunday-level puttering and tell them all my Shining fun facts. Here are my favorites:

• The Steadicam operator (who invented the Steadicam for this film!) used a boom to raise and lower the Steadicam as it was pushed along, and at one point he discovered that young Danny weighed exactly the same as the Steadicam, so sometimes he would remove the Steadicam from the boom, put Danny on it instead, and fly him around the set while Danny shrieked with laughter.
• In my favorite scene from the film, Wendy takes a peek at the page in Jack's typewriter, and sees that all he's written, over and over, is "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Weirded out, she goes over to the six-inch tall stack of pages he's already written, and starts flipping through them, only to see that they ALL SAY THE SAME THING. Every page is laid out differently, with paragraph breaks and parts for dialogue and other constructions, but it all says the same thing. It's SO GOOD. So apparently, Kubrick wanted Wendy to be able to flip through the pages at random and have everything that she pulled up look cool like that, so for months, every spare second that his secretary had was spent in typing up all those pages herself. 
• Kubrick insisted on shooting the film in chronological order, which is not how films are usually shot. The shooting also ran months over schedule, and combined with that, the Steadicam operator said that pretty much as soon as he got on set, little Danny commenced a huge growth spurt. It's not noticeable because the film was shot in order, but the operator said that if you took a shot of Danny from the first scenes of the film and put it next to a shot of him from one of the last scenes, he's visibly older by the final scene. Which probably makes the film that much more realistic on a subliminal level!

Ugh, I did not need one more must-watch horror movie to add to our yearly viewing in October, but I probably can't let another October go by without re-watching The Shining. I also dearly desire to create the REDRUMMUS and the hedge maze in pesto on top of pasta like in this viewing party, and I very much need someone to agree to dress up like the Grady children with me for trick-or-treating.

And I LOVE these decorations, because even more Halloween decorations is clearly something I was (not) needing...