CHARLEY – 2007
How it worked: we were bait. We wore platform heels. We had our hair down. We were high from performing, and some of us wanted wine and some of us coke and some a bucket of ice water for our calves. What we didn’t want was dinner on steaming platters beneath heat lamps behind the curtain marked Staff, though we did want éclairs, profiteroles, opera cake, anything from the dessert trays put out for the patrons with coffee and brandy. Sugar we loved. Ballerinas are sugar fiends.
We weren’t exactly ballerinas. I should make that clear. We weren’t ballet dancers, though all of us had that cool hum of robot technique drilled into us, the requisite childhood classes at the suburban school, the teenage years of renunciation, the trouble with food. The calamity of puberty experienced chiefly as a betrayal of physics. Oh yes, we’d all been with that cold mistress, ballet, and some of us even still went to class, there was that love of ritual in us, the comfort of barre and obedience, but we were feminists, too; we made fun of bunheads with their duck walks, their love of “beauty,” their tragic lack of irony. [ . . . ]
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