i am a mole, sticking his head above the surface of the earth

Adina and I went to the see The Nutcracker Ballet yesterday. I was quite impressed by it. I hadn't been to see a ballet in years and had forgotten the beauty of the human form, the delicate and firm, hypnotic, graceful and sensual.

Not sensual in a sexual sense, but rather in an aesthetically pleasing one.

Particularly impressive were the sets on stage. The show used a lot of opaque screens and projectors to create a multi-layered environment for the dancers. Which is to say, the screens would drop down and backdrops would be projected on them for the dancers to dance in front of while the hard set pieces were being changed behind the screens. And then the screens would lift, and these beautiful rooms and snowy fields and fantastic, dream-like worlds were revealed to us. Perhaps the best part of the ballet is after Clara and the Nutcracker arrive in the Land of Sweets and all of the dolls begin dancing for her. I really enjoyed the Spanish dolls and the Russian dolls, because Russian is my ancestry and the Spanish are beautiful.

There were a lot of children in the theatre and Adina and I talked about what they would all be when they grew up. She said all the same, and I said everyone different. She's probably more correct than I am, though. Human is human is human is unchanging. Or so they tell me. We talked about shoes, too. Painful, high-heeled shoes with razor-sharp straps that cut into the flesh and leave feet mutilated and bleeding. But so fashionable. If only people were willing to suffer as much for something outside of their own vanity.