12 Dancing Princesses

So I went to my first ballet yesterday. I know. I'm a maven of the arts. I watch musicals ALL the time -- "High School Musical," "The Muppet Movie" - stuff like that. But I hadn't been to a ballet. And neither had my kids. And I want to maintain our cultural edge, so off we went to see "The Twelve Dancing Princesses."

Which should be renamed, "The Twelve Boring Princesses." Seriously. Why is the ballet so popular? Here's a little secret about the ballet that they don't bother to mention in large OR small print on the tickets: there are no words spoken. That's right -- NO WORDS. Which made the whole thing very charade-ish. Don't get me wrong: I love playing charades. But I don't slap a $30 price tag on a piece of paper and call it a program!

The whole event reminded me of when my sister and I used to make up synchronized swimming routines in our backyard pool in the 1980s. "Let's pretend you are a swan and you are floating on your back." "Yeah, and then you see a unicorn in the sky and you try to leap up at it." "Yeah, and then YOU are the unicorn and you land in the pool and start to swim in Figure-8s in the deep end." "Yeah, and then the unicorn and swan BOTH start swimming in Figure-8s." If you're a dancer, I'm sorry. It's just so hokey.

I couldn't follow the story line, no matter how hard I tried. The only thing I gathered about the plot was that there were some princesses. And they were dancers. I think.

You know it's bad when you're leaning into your 6-year-old and whispering, "What is happening?"

So, that's our family culture for the next decade. Sometime around 2017, we'll probably head off to the art museum and then I'll have another blog for you all to read.