Support the Arts: Eat a Teacher. Hang on, that's not right...

Sometimes in class I crunch numbers.
(this is my brain saying to my body, “Battement frappé?!?! You’re on your own, Champ.”)
But anyway.
Ok, so class costs $20. There are let’s say ten people in the class. That’s $200. Pretty good haul for one old man in an hour fifteen, right? He has three classes per week that I know of, but let’s say he teaches six per week. Let’s say one each weekday and the two-hour Saturday class, which is also $20. Probably just one class per day, because, let’s face it, he’s really old and we as a class are really exhausting.
So that’s $1200 in a week.
A nice haul.
Ok but then, they say that one’s monthly rent/mortgage should be about one weeks pay, right? I don’t know about you guys, but the Manse du Adult Beginner is essentially rent-controlled at this point, and the rent is more than $1200 per month.
And Smirnoff probably has other expenses, like paying the studio for the class time, maybe paying his assistant? And there’re probably old-person expenses I don’t even wanna know about.
Does he receive Medicare? Social Security? Who knows if he ever even Pledged Allegiance to the Flag? Maybe he’s ineligible for that stuff?
Maybe he gets royalties from his movie work, but, you know, I’ve never caught his films on the Sunday Night Movie re-run or anything, doesn’t seem like a reliable income.
And he may be of that generation of dancers who never heard the words Retirement Fund. I don’t know if dancers nowadays earn any sort of retirement, but seems like from the movies and what I’ve read when they were out, they were out.
So the nice haul turns into, like, subsistence level living.
(But he dresses nicely and is a happy guy, I’m going to keep on believing he’s doing fine, monetarily speaking, because that makes me happy.)
This money crunching exercise all comes down to a thing that Barbara Kingsolver explained in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Which is a really good book, btw. If you haven’t read it you should drop you iPad right now and run off and get it. Or, silly me, just order the iBook.
She says that the way to keep heirloom breeds from going extinct is to eat them. You know, heirloom tomatoes, native non-commercial turkeys, bison, stuff like that. You buy and eat them, which raises demand for them, so farmers/breeders raise more, thereby keeping this amazing resource alive and viable in the world for future generations.
Likewise, if you want to support The Arts, take a class. Don’t just donate or buy the promo calendar, actually take a class, from a person. Consume ballet, or piano, or painting, or whatever, and you create more demand, and you keep the art-form viable.
Plus, just like heirloom foods, a class taught by a real artist has a higher nutritional value than, like, another damn workout DVD.

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