Je suis un Grande Canard

Learning ballet, man. Phew. It’s like learning a language. And by ‘it’s like’, I mean, you know, ‘it is’.
I never took French in school, so not only does my body not know what to do, my mind has to go through that whole foreign-language-delay thing of hearing a phrase and then taking it apart and figuring out where the word-breaks are and then picking out the easy words and then filling in what the hard words probably mean.
It’s like, if you’re in a giant ballroom and the band leader turns from the orchestra and calls out, “Baile con sus gatos!” and you think to yourself, Ok, I can do this, I know gato is cat, and bailar is the verb ‘to dance’ and con means with, so sus is probably plural of su, and that means ‘your’, so he’s telling us to dance with our…
And then you look around and see that everyone else is just tango-ing their butts off with cats in their arms, and you look down and there’s your own cat standing right in front of you with a rose clamped in his teeth and a big thought-bubble over his head that says, “Tick-tock, Dumbass! This be my jam! Mr. Stripes T. Cat is ready to bust-a-move already!”
Yeah.
That’s how the center-work part of just about any ballet class is for me so far.

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