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Return of the Ball-Busting Ballroom Dancer…

Aye, I do not know what’s wrong with me. I am doing the same thing to Jacob that I did to poor Luis. And worse, it’s not with my head this time, but with my heel. Jacob was trying to teach me this lift from Tharp’s Sinatra Suites where he picks me up from the waist, I kick one leg up and go into splits in the air, and he swings me around in one rotation in that position. When he brings me down, I’m supposed to do a tango lunge, bending the front knee and sliding the back leg straight down on the floor between his legs. But for some reason, my body, which often works completely independently of my brain, keeps straightening the front leg and bending the back knee, so that my back heel is aimed right at his crotch on my way down. And, unlike Luis, who waited until the coach was around to quietly ask him how to fix this little problem, Jacob does not mince words. “Your heel is coming right at my man-part, Bunny!” he shouted excitedly. Who can blame him? Problem is, it made me all the more nervous, and I started doing it worse. I just can’t figure out what this is about. Did I suffer some weird childhood thing that I’ve repressed? Do I have something to say subconsciously that I can’t bring myself to express in words? Needless to say, we very quickly changed our lift-practice tonight to those where I lie on his back and kick into the air, AWAY from all of his body parts…

BTW, I have Stuttgart Ballet soloist Evan McKie to thank for the goofy term in this post’s title. He’s a newish, and very fun contributor to The Winger. Is it obvious yet how much I adore that website!?!

So, Emmitt has won “Dancing With the Stars.” Good for him, and good for us that footballers have tuned in to our sport in big numbers 🙂 Of course this means that my Latin goddess, Karina Smirnoff, did not take her student all the way to the top. But I got to watch her world-class dancing throughout the season, and got to know her personality a bit, which, happily, I found fun but in control, sweetly sassy, and, above all, damn hard-working, which is expected of anyone at the top of her game. Can’t wait to see you at Blackpool, lady!

Karina at Blackpool

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Are Straight Women All Doomed to Orgasm-less Lives Like Sophia in Shortbus?…

Lincoln Center fountain

Last night was so beautiful! Imagine, 60-degree evening temperatures in New York in November! The world’s not all bad…

I ended up without plans, so decided to go to the opera, forgetting that the Met Opera is not the NYCBallet or the ABT, where there are nearly always last-minute Family Circle (that’s poor-people nosebleed section) tickets available. Also didn’t realize that last night was Anthony Minghella’s new production of Madame Butterfly, so not only were there no below-$250 seats available, there were no seats available at all. I waited in the cancellation line anyway, but to no avail. Ended up spending a lovely evening, though, soaking up the gentle misty breeze by sitting on the edge of the plaza fountain people-watching.

But, while in line, I couldn’t help but become quite engrossed in a conversation taking place behind me. Two women in their mid-forties, whose friends were outside trying to buy tickets directly from patrons while they waited in the official cancellation line, struck up a conversation with each other. One asked the other where she bought her boots, yadda yadda, then they exchanged questions of who they were there with — both were with female friends — and soon the conversation turned to men. Neither had ever been married, and neither had a boyfriend, though both were looking. Both were high-level executives with several advanced degrees. Both had been on umpteenth dates recently — had tried Eharmony, Jdate, Match.com, you name it — and were appalled at what they’d met. Not that the men they’d met were lying cheating deadbeat loser date-rapists or any such thing; just that they were horrendously under-sophisticated, under-accomplished, witless bores.

Today I finally got around to seeing the movie Shortbus. The film focuses on the sexual aspect of relationships, and centers around a group of twenty- to thirty-something New Yorkers and their various problems. I thought some of the dialog was witty (although at the beginning seemed a bit writerly), and the character I found most compelling was a gay man from a backwater town who’d turned to hustling in his younger years because it was the only way he knew how to express his sexuality — a situation that involved a lot of abuse and eventually resulted in adult inability to be physically close with his partner. Anyway, the main female character — Sophia — I found rather sadly funny. Her problem was that she couldn’t have an orgasm. I’m actually not sure what explanation the screenwriters ended up giving for this — the character mentioned something about having strict parents during a therapy session with a dominatrix. But I thought it was so damn obvious — she couldn’t have an orgasm because her husband was a pathetic loser. He wasn’t a bad person at all — he was a nice, and rather cute guy — just boring as hell and nowhere near a match for her accomplishments. Cute doesn’t cut it these days…

I’ve tried some of those dating services those Met women were talking about and found the same thing they did, the same thing Sophia was left with. And I don’t think it’s the Helen Fielding / Nick Hornby dilemma we’re facing at this point: I don’t think most of them are noncommittal cheaters. Many of the guys I dated weren’t scared of commitment, it was more that they were ready to settle down as long as that meant moving to some boring suburban town where they could spend as little time in the office as possible and come home every night to the TV and DVD player. I swear, several men listed TiVo and Netflix in their “Five Things I Can’t Live Without” lists. They didn’t have interesting jobs, they weren’t impassioned about their careers, they just didn’t seem interested in really doing something with their lives, in really being someone. Most of them had less education than I did and less career and educational achievements. I think for most women, like for Sophia in the movie, it’s hard if not impossible to feel sexual passion for a man they don’t feel passion for in general. And who can feel passion for these guys?

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Vestibular Rehab For the Dizzy Girl

NYU Rusk Institute

Since beginning dance a couple of years ago now, I’ve always noticed that I seem to get a bit dizzier than others, even when just doing a few simple turns in a row. Now that I’ve started to do crazier things, such as lifts where the guy holds me over his head and spins and spins and spins with me completely in the air with no sensory reception coming from a foot being planted firmly on the floor, the dizziness is getting a little out of control. For a few years now, on and off, I’ve also experienced, unrelated to dance, some short bouts of vertigo, which is really scary. That’s when suddenly the world around you spins and spins and spins, and you completely lose all sense of equilibrium, unable even to tell which way is up, which was is right, which is left, etc. I usually only got those every few years, but when they increased to every few months, I decided it was time to go to the ENT. He did a bunch of tests and, sure enough, I have a small but present vestibular malfunction stemming from an embarrasingly stupid experience I had many years ago flying with a severe cold, when I used those supposed ear stabilizers they sale in drug stores. The stabilizers had the opposite effect on me, the ER doctor told me, because I happen to have very narrow ear canals, something I hadn’t then known. I’d flown from somewhere on the East Coast — likely TFGreen airport in Providence — home to Phoenix to visit my parents for the holidays, and when I got off the plane, in addition to unbearable pain in my ears, I couldn’t hear a thing — I saw my mom running toward me grinning hugely, arms out ready to hug me, lips moving joyfully, but it was like being in a silent film. I’d badly damaged both eardrums, for which I received antibiotics and everything was okay, but apparently I have some permanent slight vestibular malfunction.

So, doctor sent me to The Rusk Institute, run by the NYU Medical Center, pictured above. I’m about half way through the therapy, which will likely last about 8 weeks (I go once a week), and it’s going pretty well. My therapist says I’m far more advanced than the other patients there, which is good, because they’re mostly very elderly people or stroke victims. Interestingly, he thinks my TAC headaches may possibly be related to this, but that’s something I have to take up with my Columbia neurologist…

Anyway, here is one of my at-home exercises:

Vestibular Rehab B exercise

I have to hold this piece of paper about an arm’s distance from my face and move it from side to side while keeping my eyes focused on the B, and while walking down a long hallway. It’s a lot more dizzying than it looks! I also have to, without the paper, walk down a long hallway and every two steps make a 180-degree turn. So, I walk forward two steps, then turn and walk backward two steps, then turn and walk forward two steps, etc. Then, I have to do the same thing but making a full 360-degree turn, every three to five steps. Those are actually easier because it’s a little easier to spot, as I’ve been taught in dance classes, since your head is whipping around in one rotation. But part of the point of the exercise is not to spot so that I habituate to the feeling of dizziness while walking down a street or turning in real life, when I’m not dancing and concentrating on spotting.

The funniest part is some of the in-therapy exercises. I brought in a tape of Luis and me performing our mambo routine to show my therapist the lift/spin that really makes me want to retch. He kept the tape and not only viewed it himself but showed it to the head therapist there, who is a former ballet dancer(!), and the head of the center, all of whom said it would be near impossible to habituate oneself to such a thing and that no one in their right mind would NOT get dizzy! So, my therapist has taken to putting me in a chair with wheels, making me lean my head back, and spinning me around and around and around and around. He said he got dizzy just watching me. I really almost lost my lunch the last time! But I’m just glad a ballet dancer-turned-vestibular rehab specialist agrees with me that my Latin teachers are a bit off their nuts 🙂

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Marcelo vs. Misha

 

Okay, call me crazy, but I say Marcelo Gomes wins?!? Am I insane? Is that the (dance) definition of insanity, thinking any other dancer is better than Baryshnikov??? For me, it’s kind of like Cabaret. My first viewing of it was the play directed by Sam Mendes and starring Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh. I fell into deep infatuation with Cumming. I then rented the film from the library and couldn’t for the life of me understand what my parents’ generation saw in Joel Grey. And I couldn’t understand why Liza Minelli had her American accent. The film was all off to me! All of my older friends thought I was deranged. And now, it’s the same with Baryshnikov v. Gomes. When I saw it performed by ABT for the first time this season, being a ballroom dancer / balletomane / mad crazed nutty Marcelo-mane and all, I was beyond smitten. And now that I see it on tape, performed by someone else, with a different interpretation of Frank, it’s just not the same.

Anyway, the important thing, and the reason I bought the DVD, is that, I showed it to Jacob last night during my lesson and he’s totally into teaching me the choreography!!!!!! It’s NOT above my head, says he, unlike a certain MacMillan version of Romeo and Juliet 🙂 and I can learn it, and we can do our own, more ballroomy version, but most definitely with all the lifts (!) for the next showcase! Jacob just said I need to learn, big-time, how to hold myself. He called me “bunny cakes” when he said this (“You’re gonna need to learn big time how to hold yourself, bunny cakes!”). What would the dance world be without gay men 🙂 🙂 🙂

On a last note… so the Dancing With the Stars finale is going to be Mario versus Emmitt. I really liked Joey, and at first was annoyed that football fans, for the second time, were voting for who I thought the least deserving to make it to the finals. But then I thought, well hey, this means that football fans are really tuning into dance these days. That’s cool. The merging of one of the country’s most popular sports and ballroom dancing. Tres interesting times we are livin’ in…

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Governor Spitzer!

 

So, we have a new Democratic governor. Does this mean, someday in the not too distant future, the Appellate courts will become a little more friendly to we appellate Public Defenders?! Does it mean there will be a slightly greater than 1% reversal rate in criminal convictions?! Does it mean the state death penalty will be revoked (not that it’s been used since being reinstated, but one never knows what more conservative D.A.s might do), and there will be more drug sentencing reforms? I guess it’ll take him a while, especially with the judicial appointments… Still, happy happy day all around!!!

Above pic is a view from my couch, where my butt was firmly planted for several hours last night. This is obviously our senator-re-elect… Or… is it the next U.S. President?!

I can’t believe it’s been six years since that chaotic insanity took place. Wow. And now, with the Montana and Virginia Senate races undecided, we could be in for a repeat of that lovely ordeal. Less flashy repeat, but seeing as how Congress has more power than the President, no less important…

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ABT Fix Is Gone Gone Gone … What’s A Girl To Do?

 

ABT‘s fall City Center season ended yesterday, sadly. Above is the cast of Glow-Stop, with the ever-radiant David Hallberg in the middle, from this past Saturday’s matinee performance. I love the mixed repertoire that my favorite dance company performs during their fall season so much better than the full-length classical ballets they do at the Met in the summer. I generally like contemporary ballets better than classical because I find it fun and challenging to try to decipher the choreographer’s meaning, plus I get a little bored seeing the same classics over and over again, and who doesn’t like something new! And, I get to see a lot more of the corps dancers who are mainly relegated to the background in the classical ballets (most of which offer only a couple of large roles per ballet, given to principals and soloists). So, it’ll be another year til I see my favorites in my preferred season again, ho hum.

Anyway, highlights for me were:

1) Marcelo Gomes doing Sinatra in Tharp’s Sinatra Suites, Marcelo dancing the part of the cocky macho sailor in Robbins’s Fancy Free, and Marcelo and Julie Kent making that insane-looking never-ending lift in Lar Lubovitch’s Meadow look completely effortless. Marcelo has such a huge personality, larger-than-life stage presence, great acting ability, and sincere appreciation for American culture, that he brings so much more than the others to the Tharp and Robbins roles. If he was not a ballet dancer, I think he would be a very successful actor!

2) David Hallberg in everything I saw him dance — Clear, In The Upper Room, Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes, Afternoon of a Faun … and he was definitely brilliant, expectedly, as Death in Kurt Jooss’ both timeless and timely, Post-WWI antiwar piece, The Green Table. He is such a beautiful man; his dancing is like watching poetry in motion. With his height and long limbs, he just fills up the entire stage whenever he is on it and makes spectacular lines. And his luminous, wispy blonde hair accentuates the fluidity of his movement. He is, I think, the quintessential lyrical dancer, and has definitely become, along with Marcelo and Jose Carreno, one of my favorites: David is the most sublime, Marcelo has the most endearing personality, and Jose is, quite simply, the greatest dancer in the world right now 🙂

(P.S.: David hasn’t been writing so much on The Winger this season, but, from what I’ve seen at City Center, that is likely because he’s been dancing every single night, so we’ll forgive him for momentarily neglecting us Wingers 🙂 )

3) Other principals I enjoyed were: Jose (like always) was perfect in everything he did; Angel Corella was wondrous in Clear, Max Beloserkovsy was beautiful dancing alongside David in Clear, Irina Dvorovenko was dazzling dancing Tharp, as she always is (and, as I think I’ve said before, to me, is currently the quintessential Tharp ballerina); Julie and Gillian were powerhouses in Meadow maintaining those shapes in mid-air practically on their own, supported only by what, Marcelo’s pinkies???

4) And a lot of the corps members I haven’t seen much of before: Misty Copeland stood out (at the beginning of the season, before she was injured anyway); both women who performed the Sinatra Suites — Sarah Lane acted the part very well and was so sweet receiving her many bouquets during curtain call the night she danced it with Angel 🙂 , and Luciana Paris had absolutely gorgeous extensions; Craig Salstein was a blast in Fancy Free and Rodeo; Jared Matthews is so damn cute you just want to pick him up and squeeze him!; Isaac Stappas did Death just as well as David I thought; Blaine Hoven seemed to be in just about everything and was very strong; Kristi Boone was remarkable in Glow-Stop; Marian Butler rocked in Rodeo, and Yuriko Kajiya was so sweet in Upper Room … and that’s just a few off the top of my head…

On a completely different note, one final thought about what we all had damn well better be doing at some point tomorrow, said much more compellingly and humorously by my very favorite political blogger. Please click here to read her raucous mad fun words of infinite wisdom.

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Hooray For Achilles Heel Marathoners!

Achilles Heel Marathon Runner

Today was the New York City Marathon — always a special day for me, and one of the many many reasons I love living close to the park, and finish line. A Brazilian guy won this year’s men’s race … which was a lotta fun for me of course, with my little Brazil fetish 🙂

Ever since my first friend in New York City, the divine Ms. Judy, took me to this event years ago when I was new here, I have always especially loved watching the Achilles Heel participants — those who have the courage and strength to run a 26.2 -mile race– miraculous for anyone to muster up — but with a disability. Literally made me cry the first year I saw it … people working so hard to overcome a nasty hurdle life threw at them, and accomplishing something huge, and attainable only by a select few really.

Here are a few other pics. It gets so crowded near the finish line, so I was up a few blocks, where the runners walked it off and met up with family and friends cheering them on. Everyone appeared to be in serious pain, and some even needed a bit of medical help. Methinks the city’s drug stores must be quite deplete of epsom salts right now…

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"Trying to Lift You Is Like Dancing With a Jack-in-the-Box!"

Mr. Jack

So Jacob says to me, while we try to do a simple lift for the umpteenth time! Apparently, I am springing up on releve (for non-dancers, that’s tippy-toes) way too early, and way too often, making it near-impossible for the guy to figure out where the hell I am so as to get a grip on me. Ugh. Lifts are so much harder than they look — even the simple-looking ones…

Anyway, I posted this pic for another reason. Just got my tickets for my annual trek down to North Carolina to visit my mom for Thanksgiving 🙂 Yay! Biscuits ‘n gravy, biscuits ‘n gravy, mouthwateringly buttery grits, more biscuits ‘n gravy, and … Jack-in-the-Box!!!!!! Seriously, this chain started in the west, and was a childhood favorite of mine growing up in Phoenix. There was a restaurant just down the street from our house, and I just thrilled to see my mom talk into the big happy-faced Jack in the drive-thru. Unfortunately, I got hooked on the menu too, which is admittedly major white-trash food — the greasy, greasy, lardy, meat-filled Monster Tacos and even greasier, fried-battery, near onion-less onion rings are my faves! Once I moved to the east coast, ugh, I was so upset — no Jacks! BUT, now they have opened several franchises in the south, and Charlotte, North Carolina (ONLY a near two-hour drive from where Mom lives!) now boasts one! So, every year, Mom has been driving me, and my cousin, who now lives in her neighborhood but who likewise grew up in Phoenix on this exquisite white-trash cornucopia, all the way to Charlotte for our annual trip down memory lane. Last year, for old times’s sake, Mom bought me this little Jack doll to bring home with me to NY. If he looks a little odd, it’s because his nose broke off and I haven’t yet got to Lee’s Paints to buy some superglue, so just stuffed it back in backwards. Well, thanks to my new teach, Jacob, the little man’s springy, wobbly head now has adult meaning to me as well…

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The Penis Enlargement Purveyors Have Raided My Photo Journal

Spam ruins lives. Seriously, it really puts a damper on the fun of blogging. (And because of this post’s title, I expect 50 spams a day minimum). But at least I can moderate the comments on this blog. I can’t do that on my photo journal plogger. So, think I’m gonna have to disable the comments function on the photo journal. With plogger, you either have to have the comments turned on or off; so, with them turned on, spammers can comment freely, forcing me to take valuable time from my day to manually delete the unwanted messages. At first it wasn’t so bad, but recently I’ve been getting upwards of 20 per day (got 42 at once to a single post).

But, it’s okay because now that I know how to embed a photo in THIS blog, where I CAN moderate comments and just refuse to post the spam, people who were commenting on the photo page can now comment here 🙂

Anyway, to try to make light of what is really an extremely frustrating problem, I think it’s kind of funny which pictures the Penis Enlargement pushers targeted to advertise their rubbish. It’s like they decided that someone in each of these pics could somehow benefit from a penis englargement in their lives. Here are some:

marthas vineyard artwork

“Maybe I wouldn’t be soooo exhausted being me if only my beau would take me away from myself, with a penis enlargement…”

Yanna doing splits lift

“Please, Lucas! If this lift is not a cry-out, I don’t know what is!”

WCS team baby baby baby lunge

Poor Mark — you seem to have got drawn into this vortex of profane insanity just for being my West Coast Swing partner … sorry!
Benji Schwimmer winning SYTYCD

Hmmmmm….

bobby brown guy teaching us to put on stage makeup

“Maybe explaining stage makeup to a bunch of first-time female performers wouldn’t be soooo tense-ridden if only I was a little bigger than this…”
guy waiting on the train at kings highway on my way to see valentina

Maybe guy waiting for the Manhattan-bound Q train at Kings Highway would not be so lonely, if he only had a penis enlargement.
me surveying my arsenal of TAC headache meds

“Maybe I wouldn’t need this arsenal of meds for my blasted Trigeminal Autonomic Cephalgia headaches if my boyfriend would just get a penis enlargement…”

DTS student showcase poster

Melanie is definitely hot for penis enlargements!

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Bah Humbug! Where Have All the True Drag Queens Gone?

Halloween Parade

Every year I tell myself I’m not going to go. And every year, I always seem to end up in the Village for the increasingly crowded, increasingly touristy, increasingly boring parade. My excuse this year was that my friend, Rebekkah’s Scottish boyfriend was visiting from Glasgow. And it was definitely fun to introduce an out-of-towner to our annual tradition. I’m just not sure what exactly the tradition is. I remember my first year here (not gonna say when that was…), when my older, wiser, fashion-industry maven friend, Judy, whom I will ALWAYS view as the consummate sophisticated New York woman 🙂 , and her friends, took me to this restaurant / bar in Chelsea and we sat there all night sipping cosmos (which I thought just about the greatest invention imaginable) admist the nastily raucous Chelsea throng of gay men with perfectly sculpted bodies in leather g-strings and stilettos — Judy and friends flirting with them, me by turns gawking and giggling. Voyeur though I may be 🙂 , that was seriously one of my best New York experiences — just watching other people express themselves so freely was kind of freeing to me. And it was the one time I felt like I could walk practically naked through the streets of N.Y. and be perfectly safe (and the city was NOT such a safe place then). I just feel like that’s not there anymore; judging by the eye-rolling and Valley Girlish “Ohkayyyy?!?”‘s at some of the totally watered-down drag costumes, the tourists who come now to see the spectacle would die if they saw the revelers of yore. Maybe, like feminism, the thought is that there’s no longer a need for that kind of expression, or maybe the gay drag thing got commodified so that it’s just silly and annoying now… Or maybe it’s just that I’m getting older and more sated on the city, who knows…

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Thanks, New Yorker!

The Complete New Yorker

Just received this in the mail from The New Yorker Compass, for taking part in their online surveys! It’s a DVD of the complete New Yorker archives — pretty cool for a NYer fan, and not very inexpensive-looking. I never win anything! Have been reading William Styron’s “Darkness Visible,” a memoir about his depression, have been feeling a bit sad myself lately, and was beginning to wonder whether I had what he did (as I often do when reading about a sickness or disorder — guess it’s the hypochondriac in me!). But apparently, if my day was brightened by such a simple thing, I must not be too bad off 🙂

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Mambo Combo Blah Blah Blahhhhhhhhh

Thank you soooo much to my friend, Rebekkah’s very kind and patient boyfriend, Robin, I now know how to embed a pic in my blog 🙂 Happy happy day 🙂 Pic’s of me and Luis finishing off our Mambo combo routine with a Latiny fish.
Mambo
Here are several more pics on photo page.