Lament from school project Hades

♪Does any one know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?♫ - Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

So, this morning, I sat in a large classroom teeming with Grade Sixes buzzing around their exhibits for the First Nations/Métis/Inuit Fair, and watched the second hand of the clock go so slowly, it was damned near going backwards.

Okay, I admit it. I'm a ba-a-a-a-d mother. I loathe field trips, sports days, student-led conferences, parent-teacher interviews. I go to them because I have to. Because I believe visible parents are a good reminder for teachers. Last night, I spent the better part of an hour concocting so-called Arctic Paradise Punch from a mixture of cranberry juice, orange juice, lemonade and ginger ale. It was from a recipe that appeared in The Vancouver Sun not long after the Northwest Territories Pavilion was one of the hits of Expo '86. Frankly, I doubt the Inuit of yore had much access to cranberries, oranges, lemons, or ginger ale, but what's good enough for the official Northwest Territories Pavilion is good enough for my daughter's Inuit exhibit, dammit.

And I woke up this morning with the mantra: "It'll be over in two hours; it'll be over in two hours..." much in the fashion I got myself through presenting seminars to ESL student teachers after I got my Master's.

It took three goddamn hours. I spent the first hour helping younger daughter pour and pass aforementioned punch. I spilled it; she kept telling me "I'm twelve years old, Mom...." The next half-hour was spent trailing judges and having younger daughter recite the two-paragraph write-up she'd memorized. (Refused to read it, because she'd memorized it, then spent agonizing seconds trying to recall the next sentence while her audience assumed she'd finished and asked questions, thus throwing her off more...). Then that half-hour watching the clock inch along. The next half-hour waiting for the judges to show up, go on and on about what a good job everyone had done, say several things about each of the dozen exhibits, then get into a debate about announcing the winners which culminated in the kids' being sent to lunch with instructions to return and find out who won...

The winners got medals, the honourable mentions didn't, and everyone who didn't get a medal is apparently pretty cracked up about it, including my daughter. Also, I think I heard them say that the honourable mention groups will be accompanying the winning groups to the Regional Fair in April. No-o-O-O-O-o-o.....

Enabling Part Two

My second example of enabling in the arts is my fondness for ballet. Sometimes I wonder if it's the moral thing to encourage malnourished women with malformed feet to dance upon their bludgeoned toes for my pleasure. Ballet, it seems to me, is a brief career of self-torture. Mind you, this could be a definition for most careers in the arts, but I still think George Balanchine has a lot to answer for. Furthermore, we're raising another enabler in our household. After the success of the outing to see the HD film of Tales of Beatrix Potter a little over a fortnight ago, we decided to tackle an HD offering of the Royal Ballet's Sleeping Beauty at one of our local cinemas.

I was a bit hesitant about subjecting second daughter to Sleeping Beauty, remembering it as a very long ballet with (how do I put this?) rather a lot of dancing in it. Every time someone finishes their bit, some other character makes a rolling motion above their head which is classic ballet mime for "Please dance!" (or "Were you the last person to use the bathroom?"), to which there should be the classic ballet mime equivalent for: "This is a *&%!# ballet; what do you think we've just been doing here?"

Actually, that's a neat advantage of watching a ballet in a cinema rather than live; you can see the details of the facial expressions, the costumes, and classic ballet mime. (You could see these live as well, but only if you sat close enough to be sprayed by sweat during the pirouettes.) This was a particular pleasure in seeing Genesia Rosato who played Carabosse the wicked fairy.
Oooh, I love a good character dancer. She had fiendish fun parodying the gifts the good fairies had brought, then going into loving detail about the fate awaiting Princess Aurora: "She's going to grow up and be all these lovely things, then she's going to prick her finger and DIE!" For good measure, she arrives in a kind of Harley-Davidson black coach with a bunch of black rats and wears a low cut costume not quite made decent by purple pasties.

Of course, this left stuff for the Lilac Fairy (top picture) to mop up, including a lot of mime explaining that Aurora would not die, made more difficult by the fact that the classic ballet mime gestures for "not" and "die" are rather similar, and furthermore she had to re-explain this in each act: "Okay, remember what Carabosse told you? Now watch carefully: the princess is not going to die. Get it? Not. Die. Not...." All with this rather fixed grin on her face.

Other dancers got to have a little more fun with the mime. The prince got to perform something along the lines of: "Yes, you're the one who has to play Blind Man's Buff with the Countess. That's why I'm the Prince, and you're a nobody." And the Major Domo character (named Cattalabutte, poor fella) demonstrated the difference between "king and queen" (three fingers pointing at forehead) and "princess" (two fingers pointing at forehead) as in: "Gad! Here come the King and Queen!" and "Oh, look! Here comes the jailbait princess..."


Princess Aurora, as I have intimated, is extremely young. And tiny. The dancer who plays her mother looks like a woman of typical height, until Aurora shows up with the other female dancers in tutus (granted, quite a few of them are supposed to be fairies). As a result, when the grieving queen goes to her unconscious daughter, she looks a bit like that Amazonian Madonna in Michaelangelo's Pieta. Alina Cojocaru, the Aurora in this production, is actually 27, but looks about 12. She doesn't dance like a twelve-year-old; she is undeniably a crackerjack dancer, as were all the other principals and soloists, including her dark and brooding prince Federico Bonelli.

And younger daughter? Entranced, even more so than at the Beatrix Potter ballet of two weeks before. We've bought season tickets for one of The National Arts Centre's ballet series. It includes a production of Peter Pan from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Romeo and Juliet from the National Ballet of Canada, and Giselle with lots more adventures in classical ballet mime. I fear we will be enabling throughout the coming winter...

Enabling Part One

Sometimes I worry that, as a member of the viewing public, I am an enabler. This has been a concern twice this week.

First example: A strange excuse for entertainment entitled How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?. Based on a British series of shows that set up a very public competition for a lead role in a high-end musical, this is CBC's quest to cast the role of Maria in an upcoming revival of The Sound of Music in Toronto.

First off, let me clarify this: I have never watched American Idol nor Canadian Idol. I don't watch So You Think You Can Dance. I don't even watch Are You Smarter than a Canadian Fifth Grader? (For one thing, we don't call it the Fifth Grade in Canada; it's Grade Five.) So, I go into this thing thinking: Younger daughter loves Sound of Music; there'll be Broadway tunes; we can all watch this together.

Okay, so the first two shows are basically documenting the winnowing process. The first concludes with a rather silly reception in London where the twenty hopefuls are called upstairs in twos and threes to be told, on camera: "We don't think you are Maria"/"You could be Maria". Pretty artificial and definitely humiliating for those who don't make it, but perhaps only marginally more brutal than the cattle-calls they've all experienced.

The second show was live-ish. (we have six time zones in Canada, so there was a designated voting time for the great unwashed public.) This featured ten show stoppers in groups of two, followed by some more rather brutal critiques.

Then there was the third show, a third of which was taken up with superfluous footage of the "Marias" in Saltzburg. Why? Presumably because they have the budget for it. The rest was Gavin Crawford, our hapless host from This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Second City among other things, trying to feebly yuck it up while they take an unforgiveable amount of time telling groups of girls they will make it to the next round until the final two are forced into a "sing-off".
Together.
After being told by the judges that they are deservedly the least popular.

But, oh no, there's a final bit of degradation. The loser of the sing-off, having had her hopes crushed and her short-comings catalogued, must stay on the stage and have the remaining Marias surround her in a rainbow of dirndl skirts and serenade her with "So Long, Farewell, Au Wiedersehen , Good Night".

No, no, wait. Then Loser Girl has to finish the song with "Good Night...Good Night....Good Night...."

Pardon me, but am I the only person who is appalled? How about if we just go back to public executions, or feeding Christians (or your bêtes noirs of choice) to the lions?