ballet.prodigy

Eight year old *m* has been taking ballet lessons at the boston ballet school for a couple years. This school year, she moved up to the age group where they are required to take lessons twice a week. Since she has a crap load of homework, she was given the choice of staying at the boston ballet school and stopping her gymnastics lessons, or sticking with gymnastics and switching to another ballet school where she could stick to her once a week saturday morning lesson. She decided to stay with boston ballet, and why? Because this is the first year she could audition to be part of the nutcracker, silly! I found all of this a little amusing. How likely is it that an eight year old third grader, who appears to be a perfectly average dancer, would actually make it into a ballet that people pay lots of money to see each christmas? I guess I've always assumed those kid parts were performed by freakish prodigy types whose parents had started them in ballet as soon as they could walk. None-the-less, she dropped gymnastics, and we added another afternoon at the ballet studio to our already threadbare schedule. When the time came around for auditions, the teacher talked to them about the "luck" factor- ie- even if you do a great job with the actual ballet, you may be too short, too tall, or have the wrong color hair for the part. Instead of reassuring her, or just giving her an excuse if she didn't make it, this little talk seemed to scare the living daylights out of her. She decided she didn't want to audition, apparently because she became aware of the fact that she might not make it. In the end, she did audition. She also got a pink call-back slip, and today, she received a letter congratulating her for being accepted as the part of a doll. I guess I'll be out $125 for front row nutcracker seats this year.