Housekeeping first! Amazon has for some reason gotten spotty about putting the thank-you QR codes in their packages. I don't have any direct way to get in touch with the anony-mouse (anony-mice?) who send things off the lists, but everything has arrived. Thank you!
Well, I made it through about two weeks of "time off" before I started trying to DO SOMETHING so I didn't go mad. Browsing job boards, mainly. It makes me nervous to see the numbers in my bank accounts go down and down. I realize that this is the point of that grant money -- to spend it on rent and groceries and transit and other aspects of living my life, and that not spending it on those things would be counterproductive. I also realize that theater goes through a lull every year around this time, and that everything will be back in September as it always is.
None of that makes me more comfortable. I will probably never be comfortable with the finite nature of money under a capitalist system. I will also probably never be comfortable with staying idle for more than a couple weeks at a time. Having nothing to focus on makes my brain itch unpleasantly.
I did give myself a budget and spent most of July working on personal projects and taking whatever classes seemed interesting. I didn't get quite as much done as I wanted, mainly because Boston has been 90°F and 90% humidity a lot, which feels a little like trying to be productive from the inside of a double-boiler.
The SOJD has finished his foray into professional cheerleading and is back at our home studio, for which I am grateful. That is one of the few classes where I feel like I can just sit the fuck down for a minute and nobody will swarm me. I don't know if he knows that's unusual -- he's pretty blind to just how much the way his classroom works is a reflection of how he thinks the world should work, and not how it actually does. I've tried to tell him that, but frankly not too hard, since it's to my advantage not to rock the boat here. It also makes him a useful barometer for when I'm too out of whack to reliably assess myself. We're about equally self-destructively determined; if he thinks I look concerning enough to come over and check, I am clearly done, and I should crawl home.
People kept asking me if he was going to re-sign with the Celtics dance squad. My guess was no, because this is the second time I've seen him try to do literally anything with his life other than teach, and the second time he made it like two months in before he decided it sucked. My guess was correct, but why they didn't just ask him in the first place is beyond me. I'm not his mother. He spent a few months hating the whole cheerleading style too, but he did eventually figure out how to make it more his own thing. For what it's worth, I've seen him in a lot of the Celtics Entertainment reels, but the first time he ever really looked like himself was when they had Haus of Snap in for Pride Night and got the whole squad to do a number in their signature style, a mashup of hip-hop and ballroom (aka vogueing).
[He is visible at least once in that collab clip. Have fun figuring out which one of those dudes has been trying to teach me hip-hop.]
Sadly, it looks like I'm going to have to drop his cheer/street jazz block in the fall. It's $155 for 10 classes, which is more than my anxiety will let me spend. I could justify it if I could use those 10 classes whenever, but class packages at that studio are also time-limited, and I can't guarantee I'd make it to 10 classes in 30 days once the theater reconvenes and I start having long blocks of tech rehearsal again. If I have to drop things, the ones that cost money go first.
If I'm honest, that class is the least comfortable for me to be in. The movement is fun, and he's teaching pom, which is technically a props thing. I do enjoy flailing around with shiny light-up things in my hands. The crowd is a lot different than what he draws in our home studio, though. His "all level" classes are eclectic; there are professionals who come to class, and there are amateurs who know they will never be pro, but don't care, because they're too busy envisioning themselves on stage with Beyonce. The crowd is a wide variety of shapes and colors. I'm not the only one in my 40s.
The prostyle cheer class attracts exactly the audience you would expect it to: Young women who are currently in or recently out of competitive cheer programs, who hope to be a cheerleader for a professional sports org in the future. They come to class in Fabletics coordinates, with perfect hair and makeup which are both still perfect after an hour and a half. No shade to these women; they all seem to be perfectly nice people, and "basic pageant girl" is a totally valid look that takes a lot of time and effort to maintain. But it is, to be blunt, the thinnest, blondest, whitest room I have ever seen him teach anything to, and I feel really weird about being there.
Being the odd one out doesn't normally bother me. I just took a pop-up class that was hip-hop/Bollywood fusion, and I was the only person in the room who didn't have an Indian accent. I looked nothing like any of the other dancers. Nobody cared, because I wasn't supposed to. But you are supposed to look more or less like the other people on your cheer squad -- not to the extent of a corps de ballet, but at least to the extent that you all look like you're coming at the choreo from the same basic movement background. More like Broadway tap, perhaps. I look sort of like the rest of them visually, but not really, and sort of like the rest of them kinetically, but not really, and it makes me cringe whenever I see myself in the mirror.
The SOJD has explicitly expressed that he thinks standing out is a good thing. In the general sense, in the success-at-auditions sense, in the pretty-sure-that's-how-he-made-the-squad sense, and in the very specific sense that applied to me, after a few months of flailing randomly around in his classes. All the approval in the world from the guy standing up at the front does not make me feel less awkward about this. I honestly can't tell if that's a defect in me, or if he's trying to make the world inside his classroom bend to his will again. I have no interest in professional cheer, and I can't justify continuing to spend money to see if I'll ever get over it.
Comments
Post a Comment