Ballet

When I was six years old, I wanted to be a dancer. I rented movies about dancing, watched ballets on television, and liked to dance around my room to classical music, pretending I was the star of a beautiful ballet. I had always been too young to join a real dance class. Of course there were those “Mommy and me” classes for babies, and then the “creative dance” classes that consisted of toddlers spinning and hopping around a dance floor, following no set chorography. But, now, being six, I could join a real dance class, where the beginnings of a true ballerina were born.
“I’m going to be a dancer,” I said confidently to my mother in the kitchen, as she made dinner and I practiced plies.
“I know, I know, dear,” She replied, having heard this from me many times before.
The next day was a Saturday. My mother came into the living room at around eleven ‘o clock that morning. I was watching weekend cartoons when she came in.
“Get dressed, we a...