Journal 11
Wednesday - 01-26-11
Happy Birthday to my Mashen'ka!!!
(One of my good friends from the dance studio. -- I went to her family's Dacha together, with here and some of her other friends.)
**********
Today started pretty well, all things considered! (At least, from a female's perspective.) And this is because I:
A. Feel marvelously sexy today. (It's always awesome, for girls, when they wake up and just have a day where they feel pretty and good about themselves.)
B. Am wearing a shirt with a neckline that is absolutely scandalous. (It is for me, anyway!)
C. Took a really awesome picture today, so says I. (It's now my new profile picture on facebook. *waves little flags* Yay.)
See?
And of course, I can't forget that I'm supposed to have four hours (slightly less) of dance lessons today!!!
**********
… Funny how that didn't *quite* work out…
I got 4 hours or slightly less of sleep (all told), and then left home in order to meet Roma about an hour before the lesson. That way, we could have time to get to wherever our lessons would be at, and we could warm up before the lesson. Also, it was because Roma was supposed to have reached a final agreement with Vova about the lessons last night -- but Vova hadn't called back -- so we apparently didn't know quite were we stood, lesson wise. That was news to me.
So, we're on our way to this studio, and Roma gets a hold of Vova, finally; only to find out that our lesson has been moved to 9 PM. (It was 12:20 PM at the time!!!)
Then, as I'm finding out that I now have lessons in the evening, I am trying to get a hold of the other trainer (Elena) with whom I'm supposed to have my other two lessons today! I hadn't heard anything from her the day before, though she said she was going to get a hold of me; so, I called her.
As it turned out, her phone had run out of money yesterday, so she couldn't respond. (This has happened to me before, at terribly inopportune times, so I completely understood.)
Unfortunately, however, it was the same story from Lena: there was no room for the lessons anywhere (due to the problems going on with our main hall -- see Session IV, Journal 2) -- and so my lessons with her were moved to Friday.
It was frustrating to have the day, which I thought was going to be full of dance, turn out to seem rather empty. Naturally, it was also terribly frustrating to have "wasted" the time getting out to Babushkinskaya Metro. (It's essentially an hour from my house to the Metro station itself.)
I counted myself fortunate, however, that we were still going to have lessons with Vova, just later; and I would still have lessons with Lena, a few days from now.
*****
… Of course, even once we got to the lesson in the evening, I still managed to hit a bump…! =>_<=
The tights that I had had *in my hands,* and which I could have sworn that I had folded up with all my dance clothes and put into my bag... Were not there!!!!!
No tights meant I had no "bottom" to wear for practice… For our first lesson in over a month, and our first lesson with a new coach!!! Pulling a MacGyver** as much as I ever have, I fashioned a skirt out of a tank top (thanking God that I was small enough in the hips to make it work), and then tried to cover the rest of my legs, as best I could, with some leg warmers. And thankfully, the shirt I was wearing today worked for dance; otherwise, I'd have had no shirt to wear -- having just turned it into a skirt.
[**MacGyver = American action t.v. show, which aired from 1985-1992. Featured the main character, MacGyver, who was famous for being able to make any number of gadgets out of seemingly random, non-useful items.
Example of a typical MacGyver joke: "It's MacGyver! The guy could make a bomb out of a paperclip and some used gum!"]
The ensemble worked alright -- but I was embarrassed, and mad. (Without tights, I was obviously working "bare-legged," and I'm very self conscious about the skin on my legs. Mostly due to my paleness, but for other reasons, too -- so having to work without tights is like taking the security blanket away from a toddler and then shoving him into a closet he believes is filled with horrible monsters who will devour him if he doesn't have the blanket. = O_o = Or something like that…)
*****
My insecurities about the evening's fashion aside, and after a rough start, the lesson was AMAZING.
I say a "rough start," because even though I had asked Roma what he wanted to do in today's lesson (being aware of both his inconsistencies in choosing what he wants to work on and inability to say what he wants to work on when asked by a coach -- both things the frustrate me), and even though he and I talked about it, as soon as Vova greeted us to start our lesson, and asked, "What do you want to work on today?" Roma just said, "Uhh….." as though he'd never put a single thought towards what he wanted to work on in dancing, ever!!!
It's hard to explain how this makes me feel, every time it happens… If you're familiar with Asian cultures' concept of, "Face," -- then I don't need to explain anything more to you. When he does this, in front of the talented coaches we are blessed to work with, I feel as though I am loosing Face. And lots of it.
If you haven't the slightest what I am talking about, when I allude to, "Face," I suppose a more "Western" way to put it is, is that I feel that Roma's seeming, "unprepared-ness" or, "disinterest/apathy," damages my reputation and makes me look bad in front of our coaches. I feel that it, by extension, makes me look as though I haven't cared enough about the lesson I'm going to have, to bother coming up with specific questions or topics to work on in our lesson. After all, we are supposed to be a team, and be working together outside of all these lessons, so we surely must have some questions! But if we have no questions, do we really care? Are we really working hard?
From the look on Vova's face as Roma gave him a, "as a cow looks at an oncoming train," stare, and said he didn't know what he wanted to work on -- I could tell Vova had the same, "Uhh… How do you not know? There's NOTHING you want to ask about?" thought running through his head.
Vova dropped his attention on Roma and turned to look at me instead -- and while I'd been hoping that having had the talk with Roma beforehand would have meant that he could answer the question, and in better Russian than I; I realized that if we were going to achieve anything (and save Face / reputation), I was going to have to be the one to, "save the day…" … Again.
I quickly rolled off to Vova many of the things I'd talked about with Roma, trying (with an internal feel of desperation) to show that we, or at least I, had thought about things, had questions, and wanted to work!! Vova seemed satisfied with what I said, and we commenced to working on Samba.
The idea is that we'll go through our routines, show them to Vova, say what we are uncomfortable with (or Vova can see what we are uncomfortable with), and either better learn how to do certain moves, or modify/change them, in order to make the routine better.
I have to say, the outright highlight of the night (besides hearing some corrections be given to my partner that I have been trying to point out for ages, and getting corrected myself) was Vova shouting [to Roma]:
"My Grandma collects her legs faster than you!"
I about died of laughter on the spot!! (This is also something like the line from the film, "Eat, Pray, Love" -- "My Grandma walks faster than you! … And she's dead!!")
*****
All in all, working with Vova is just as awesome as I thought it would be, and I know it will continue to be so! To add one more positive to the evening, he even made time for Roma and I tomorrow -- so, we will actually wind up getting a little bit more time with him this week! (Because we're doing something like 1.5 lessons today and tomorrow.)
Another bright spot is that instead of having all the lessons [which I was supposed to have] jammed into one day, I will now have three days of instruction. I am certainly looking forward to that!!
(Fast Fact: When explaining this situation to a friend online, I almost mistyped that as "Sinstruction." -- "Which is epic-ly hedonistic. And oddly appropriate for my sphere of dancing!" I joked. I also wondered if it was a Freudian slip of some kind; but then just settled with reminding myself of another layered pun I once created: 'A priest will Absolve you of sins. A bartender will Absinthe you of them."
[For anyone who's never been much exposed to Latin… The first layer of the pun is merely the contrast of the words "Absolve," and "Absinthe."
The second layer incorporates the Latin. The prefix "Ab-" means, "away, from" -- so breaking down the word "Absinthe" you get, "Ab-sin," or, "Away from sin."
-- For anyone who wants to be picky about, "What happens to the "-th" sound??" -- from Old English, "-th" is a suffix forming nouns, either from verbs (showing process or action - ex: birth) or from adjectives (showing a state of being - ex: health). So, sin-th (phonetically), would denote "the action of sinning."
-- And we still come around to a contrast of the Priest and the Bartender's manner of taking their patrons away from sin. And the pun still gets to be about Liquor AND Latin. Whoo!]
**********
Randomly: at the end of the lesson,
Once I'd returned home, I saw that I had received a wonderful email from my lovely Yitian today, and that fact, of course, put a giant smile on my face! The best part of the email was probably the following line:
"Warmest wishes (because you need them to stay out of the Russian Cold)"
I couldn't stop laughing!!! It was twice as funny as it normally would have been, because it *was* rather cold this evening, and the temperature led me to having the following conversation with my host Babushka before I left for dance:
Her: "Oh, Katya, it's so cold outside in the street! You shouldn't go out!"
Me - "But I have dance!"
Her: "Oh, no, you should stay in!! Don't go out there, it is far too cold!"
Me - "Can't help it, gotta dance!"
Her: "I wish you would stay in...."
I managed to catch Yitian online later in the evening, actually, and got to relate the story to her. She couldn't stay long, however, as she had to get to dance lessons. She told me that one of my/our favorite coaches was coming that evening, and I told her to please give him my hellos! I miss working with him so much!
He and his wife were former national champions of Estonia (Standard Program), before they moved to the US. Every lesson we had with him was both very informative, and often left us dying with laughter, due to his dry wit, iconic speaking style, and often-unintended jokes.
Yitian and my's very favorite story with him however, occurred one day at the end of a lesson… We hadn't seen this coach for a very long time, and she and I approached him, and simultaneously gave him a hug. (One of us was on each of his sides.) He put an arm around each of our shoulders (lightly), "returned" the hug for a moment, while saying, "Aww…" and a moment later (and in the same breath) said, "…Okay, go." And released us!
It was good to think of the good times we had…
No comments:
Post a Comment