Ballerinas

My brother wrote a human interest column for many years in the Maui News.  The newspaper published a book of some of his stuff.  I have transcribed some of my favorites into my blog.  Enjoy

     Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres

Ballerinas  by Tom Stevens

     Toe shoes and tutus do not a Dame Margot make, but something special happens when little girls slip those ribboned satin shoes onto their feet, tie the gauzy skirts around their waists and become...ballerinas.
     Little boys, all "snips and snails and puppy dog tails", can never quite figure it out---even when they become fathers of ballerinas.  But to little girls and little girls grown, there is no doubt at all.
     To be a ballerina, even for a night, is to dance in a dream.
     As recital night nears, a wondrous transformation occurs.  Spirited island girls who climb trees and throw rocks at their brothers, girls with freckles on their faces and bandaids on their knees, turn into butterflies.
     Cheeks glowing with unaccustomed rouge, sparkling eyes highlighted with liner and brow pencil, they wait off-stage for the grownups to stop talking, for the house lights to dim, for the shining moment to arrive.
     The weeks of rehearsal are over.  The warmup stretches, the plies at the barre, the teacher's endless "repetez, repetez."  After patient tutoring and considerable exertion, 8-year-old awkwardness has become 8-year-old grace.
     Now, as they wait for the phonograph needle to drop into the grooves of "Swan Lake" or "Peter and the Wolf," expectation shining in their eyes, they seem like faeries from some gentler bubble world.
     They are, right now, in magic.  This is what it is for.  The afternoons of practice, the parents' many car pools from school to studio to home---all lead to this fragile moment.
     It is not the performance, really.  That will go as well as it should---a festival of bright costumes and swirling motion ending in a proud thunder of applause.
     There will be refreshments afterwards, and many pictures taken.  Praise will rain on the teacher and her pupils.  The parents will be pleased that they helped create something special for their daughters.
     But the dancer is not timeless as the wistful fantasy of the waiting dancer.  That cannot be photographed, or caught and held in the heart.
     The grownups know this, especially the mothers.  The beauty of this expectant moment stirs something deep in them, and they ache.  Time is passing.  Youth, which stretches ahead infinitely for the ballerinas, is so very short, and innocence so innocent.
     There is a moment in nature-----in the still, cool hour just before sunrise----when the very earth seems to hold its breath.  The birds sleep.  The light wind dies.  A crystalline hush settles over all.
     The waiting ballerinas are like that, in a way.  No longer toddlers, not yet women, they toe-balance between dream and wakefulness.  To them the stage is not a stage.  The crowded auditorium is not a darkened room.
     The ballerinas are not there.
     They are, right now, in magic.

     June, 1983

     A young ballerina from Makawao, Maui, waits for her call to the stage.  1983.