Sometimes you are tutu much...

So we went to Ava's Ballet Recital the other night.

I'll be honest when to comes to these things I don't ask a lot of questions…Renee tells me roughly what is going on ("what is going on is you are going to Ava's Ballet recital") and a time to arrive ("6pm sharp or I'll punch you in the neck").

So I showed up. I was handed a program of the evenings events. It was a strange mixture of what we would call classical entertainment, represented by lovely young girls with hair in tight buns, wearing tutus performing ballet and more non-traditional entertainment represented by boys doing karate... punching each other in the giblets to the tune "Santa Claus is coming to Town".

So the director of the school comes out and takes the stage…

Director: "Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming, tonight is very special and the kids have worked so hard for the past 3 months to bring you a great show. As each act finishes, your child will be seated up here in the front. Please do not come get them as it will disrupt the remaining acts. Thank you and enjoy our Holiday Show.

I of course translated this in my head and it went something like this…

Director: Attention people too stupid to get out of coming here, tonight is the culmination of 3 months of scattered direction, unfocused children thinking about Christmas presents and the fine discipline our teachers have shown in not letting the children see them drink during practice. As each act finishes, please do not rush down to the front to grab your child like it's the last chopper out of Saigon, please remain seated and endure this artistic travesty with the rest of us. Thank you and enjoy our non-denominational show because we can no longer say Christmas without pissing off everyone out there.

Anyhow, the show starts, the ballet begins. It's typically crappy, the kids forget where to go, they can't remember the moves they practiced, they look at each other (no help there), they look at the teachers and eventually end up in a small blurry, twitchy knot back by the curtain.

But what's this?…one single whiff of roses among this steaming turd..THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DANCER IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE APPEARS!

And salvages what little dignity the rest of the kids have squandered...

So as many of you have guessed, that dancer was me.

No, seriously it was Ava and she was so frickin awesome for the whole 34 seconds she was on stage.

Anyway, they finished and with a little coaxing were led off stage and to their seats.

After all that drama and passion on stage, I wiped the sweat from my brow, hopeful that I would have a moment to catch my breath…

…but it was not to be for now we were about to be treated to that ancient and oh so revered form of artistic merit known as…

…jump rope.

Yes, you read that right…jump rope. As I type this I'm unsure if I can properly convey to you what I witnessed…but I will try.

Picture this: the stage has a backdrop of long paper streamers towards the rear and above the stage floor are a series of stars and spheres covered in glitter and swaying gently.

On the stage are no less than 8 kids standing 12 inches apart flailing their arms, whipping their jump ropes randomly in all directions, getting caught in the backdrop, hitting each others faces, catching the hanging ornaments, saying oops every 2 seconds etc.

With all that spastic action, if I could have put them in a swimming pool, thrown in some detergent and my clothes, they would have been able to clean my laundry.

Anyhoo...

On to Act 3: Hip Hop. Now I don't consider myself racist, I don't think anyone else would either but with very, very minor exceptions, Hip Hop was built by black artists in the black communities and there is something so wrong with a bunch of white 7 year olds trying to rap and doing hip thrusts on stage.

And that's all I can say about that.

So get ready cause here comes the end…Act 4: the Karate Act. It was subtitled "All I Want for Christmas is a Black Belt".

It was, I thought, a thing of beauty. The stage is about 25 feet wide, it had 30 kids on it plus a sensei plus 2 assistants. They yelled and grunted for about 10 minutes. I couldn't make out what the teacher was yelling but every time she shouted several random kids would throw kicks or punches or swing their arms into the space in front of them which of course caused a chain reaction where kids several rows back would actually fall over.

It looked like 20 cats in a white bag fighting over a mouse.

And if that isn't the very definition of entertainment, I don't know what is.