This Is Beautiful: Playing in a Jazz Band

 I've had such a hard road with music lately. Specifically since I moved to Michigan. I really didn't like playing with student groups, it was a combination of not having peers in the groups and not loving the pressure to do well. And I've had a hard time finding a decent community concert band that I vibe with. But I'm so happy that I joined this community jazz band! We've had multiple gigs and the rehearsals are always fun and respectful while getting things done. I'm really so happy that I'm here.

“The Ballerinas” by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

This book is the one that I picked up in Marquette, at Snowbound books (which I mentioned in my post about Marquette here). I wasn’t sure about this book, I mean it’s about ballet so I’m going to at least give it a glance. But a lot of ballet books that deal with “female violence” like the back of the book use ambition as the driving force and get more caught up in the aesthetic of ballet rather than what ballet is actually like (I never watched it but I think there was a season of like “Pretty Little Liars” or something that centered around a murder at a ballet school, that sort of thing). And since I actually am a dancer, I really just want something that resonates with my experiences. So I was hesitant about this book, until I picked it up, flipped through it, and saw the epigraph from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Then I knew this was a book I had to read.

The plot follows Delphine, a dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet from her adolescent years into adulthood. The way the chapters are structured, we get a snippet of Delphine as a teenager, and a portion of her life as an adult, having just returned to Paris. Delphine as a teenager is at ballet school with her best friend Margeaux, they then meet Lindsay who joins the program late and rounds out their trio. As an adult, Delphine is trying to get her new ballet off the ground as a budding choreographer, while reconnecting with her friends and her surrogate mother Stella. Delphine quickly realizes how much things have changed, Margeaux now no longer wants to be a dancer forever. Lindsay still does but after an accident years ago has a hard time partnering with anyone. Both are married, Delphine missed both of their weddings. Stella is about to have her hip replaced, but Delphine struggles to see Stella as a person and not her mother or another caretaker. Eventually though, a few secrets some to light. Delphine finds out that her crush from her teen years is sleeping around the cast and filming it secretly. She leaks it to the press and has to deal with the possibility of revenge porn. The accident that caused Lindsay’s injury was Delphine and Margeaux tripping her into the street before an audition since Lindsay wanted to sleep with one of the judges. And finally, it gets revealed how Delphine decided to return to Paris after finding out that her boyfriend, the one who encouraged her to choreograph, was a serial cheater and preventing her career from getting started. This culminates in Lindsay’s birthday where her husband is devastated that she had an abortion so that she could continue dancing, and he accidentally drops a bust on her foot. Delphine then gives him a shove, and sends him out of a window. She gets off with it being to protect her friend, and continues to choreograph. Lindsay accepts that she cannot dance anymore, and starts to teach English. And Margeaux also quits to try and start a family of her own.

Apologies for the huge paragraph of a summary, but I really didn’t know how to cut that in half or cut it down. There is so much going on in this story, but lets start with the structure of the chapters. Having the narrative partly be from their teen years and partly as adults is a really interesting idea. Of course eventually the teen narrative catches up to where the adult one began, completing the circle. It also reinforces this idea that Delphine has that when she returns to Paris, everything will be exactly the same as before. None of the in between things will have made a difference. And here the reader is with a snapshot of what those before times really were like.

So much of the book is about stories. But in a surprisingly subtle way. The most overt part of this has to do with Delphine as a choreographer, using bodies and music to tell stories. She starts with telling the story of the last Tsar of Russia, a story that she wants to be about how you can get everything that you want, and all that can destroy you. It’s very clearly about her experiences with this relationship that has just fallen apart and how she feels it is tearing her apart as well. This gets scrapped though, when the artistic director tells her to do some feminist-y piece. So instead of that, Delphine creates a solo dance to Janis Joplin that is all about the cycle of grief, particularly female grief. And she gets Lindsay to do it, she has the life experience from constantly yearning to be a principal. This new piece is much more intimate, and it has this cyclical nature to it. You will eventually recover from grief, and experience it again.

There’s another layer to the commentary on stories though. The entire time Delphine was away, she was telling herself stories about the people that she left behind. And instead of keeping up with them and what they were like, she trapped them into this story that she told herself. This almost destroys multiple relationships that she has: Stella and Margeaux. Margeaux has developed a drinking problem, she’s drunk all the time but Delphine doesn’t let herself see it. Stella also is her own person and does not exist to help Delphine, but Delphine needs that so badly that she keeps expecting so much from her. In the end though, Delphine is able to talk to them about it, apologize, and accept them for who they are and not who she wants them to be.

In contrast to this are all the male characters in the story. Ballet is an interesting example of these gender dynamics as it is mostly women, but almost all of the positions of responsibility are held by men. Men set the standards for how the women need to look and the women bend over backwards to meet that. One example of this is Delphine’s ex keeping her career small. He wants someone to be his unpaid assistant, not to have a mind of her own. Another is Delphine’s old crush who films himself having sex with women in the company. He wants them to just be objects, submissive and always willing. And finally there’s Lindsay’s husband. He refuses to believe that she won’t want to have children and give in to his goals in life, as opposed to letting her be in control of her life and her body. After Delphine pushes him out a window, she describes it as his suicide in that he brought that on himself by treating his wife like that, taking pleasure in her not achieving her goals so that he could have his. All of the men want to keep the women trapped into their ideas of how they should act instead of letting them be real people.

Of course, the book also has a lot to say about the dance world. Clearly the author was involved in ballet at some point, or I don’t think she could write this. There are a lot of details about how ballet works, when dancers go en pointe, how white-washed the ballet world is, things like that which I don’t think outsiders typically know. Really my only nitpick is that Delphine, Margeaux, and Lindsay all get into the company at the same time. The odds of that are astronomically small, but it has to work that way for the plot so whatever. But truly, so much of this resonated with my experiences. Delphine talks about leaving dance for choreography, and it almost mirrors my own. How I didn’t want to serve in someone else’s vision but instead create my own. And how much I miss being a more serious dancer. She also doesn’t shy away from the messy parts, how dancers are constantly dancing on injuries and hurting themselves without allowing enough time to heal. But also how strong and powerful they are. You can’t make it to a professional level any other way. There’s one part that mentions how ballet typically has a pink colored screen over it that softens all of the hard parts. This book doesn’t do it, it shows ballerinas as powerful and underlines how strange it is that a symbol of femininity is made up of underweight, overworked individuals.

The final theme I want to address is the theme of watching within the story. It is present from that opening epigraph, the quote talking about how learning that there is no God and no one is watching is the greatest tragedy. Dance is all about feeling watched, that there could be audience and cameras anywhere. That dancers need to be ready at any point to get a correction from the teacher that is watching. And it runs all through this book, both on stage and off. Women need to constantly act as though someone is watching just in general as they apply makeup and other techniques to alter their appearance. This is contrasted with seeing someone. Delphine finally learns to see the people around her for who they are. When Lindsay’s husband is killed she yells at him “you don’t see me!” It is watching as observation versus seeing as understanding.

In case you can’t tell from the amount that I’ve written about this, I adored this book and this story. It has been so long since I dove into a story to this extent and found it so fruitful to think about. I’m so glad that this exists, I feel like I’ve been searching my whole life for relatable ballet content, and now I got two books in a single summer. (The first was Don’t Think, Dear which I wrote about in this post and goes really well as a companion to this book.) Here’s hoping that I’m able to find some more, and that I get back into the studio to dance myself really soon.

This Is Beautiful: Spoken Word Poetry

 All right, hold your boos. I went to an event last weekend where Dark Noise Collective came and read a bunch of their poems. And it was so good and energizing! The poems were great, but also all of their personalities really came through and it felt like you got to know them. Of course also the poems were about social justice and imagining a new world, and it really felt like a bunch of people came together to share their energy with each other. Such a cool event, I left with 2 of their books haha. I'm excited to read them!

“Calling on Dragons” by Patricia Wrede

This is the third book in the Enchanted Forest chronicles, I talked about the first book here and the second book here. This book keeps the pattern of going with a different narrator, and for this one we get the witch Morwen! Which is incredible because that means that we can understand her cats as well.

Morwen lives in the Enchanted Forest, and one day her cats discover a huge rabbit. The rabbit’s name is Killer, and he was eating some innocent-looking clover when he started growing. So they head over there and discover evidence of wizards using the clover to change their size, as well as a small wizard that Morwen promptly melts. They take this to the King and Queen of the Enchanted Forest, Mendelbar and Cimorene. Kazul the King of the Dragons is visiting as well, and their magician friend Telemain. While there, they discover that the wizards have stolen Mendelbar’s magic sword that maintains peace and prevents the wizards from draining the forest of magic. As a result, Morwen, Kazul, Cimorene (who we learn is pregnant), Telemain, and the increasingly cursed rabbit Killer (who ends up a blue donkey) all set out to find it. Mendelbar wants to come, but he has to stay in the forest to maintain peace in the absence of the sword.

On the way, the group runs into a fire witch who helps them find the wizards’ lair. Once there, they steal the sword back. However, they are too late. By the time they get back the wizards have attached the castle with Mendelbar inside. Now there’s a bubble preventing anyone who isn’t a wizard from entering. The sword could disperse it, if the King of the Enchanted Forest wields it. But he is trapped inside. The group resolves that their best course of action is to wait for Cimorene’s baby to grow up and wield the sword, finally releasing Mendelbar.

Alright so the ending. That’s a hell of an ending. And quite the lead up to the last book in the series. It almost feels like… a bit too much for the series. Up until now, things have been able to wrap up so neat and tidy, it feels ridiculous that their best course of action is to do nothing and wait for another sixteen years or so. Having said that, the book does say that Cimorene never gives up trying to get to Mendelbar. So at least she’s putting in the effort.

There is a subplot about the witches being accosted by some guy who wants the witches to look “traditional” and things like that. I really enjoyed how Morwen bucks those trends, she has nine cats and none of them are black and wears what she wants and in general does not look like a stereotypical witch. And even though this is just a side-plot, the entire series is about characters rejecting the stories that are set for them and doing what makes them happy. It’s a really sweet and important message to bring along with the upending of fairy tale tropes.

There are few ways to make these middle sequels stand out, but that ending really does nail this one. I think I’ll be thinking about that one for a while. And it does make me really excited to finally get to the last book of this series.

This Is Beautiful: Not Going Into Work

 This should be obvious but it is so nice when you can stay home and not go into work. Two weekends ago I had to go in over the holiday but last weekend I got to stay home while my undergrad took care of it. It was so nice, I mean I still had to do work but at least I didn't have to go anywhere.

Marquette and the Upper Peninsula

Over the summer my partner and I went on a short trip up to the upper peninsula of Michigan. We drove up to Marquette first, and spent most of our time there. There were a surprising number of good restaurants and breweries to check out!

One of the highlights was the bookstore, Snowbound Books. It has used books and new ones! Despite the fac that the store is tiny, the shelves everywhere pack in a lot of product. There’s also a really cool spice and tea store, Spice Merchants. They have these lovely packs of pre-mixed soup spices that we grabbed a bunch of. And there’s a bagel place! With decent bagels! Incredible.

The best part, to me, was the couple of hikes that we went on. First was Echo Lake and then Presque Isle. Both are gorgeous, with lovely views of nature. At Echo Lake we even found wild blueberries! Presque Isle also has Black Rocks, which are these rocks that people jump off of into the water. We didn’t do it, it was freezing and windy the day we went, but it’ll be fun to do later.

We also took a short trip to Negaunee as well. Not as much there, but we found some caving grounds from old mine shafts and got pasties! It is interesting seeing how the town is incorporating mining and its history into how it attracts tourists.

Finally on the way back we went to Mackinaw Island. I had never been before, but my partner used to go every summer so nothing new for him. It was cool, I love a walkable city and this whole island doesn’t allow cars! If you want to see the whole thing you have to rent a bike or a horse. Having said that though, it does feel a little like Disneyland, with how cute and clean it is. Most of the shops are within a few blocks of the harbor and are crowded as a result. Beyond that there’s the fort (which we didn’t go to) and the Grand Hotel which is huge and fancy and all that. So really our visit only took a couple hours, but it was fun for that period of time. Any longer would not have been worth it.

All in all, I thought it was a good visit. We got to see nature, I got to see where my partner grew up, and we had a sprinkling of history and tourist sites throughout. Next time we go up I really want to check out Pictured Rocks so maybe we will make a dedicated trip.

This Is Beautiful: Staged Season 3

 Alright I have been a big fan of Staged since it first came out, but I was really late to finding out about the third season. I might have written about it before, but to sum up I thought that the first season was great, the premise for the second was fine but poorly executed. And I thought the third season was amazing!

The season opens with the boys getting back together to do a radio play, very similar to the first season. But then at the end of the second episode Michael storms off and episodes three to five are actually documentary footage of them working on the season, trying to pull it together with everyone leaving. A lot of it is about how to do new things while still staying true to the original idea/concept of the show. And it culminates in a live show where they improvise "A Christmas Carol." And very sweetly, they decide to end the show.

This was so fun, the season gives plenty of time to Michael and David while still letting their wives (particularly Georgia) and other minor characters shine. It hits a really good balance where the banter is funny and the other characters actually play a role in the plot. It also doesn't rely on Michael and David fighting the way season two did, instead has them trying to work together to pull off one last season.

It's so good, highly recommend the whole show, but particularly this season. It's short, only 6 episodes, but they're all excellently crafted.

“You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain” by Phoebe Robinson

This was a book that I stumbled on somewhere within the house since my partner had a copy. What with all the free time I had while recovering from surgery, I decided that I would pick it up.

The book is a series of essays roughly surrounding being a Black woman in the entertainment industry. Robinson covers many things from her hair (in the title) to her guilty pleasures. It ends, really touchingly, with letters to her recently born niece about being a mixed race woman in the world.

Now I’ve read a bunch of books that, broadly, speak about race and this one is definitely the funniest that I’ve read so far. Robinson is a comedian, and damn, she is good at her job! The book is sprinkled with jokes and pop culture references. (Keep in mind that the book was written in 2016 so some of the references are dated.) And should you think that the jokes are a bit too far, she even has an essay on the trope of the “angry, Black woman” and how that often makes her feel as though she has to cut any criticisms she has with humor.

More broadly than that though, as someone in the entertainment industry she brings up issues that I hadn’t heard of before. Or issues that I knew existed, but I didn’t know the specifics, such as casting calls that weren’t written by people of color. Sure, I can imagine that would be an issue, but I don’t frequently see casting calls so I couldn’t tell you how they are discriminatory and poorly written.

Anyways this is a hilarious and entertaining book. Even if you don’t pick it up wanting to learn about race and racism in America, you will likely still have a good time reading it. And hopefully, learn a thing or two!