Nutcracker Weekend

My daughter is a dancer. She is a beautiful graceful dancer. I take no credit for this. To say I lack grace is an understatement. I have broken my ankle walking down stairs, and torn all the ligaments in my knee watering the lawn. I am grateful she has that talent, most of the time.
However this weekend was Nutcracker Sunday. I use the term both to refer to Tchaikovsky’s ballet and as a crude reference to the behavior of the females in my household before up to my daughter’s performance in it.
I have to say that this year’s version was not quite as bad as last year’s. Last year she played Clara, one of the leads, and it was a pretty intense preparation. This year she played one of the kissing dolls and the lead Marzipan as well as several other dances.
When I refer to preparation, I am mainly referring to the work of Christina, the daughter and my wife, the mother of said fifteen year old.
There is the learning and rehearsal of the dance, which to the uninitiated would seem like the difficult part. However there is also the matter of shoes, costumes, hairdo, makeup, transportation, and tickets.
Aside from being the driver for rehearsals I have almost no role in the dance part, Christina handles that well. Each of the other matters do involve me in one way or the other.
First the shoes. Ballet requires two kinds of shoes, the soft ballet slippers that are featured in the cutesy décor of little girl’s bedrooms. My job with those is to find them. For each most rehearsals I hear ‘Where are My ballet shoes’ and in my omniscience I can usually locate them in the car, the closet or the shoe cubby. The second type of shoes are pointe shoes. These have hard toes and enable the dancer to stand on her tip-toes These are held on the foot by ribbons. Now, unlike most footwear that come ready-to-wear, pointe shoes have to have the ribbon sewn to fit each dancer’s foot. Many shoe manufacturers include a special needle and thread to do this. My job is not the sewing. It is finding the needle and thread that inevitably gets misplaced. Somehow, although I have never used them it becomes my fault when they are lost.
Next are the costumes. The costumes for group dances are from the dance studio. They do not always fit. So there is more sewing, and hemming. The show was Sunday night. My wife was up sewing Saturday night until midnight at which point she said to me, “You have to go to the store early and get light hemming tape. The stuff I have is too heavy. ” Now I know what hemming tape is so I said sure, as soon as Walmart opens I will be there.
And I was there, and went to the craft section, and looked at the hemming tape there was regular hemming tape, heavy duty hemming tape, and then I spotted ‘Ultra Light’. I beamed. I would get this right. So, I rushed home, and opened it and looked at it. It was hemming web and looked like plastic wrap and looked too permanent. My wife looked at me with that. ‘You are utterly hopeless’ look. I would see a lot of that by the day’s end.
I woke my daughter up with a cheery ‘Good morning’ and was greeted in return by a grunt and groan.
Christina went to the bathroom and came out and gave me her version of the ‘You are utterly hopeless’ look. “Dad, I asked you to get me conditioner” she waved a plastic bottle at me.
“I did, I even got you ‘happy hydration’ just as you told me.

“THIS is shampoo and conditioner in one. I can’t use THIS” she sighed.

“I will get conditioner when I go back to the store”, I told her, “I know you will need something else.” To be continued..