Mommy, you can hear their feet!

Last night Riley, Mary Beth and I went to the ballet with our friends to experience Jewels. If your experience with the ballet is like mine--meaning you've only seen it on PBS as you are channel surfing--you might not realize how much noise the ballerinas' feet make as they are performing. During the first act, Emeralds, Mary Beth commented to me how loud their feet were, and I couldn't help but agree. My friend, who is very familiar with the ballet, told us that this noise was nothing compared with some performances she has seen.

We went to the ballet as part of a program offered to our school district. The seats were very reasonably priced, so we decided to give it a shot. After last week's experience at The Magic Tree House the Musical, we knew we'd be in for a bit of culture shock, and that was okay. However, it was a little disconcerting when I read the playbill describing the performance as "a grand-scale work whose presentation is made complex by its length and its multiple styles." Uhhhh, this could be trouble, considering we have 3 school girls, and this started at 8 p.m. (a.k.a. bedtime). Jewels is comprised of three acts--Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds, each "representative of a different period and/or style" of ballet. Rubies was quite a treat--the costumes were magnificent (I love ALL things red), and the dancing was fun and playful, apparently it reprensented the American style characteristic of Jewels' creator Balanchine (notice how I drop the name as though I'm quite familiar with his work? Thank goodness for Playbills!). I think the girls would have been happy to leave after Rubies--they were tired. But how could we skip Diamonds? It featured the classical Russian style of dancing and costumes. We were glad we stayed, because it was really very beautiful and dazzling.

The performance was in Boston's Wang Theater. It was beyond pretty. I took pictures with my little $50 purse camera--I'm sorry, they don't do any justice to its beauty.

We left in rain. Bleck... The girls were looking forward to practicing some ballerina moves through the Common.

I don't know if I would have ever associated solitaire with the ballet, but it was what the girl in front of me did during all the intermissions.