The Nutcracker Ballet

(I've not updated this thing in forever, so I suppose it's time I got on that.)

For Christmas this year, all I wanted was to go to the Nutcracker Ballet. My experience going with my parents as a little girl was magical—I remember the beautiful theater in Richmond and the enchanting dances and costumes on stage. I took ballet from elementary through my senior year in high school, but we never had a proper dance studio in my rural town. Still, I absolutely loved learning ballet and sometimes wish I'd had the opportunity to be more of a serious dancer. I loved the preparation and excitement leading up to the final recital—past recitals include Oklahoma!, the Wizard of Oz, and Cats. (Other recitals were comprised of dances with a broad theme, such as the seasons and numbers from musicals.) My dad remembers that when I was in elementary school, I said very passionately to a fellow team member at t-ball practice, "Ballet is so much more important than t-ball!" (He knew at that moment that I would never be into sports like so many of my other friends who stuck with t-ball and eventually came to live, breathe, and eat softball.)

Even though (or perhaps because?) I haven't danced since high school, I was especially looking forward to the Nutcracker Ballet. My sisters and I got all dolled up in heels and dresses to go to the Carpenter Center in Richmond. Once inside, the sound of the Richmond Symphony tuning instruments and the ceiling painted as the night sky (complete with lights flickering like twinkling stars!) helped recreate the magic of my experience as a child. I loved every second of the show, from the opening dances at the Christmas party to Clara's somewhat frightening magician godfather, "Uncle" Drosselmeyer to the Nutcracker battling the mice to the woman with the massive dress from which children emerge to the Sugarplum fairy's costume with billowing wings to the Russian dancers with the bear to the end when Clara awakes in front of the Christmas tree and thrusts the Nutcracker high above her head on the very dramatic final note. I think that my favorite of all scenes is the one in which Clara and Uncle Drosselmeyer dance alone in front of the Christmas tree, and it suddenly begins to grow bigger and bigger as Clara shrinks down to the size of her nutcracker. My favorite piece of music is the Waltz of the Snowflakes—the vocals are enchanting. My heart sings when I hear it!

Experiencing a variety of emotions throughout the performance (even tearing up in some parts), I couldn't help but peer around me in the dark to look at the faces of other people in the audience. Were they also having intense emotional reactions to the performance? What drew them to the Nutcracker ballet—were they former dancers? Current ones? Were they trying to please the grandkids who came to visit for Christmas? Was the Nutcracker ballet a Christmas tradition, or were they experiencing the ballet for the first time? Were they, too, trying to recreate some previously experienced "magic"? I love imagining how other people engage with performances—it's kind of my form of people watching. The Nutcracker Ballet was, by far, my best Christmas present this year!

Overheard in the Churchyard (Family Reunion, Part III)

-Mama, taking in her surroundings: "Anna, all these people are your relatives. I suggest you marry outside of Virginia."
-Butch, a relative by marriage and truly lovable character who lives in his family's old plantation home and refers to Natural Light as "the poor man's Budweiser": "So, Chicago, eh? Couldn't you find a school any closer? Let me tell you, I went to Chicago twice in my life. Both times was a mistake."
-Man serving my vegetarian cousins from Chicago and me dinner, in a shocked tone: "No chicken? Just coleslaw, potatoes, and rolls?"
-Aunt Cindy, fan of exaggeration and sinner for bringing booze in her trunk to the Methodist parking lot: "You watch out for them Spiers who crashed the party. There's some incest there, and I'm not just talkin' cousins marrying cousins...I'm talkin' the real deal."
-A relative surveying the gravestones: "Well, Spiers married Crawford, Crawford married Spiers, and then Spiers married Spiers!"

Perhaps I should elaborate on the Spiers, a branch of the family from my great grandmother's side, but a picture's worth a thousand words, so here goes:

The Spiers Folks

I found amongst the photos a "Robert E. Lee Spiers," but in the cemetery, I saw that his grave read, "Robert Emmett Spiers," so I will pretend that the caption was someone's idea of a joke and leave it at that.

In the Spiers's defense, I met a wonderful elderly Spiers lady who lives in Kentucky, Mama's home state, who years ago visited my parents when she heard that they had come to be with Mama's father in the hospital. I'd heard of this relative long before from a story my parents love to tell, about how, for some reason, my dad was confused and thought that the visiting cousin was my mother's, not his, so when Mary mentioned the name, "Spiers," Dad turned white as a sheet, thinking he'd married a Spiers, one of his distant cousins! It was great to finally put a face
to the story—Mary was a sweet woman.

While I enjoyed visiting with my first cousins (most live in other parts of Virginia, some in Chicago), making connections about the numerous cousins and branches of the family, listening to the thick New York accents of relatives from Queens, and hearing people share old stories, it was sad to think that the exact same group of people would never be together in one place again. One elderly relative, Merryl, who had come all the way from Texas to be there in that tiny church in rural Southern Virginia was delighted to meet my sisters and me, and it made me tear up a bit when she waved goodbye to know that I will probably never cross paths with her, Mary, or maybe even Bill and Carolyn again. I feel like I will never know as much as some relatives do about my family history (perhaps an anthropological project for me can be an oral history of my family?). Still, I cherish the reunion for bringing me closer to everyone, if only for that one evening.

Family Album (Family Reunion, Part II)

Saturday afternoon, we got caught in a huge thunderstorm as we drove through winding country roads, past fields of tobacco and soy beans, by an old, faded green, run-down house where my great grandfather grew up, to Oak Grove Methodist Church. Running from our cars to the church to escape the downpour, we were greeted inside by my grandfather, who instructed us to put on nametags (again, it was a huge gathering!). Before all the relatives started pouring in, I spent time looking into the Sunday School room where a bunch of old family photographs were displayed on tables. I learned a lot about my ancestors in that room:

Some of them had style.


Some were mothers.


Some were Ivy Leaguers.


Some were glamorous.


Some had friends of all kinds.


Some let others do all of the hard work.


Some were nudists in their youth.


Some, I would’ve liked to have laughed with.


Some were studs.


Some seemed a little eccentric.


And some were soulmates.

The Guests Arrive (Family Reunion, Part I)

This past Saturday, my family had a MASSIVE reunion, and I'm not just talking first cousins—I met relatives from branches of the family that I didn't even know existed. We have some relatives who live in New York, as well as the more Southern branches of the family here in Virginia, so it was an interesting blend of characters. My grandfather organized it all, and the reunion was held in an old country Methodist church near where my Great Great Great Uncle Cab was run over by a train. (How sentimental.)

Cousin Robert from Queens stayed in our house with his wife, Margie. Cousin Robert wears massive rings and gold bracelets, and slicks his hair over his bald spot. While his extremely loud New York voice booms out-of-place in our quiet town, there's something endearing about him—he tells hilarious (and exaggerated, I'm sure!) stories. He brings down chocolate truffles and (used to bring us) DVDs of questionable legality that my paranoid mother would always end sticking in the microwave as soon as he left to "destroy the evidence." (If you're an FBI agent who happens to be reading this, then don't get your underpants all in a twist, because he brought us real DVDs this year—perhaps he's made better friends who don't run sketchy movie stores.)

Margie is an angel—she uses expressions such as "Crumbs!" when she's agitated and "Oh my glory!" when she's surprised. While she was ecstatic to visit us for the first time in years, she missed her beloved cats (they don't have children) back home. (As I recall from a trip when I was very young, she fed them from a glass goblet.) Her eyes are beautiful and friendly, and she positively radiates joy and kindness.

On short notice, we found out that we would host two additional guests, Cousin Robert's brother and his wife who own a horse farm in Ohio. While it was hectic preparing another room for them, they were lovely people—Bill has caterpillar eyebrows, a friendly smile, and a booming voice (most likely due to his loss of hearing), and Carolyn has crinkly eyes and a soothing accent. Despite a recent freak accident on the farm that involved one horse bleeding halfway to death after another one kicked him, they (Bill and Carolyn, that is, not the horses, I imagine) were in good spirits. I enjoyed hearing Bill tell old family stories into the late hours of the night, especially the ones about his time as a trade school student in Chicago. He told me that the appeal of the city wore off after a few years (and bitter cold winters) for him—he hadn't fallen in love with Chicago like I have.

Greetings from the South

So here's the deal—before leaving Chicago to come home for the summer, I told some of my friends that I would start a blog. A few friends were writing travel blogs, as they were spending their summers abroad, and I figured that rural Southern Virginia might as well be a foreign country (at least in comparison to Chicago), so why not report back from it? However, my summer job as a camp counselor at the Summer Enrichment Program (SEP) at UVA left me with little time to start blogging. Now that I'm home with over a month to go before I'm back to UChicago, I need something to prevent myself from dying from boredom in a county that has only one stoplight, so here I am! We'll see where this goes.