Ballet 101—Nutcracker

“Little girls dream of the party scene,

Older ones a chance to dance with the corps

Behind the Dew Drop Fairy,

Or perhaps be featured as an exotic candy

In the Land of Sweets.”

—Audition by Stasia Ward Kehoe

I wish I had made The Nutcracker my first Ballet 101 post. After all, I did see it last year and it is the ballet to end all ballets: the one most aspiring ballerinas have been in and the one most people have seen. But for some reason, I didn’t have time to blog about it immediately afterwards and so, after a couple of days had passed, I decided not to. Now, after such a crazy fall, when I seemed barely able to post about anything but opera, a few days seem like nothing. Plus, in San Francisco, The Nutcracker marks the transition from opera season to ballet season at the War Memorial Opera House so it seems only right to mark that passage here.

I don’t necessarily see The Nutcracker every Christmas, but I do usually try to see at least one Christmas-related performance during the month of December and it often shows up in the rotation if I’m not into Messiah that year. La Belle Chantal loves it, so it’s always a great excuse for us to hit the town.

Plus, I have a thing for nutcrackers since a tree-trimming party years ago when my boyfriend at the time gave me two beautiful wooden nutcracker ornaments. Which eventually led to this madness:

Yes, there are 40+ nutcrackers on that tree.

Drosselmeyer nutcracker

The one that started it all

And, yes, I bought two more ornaments at the performance itself. I ask you, how could I not get the pink “Kingdom of the Sweets” one?

And that’s what I love about this ballet. Dolls, toys, and candy come alive? Being taken away to a magical snowy wonderland full of tasty treats where people perform just for you? Sign me up.

The San Francisco Ballet sets this particular production in San Francisco during the 1915 World’s Fair so there is a bit of local color as well. I don’t love everything about the production (notably that Clara is played by a young child and is transformed into another dancer for the pas de deux), but they set up the story well and there are a number of standout pieces, especially the “Waltz of the Snowflakes” (it is truly a spectacular feat that they are able to dance in the near-blizzard conditions on stage) and the coffee, tea, and trepak divertissement dances.

In this year’s production, two dancers stood out for me, Koto Ishihara, who played the mechanical doll in the party scene, and Frances Chung, who danced the “Grand Pas de Deux.” Of course, the casting changes from night to night, so going on a different night may mean a very different cast. However, I can’t imagine not enjoying this on any night, if only for all the little girls you will see in the audience, playing dress up and watching their dreams unfold before their very eyes.

Merry Christmas everyone and may all your dreams come true!

Lenten Sacrifice

I’m not Catholic. By all rights I should be, given my parents’ background, but they weren’t religious and gave up even baptizing their kids after the first one. Bizarrely, I did make my way to Congregationalist Sunday School on my own in third grade and continued to be a steady churchgoer through college and beyond, including weekly mass at my Catholic university (hey, all the kids were doing it). But the story of my finding and losing religion is one for another day.

One thing that has stuck, however, is the practice of giving up something for Lent. I find that it is a great way for me to be more mindful of habits I’ve fallen into and to break potentially bad cycles of behavior. Generally, it has been pretty easy for me to decide what to give up; something just made sense, whether it was meat, processed foods, or alcohol (although most people just thought I was pregnant).

This year, however, I struggled. There wasn’t an obvious food issue. Plus, I’m going on vacation with family soon and that could pose a lot of problems. Television? If I did that, I might have to revert to the “cheating” version of Lent that doesn’t count Sundays.* Something Internet-related? Getting to work on time (something that started slipping during the World Cup and has never really righted itself)?

No one thing stood out.

In the end, I realized that the change I most wanted to make was to get back to my stairway walks. Although I walk to work for 30 minutes every day, it’s over perhaps the least hilly terrain in San Francisco and not very challenging physically. So I decided to give up laziness, which would potentially address a number of smaller problems as well. While concepts have never worked very well for me (giving up gossip at work was an epic failure), perhaps this year will be different. I’ll get back to you in forty (or rather, forty-six) days.

* Lent is forty days long to represent the time that, according to the Bible, Jesus spent in the desert denying Satan’s temptations. In Western Christianity, the Lenten period begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Holy Saturday. A quick check of the calendar reveals this to actually be 46 days. Sort of how people say pregnancy is nine months, but in reality it’s forty weeks—a technical, but big, difference, as I’m sure any woman who’s actually been pregnant can tell you.

Santa Makes the Baby Jesus Cry

Let me start off by saying that I am not at all religious and these days pretty much regard Christmas as a secular holiday. However, when it comes to music, I like to keep the Christ in Christmas. So, when I say I love Christmas music, I generally don’t mean anything that uses the words rock or bells (although exceptions can be made in the case of music recorded before I was born). The fact that I have relegated all my Santa-related music to a playlist called “Get Behind Me, Santa” basically tells you all you need to know.

Along with opera, Christmas music is really the only thing I buy on CD these days and I recently added a few new favorites to my collection that I wanted to share. The first two albums are by The Cambridge Singers, conducted by John Rutter—Christmas Night: Carols of the Nativity and The Cambridge Singers Christmas Album. I can’t believe this group escaped my notice for so long. Both of these albums are fabulous collections of traditional European carols, and, although I’d give a slight edge to the selection on Christmas Album (“Somerset Wassail”; “Still, Still, Still”; “Gabriel’s Message”; “In dulci jubilo”), Christmas Night has “The Cherry Tree Carol,” which is one of my all-time favorites.

Also out of England is a collection from the early 1990s, A Traditional Christmas Carol Collection by The Sixteen, conducted by Harry Christophers. These carols are probably a bit more familiar to your ears than those of The Cambridge Singers, but still remain fairly traditional, similar to the selections of the Robert Shaw Chorale, which is an old standby, along with Now Is the Caroling Season by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, a favorite from my childhood.

The Two Americas

The amazing thing about California is its sheer size and the resulting diversity of landscapes and mindsets. A great example of this diversity can be found in the two classic landmarks that I stayed in this past week.

In what is quickly becoming a Thanksgiving tradition, I headed down to Pasadena for the holiday. Last year, I flew down early and had a marvelous side trip to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree National Park. This year, I decided to take a few days off and drive leisurely down 101 (or I guess “the 101” being that I was visiting Southern California).

I have driven along the coast twice since moving here, with the focal point of both trips being Hearst Castle, when I stayed at the Sand Pebbles Inn on Moonstone Beach in Cambria. This time, I stayed at two iconic places along the route: Asilomar and the Madonna Inn.

Asilomar boardwalk and dunes at sunset

I had longed to stay at both for some time: Asilomar, because it was designed by Julia Morgan, architect of my beloved Hearst Castle, and the Madonna Inn because I had heard so many crazy things about it.

Asilomar Room

While both high on my list of landmark lodgings, these two places couldn’t be more opposite, with Asilomar representing a sort of East Coast, old money rusticity, and the Madonna Inn (named after its original owner, Alex Madonna, not the pop star), representing classic American roadside kitsch. And yet it made perfect sense to me that I loved them equally and that they were both terrific representations of my new home state.

The Traveler's Yacht room at the Madonna Inn

You can read about these incredible places in more detail at my new travel blog, Worth the Detour.