I've been having trouble sleeping. For the second night in a row, I woke up in the middle of the night and didn't get back to sleep until 5 in the morning. Then I slept through my alarm, and if it wasn't for a text message from Sebastian, I probably would have slept through my ballet final too.
I never stressed out over dance finals because usually everyone passes. They're a breeze, you're lined up alphabetically and it's just like a regular class except you're divided into small groups of four, like an audition, and it's administered by a different instructor while the head of the department takes notes and scrutinizes accordingly. An old, bald Chinese man with earrings and a turtleneck who calls me by the exact name printed on the roll sheet, "A(r)exi Marie" and pronounces "musician" as "magician". Most people pass ballet, but I'm absent a lot (with classes at 8am, give me a break) so it's always a toss-up whether or not I should even take the stupid final because my attendance is so shot.
Aside from the lack of sleep, and the fact that I didn't have enough time to even brush my teeth or wash my face much less make coffee or eat breakfast, it could have been a lot worse. Take Fall quarter's final for example.
Our instructor was a very strict, (assumingly) homosexual African-American man hailing from Detroit. He corrected us a lot and talked to us like we were children, often making us repeat the same exercise over and over and over again until all of the idiots in the class got the intro musicality right. "Elbows up, ladies- your arms look like chicken wings and KFC's not open this early!" Sometimes he'd scream at the accompaniast to STOP! STOP! HELLO? I SAID STOP! and then slide on his stomach across the hardwood floor to some poor dancer's ankles and, almost violently, turn them out with his own hands. Even when he was giving us praise he sounded like he was yelling at us. So I was constantly wincing. The worst part of it was it seemed like I was singled out a lot as the class example, which was sometimes a compliment, but more often than not was just plain embarrassing. "Do it the right way. Now show them the wrong way. Thank you, Beyonce." (Beyonce, because I was one of the more "developed" girls in our leotards and baby pink tights.)
I'm not the best dancer, but I'm not the worst, either. My strengths are, well, strong and my weaknesses are, to say the least, a near disaster. For my entire dancing experience, since I was little, I had a problem with getting dizzy while turning. Ridiculously dizzy. I thought I'd eventually get over it, or someone would teach me a trick to overcome it. And yes, I tried spotting. I ended up just getting used to it and, like stagefright, learned to deal.
I'm good with several, maybe six or seven turns before the room starts to spin. In class, I'd just sneak out the door unnoticed and wait to jump back in on the next exercise. But on the day of our Fall quarter ballet final, I had no way out. The last assignment was a long sequence of chaînés turns across the floor from corner to corner. I did the math in my head and figured with the length of my stride and the distance I'd have to cover, I was fucked. I held my breath and was about three-quarters across the floor when I realized I had strayed a little off-course from my perfect diagonal line and was going to smash into the mirror, so I stopped and tried to play it off by walking the rest of the way. The floor spun out from under me and, in front of a panel of instructors and my entire class, I was completely and helplessly disoriented. I proceeded to somehow trip blindly and, in more than a few attempts to grip the baby grand piano for support, missed it entirely, ending up sprawled across the lap of our beloved "magician". Like a professional, he continued to play the last four measures of the piece and no one even offered to help me up, despite their sympathetic gasps. At this point I was nowhere near any condition to tell the difference between up or down, never mind standing up gracefully to "shake it off". As if I possessed some sort of control that granted me the power to will my equilibrium to chill out, everyone watched and waited for me to get up and wave, "Sorry guys, I'm alright!" So the only thing more humiliating than the spectacle I had just made of myself was the fact that I had to admit aloud that I could not stand upright unassisted. To which I was instructed in that intimidating Michigan accent, "Sweet Jesus. Go back and take it again, Beyonce!"
