Things Learned From My Mother: Ballet

Missing my mother is something that I feel in unpredictable odd moments, though the stabs of absence last week were all about the ballet.

We've kept, for now anyway, her tickets to City Ballet. This spring, Romeo+Juliet turned up on the subscription, and I promptly turned them in for a matinee of Coppelia - I figured that a comic ballet about dolls and trickery might be better for a five year old than a bastardization of a Shakespeare tragedy.

To brush up on the story, I started in my own bookshelves where I've got a copy of Balanchine's Festival of Ballet that my mother gave me years ago. I then trotted off to the public library and found two picture books and a DVD. One of the books was Margot Fonteyn's telling of Coppelia; once when my mother had taken me to something at the New York State Theater, she spotted Fonteyn in the audience and sent me over for an autograph - and Fonteyn refused! Bitch. The DVD starred Fernando Bujones as Franz; back in the day, my mother used to take me out of school to see stuff, and we were in the audience when Bujones brought down the house as a 15 year old at the School of American Ballet workshop.

So not only did I use her tickets to take my daughter to Coppelia, my mother made her presence felt each time I turned around.

Moky, thank you for having introduced me to the ballet.