I do. Her name is Jane Shelton, and she teaches ballet in Memphis, Tennessee. I have known her since I was four, when she was a young psychology student at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) and I was a rising kindergartner at Church of the Good Shepherd. She danced at Memphis Ballet [...]
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SELF-INDULGENT BALLET DRIVEL.
Dancers are obsessed with bodies, especially their own. And even though I have not been a dancer dancer for some time now, I still dance in front of my young students in their ballet classes (and wall-to-wall mirrors) five and sometimes six days a week; I am keenly aware [...]
This time last Thursday I was attending a conference in beautiful Black Mountain, North Carolina. It had not anything to do with dance, but everything to do with children, particularly my own child. Seated around our table, and the one next to it, were other parents and a few grandparents of teenage boys, each belonging [...]
There is no real excuse for the neglect I’ve shown my blog these last weeks. At first I decided I must be uninspired—a disconcerting notion, as I usually have not one, but several ideas for posts banging around in my head when I sit down to write. But then I decided I might just be [...]
In 1992 a terrible fire destroyed some of the most historic portions of Windsor Castle, including St. George’s Hall and Brunswick Tower; the same year saw the disintegration of three royal marriages. The question of how the restoration would be funded spawned still more questions about the funding and relevance of the English monarchy [...]
Deb-Style by A Little Tea or Something
This is more or less my default style; it has not changed much since I was ten. Sensible. Simple. Acceptable Under Most Circumstances. A couple of times in my adult life I have dabbled in what some might call high fashion, but those were super-skinny [...]
Teenager has decided to go Goth. Not because he wishes to assume the Goth demeanor and all that goes with it (which we’re still a little unclear about), mind you, but because he wants to irritate somebody. And no, it’s not his parents in this case. Seems somebody at school said something to [...]
One thing I miss an awful lot from my now-teenager’s early childhood is reading great children’s books with him. When it was at last time to clean off his shelves and store the wonderful juvenile books he had outgrown, there were a few I could not bear to put away. These are on [...]
I could not resist snapping this picture yesterday: teenager’s much-anticipated pink Sony Vaio arrived (pink because that’s ironic, of course), and the image of father and son hunched over laptops made me smile. I shot this in the dining room, where husband prefers to work in spite of the fact that he has [...]
As usual, Shakespeare on the Square nearly got away from me. This is typical. I hear the dates and the plays announced months in advance, think I have loads of time to see them, and then they’re nearly gone. This was the final weekend: I’m sorry to say I made it [...]