I'm sorry! I just don't GET IT.

Art, is a finicky, slippery, fish of a thing.

Some people love it! Crave it! Marinate and savor it!

Other people want to toss it back into the ocean where it undoubtedly belongs.

Still others are somewhere in the between. Taking it as they find it, but not always overtly seeking it out.

Well, jokes on you, Still Others, because art is EVERYWHERE. Your beloved Super Bowl commercials? That was someone's artistic marketing dream! The jingle of your go-to oil changery? That was borne of a musician's heart! The color scheme of your CPA's office? Yeah, someone said to herself, "These commercial business chairs will look alright with this commercial business carpet, and this wall hanging from Staples is fine."

Art is, delightfully, everywhere.

(Here is comes...)

BUT.

The trickiest misconception about art is that you have to, you know get it. Understand it. It has to mean something to you every time. And here's the thing. It might not.

SUPERBOWL XXLMNOP or Boston Dance as a Spectator Sport

I like to think that I studied dance in its classical age. You went to the studio. You took classes. You wore a leotard and tights and maaaaaybe a ballet skirt if your teacher was feeling generous. You had a recital. You FINALLY got on pointe and were thrilled to brag to all your non-dancer friends about your blisters. When people asked what sport you played after school, you smartly answered, "dance."

It was toward the end of my high school career that competition dance was settling into place. As a retired cheerleader, I knew the thrill, I knew the drill. It was novel to take our recital dance from last year and get a trophy for it! We were no longer a class, but a team, and we had prevailed over the adversaries! Still for me, my favorite part of dance was that, well, it wasn't a sport. There were no statistics. There were no teams to beat. Aside from the snarky looks you'd get from the super trinas when you fell out of a double pirouette, dance class was not a competition.

This photo is from 2003. My dear friend Kate is currently minutes away from having her PhD. I'm sure if they saw her performance in "The Gods Love Nubia" Berkeley would have given it to her on arrival.

Here's what you might not know about me. I started dancing when I was thirteen years old. True, I took ballet and tap as a tiny tot but my family moved and we never found a dance studio in time to continue lessons. I stayed busy. I became one hell of a pee-wee soccer goalie, which I no sooner left behind to focus squarely on being captain of my pop warner cheerleading squad. It was only after going to a friend's dance recital in seventh grade that I was like, "oh yeah! that's what I'd like to do!"

So maybe that's where my disinterest in competition stems from. The fact that the formative years of my dance career were spent playing catch up to the "older girls" at my studio, who were all actually around my same age. I was in a constant competition with myself. To do better than I had the day before. To learn all the things in a few weeks that those other girls had learned over the course of a few years. To prove that just because I was untrained didn't mean I was bad. TO DO GODDAMN PICKUPS ACROSS THE FLOOR. And that was enough competition for me. I didn't need rhinestones down my part or matching jackets with our names on the sleeves to feel like I was a part of something. Because at the end of a class, at the end of an afternoon of classes, I knew that I was improving, and that I was doing something cool. It felt good to make progress and to keep up with combinations and across-the-floors. It felt good to dance. 

AND SO FINALLY, we grow up and go to college and we dance around Boston and aside from Dance Moms and SYTYCD and little girls in two piece leotards with 12-pack abs and tilt kicks, THE COMPETITION IS FINALLY OVER.

Or is it?

A Post about Process, Or: Why We Painted our Faces

There are some pieces that you'd like to make. You get a fun idea; a quirky movement pops into your head; you're inspired by a new song. With time and oh, I guess some effort, you end up building a pretty great dance around it.

And then there are some pieces that you HAVE to make. Ideas you need to get out of you. Thoughts, concepts and dare I say, emotions that are so stuck, so stagnant, that you actually, viscerally need to expunge them from your body, before they suffocate you.

And in this case, the word "expunge" is an SAT-level euphemism for DANCE.

That's where "Severely, Sincerely" came from.

:DANCE BREAK:

how OT makes me a better DANCER

Inspired as I usually am by Meghan's insight and intellect, I thought I would do a self-collaboration post of my own. Ever since having joined the adult working world a few short years ago, I've determinedly made it my mission to maintain my job as just that, and not let it consume my life or be definitive of my person. However, even the cynical millennial hidden inside of me agrees that my job has altered the more cherished parts of my life in some really excellent ways.

In other words;