windinthemaples

Since long before he could ever articulate why, one of Graeme's favorite board books has been Peter Sis' Ballerina!. In the story, the imaginative Terry goes to her bedroom to dance, digging through her dress-up trunk for all the costume pieces she might need. She puts on her feather boa and dances a fire dance or her violet cape and does a floating dance. The brilliance of the book is that it is entirely black and white until she puts on one of these colorful accessories and then she is, literally, transformed into the very figure of a prima ballerina. The dancing brings the vibrancy, the stories the color.

About a year ago, when Graeme was two, he told me he wanted to grow up to be a ballerina. It was one of those out-of-the-blue announcements that toddlers sometimes make that feel, eerily, important. I said, "Well, boys don't grow up to be called ballerinas, but if you want to grow up to be a ballet dancer, you could. Would you want to take a class and learn ballet?" Without hesitation, Graeme said, "Yes!" and I went about finding an option for him as a little boy in diapers. As luck would have it, our local park service was offering a class for 3 and 4 year olds and potty training wasn't a requirement. So, early in January, Graeme was suited up in his ballet togs and introduced into his first class.

The teacher, thank the Gods, swooped him up from the start. "My little Baryshnikov! Oh, we have a prince! Boys are always the stars of the show--you'll get to be right in the middle." The reaction of his fellow students, however, was more dumb shock. "Is that a boy? Are you a boy?" Over time, though, the ten of them have bonded over post-class trips to the park, paper towel plates heaped with pretzel sticks, and Graeme's abominable abilities at hide-and-seek.

Saturday, all of the students of the district's dance program, ages 3-17, were brought in for professional photographs. It was the first time that Graeme has seen any of the other dancers who will all be performing together in the spring recital *this* upcoming Saturday and the first time that anyone outside of his little group has seen him. The school hallway outside the photography studio was sheer pandemonium. Employees are scrambling around with clipboards trying to herd each age group, on time, into the studio for a class and then individual photographs. Outside, parents are trying to work some last minute miracles on messy hair, torn tights, and smushed tutus. It was crazy. So walking through this scene of dance bags and pink (pink everwhere!) comes Graeme in his little boy's dance costume. He's calm. He's collected. He's holding my hand. We pass a girl from one of the older classes, a four or five year old at the most, and she literally points her finger at Graeme (who is passing two feet away from her) and positively shrieks with laughter. "Look! Look! It is a *boy* in ballet class! A *boy* wearing ballet slippers! HAHAHAHAHA!" It was, to her, the funniest thing on the earth. She was literally rolling on the floor and holding her stomach at one point. Her mother, who had been tucking her little slipper ties out of the way, said not one word. Two more classmates of the jokester joined her and she renewed her shouts, "Look over there! Oh my god, look!! Isn't that funny?! It is a BOY! A BOY IN BALLET!! HAHAHAHAHA!" I mean, she was cackling and sneering and the finger-pointing never stopped and the fifty of us crammed into the hallway together all heard her even over the hubbub and craziness of the moment. I was gut shot. Graeme grew still and white as a sheet. His grip on my hand tightened but he didn't turn around.

I accept, because I'm a realist, that there will be people who make fun of Graeme because he loves ballet. I expected these mythical bullies to become an issue around age 8 and that they'd be in soccer or football or something. What I couldn't have expected, in a million years, is that I'd hear some poisonous, thoughtless, hurtful things from a preschooler who, herself, takes ballet. Shouldn't she be one of his allies?

I said, brightly, something like, "I know! A boy, isn't it wonderful! You girls need a lot more boys in ballet. Have you ever watched a ballet? It is the boys who pick up the girls. The boys are the princes! It'd be a very sad ballet without any boys." The mother, who could have run with it, remained silent and her daughter gave me the sort of withering look that I thought only teens were capable of. I wasn't going to change her mind and, in fact, there was a lot more pointing and whispering and giggling when her other pink tutu'd cronies joined her. God. I'm talking about someone not even old enough for kindergarten, most likely, and already she's bigoted. Children aren't born with prejudice. They aren't born to classify some things as 'girly'. They learn it and saints alive--someone taught this girl to hate and she's, at most, FIVE.

Saturday, my son Graeme will be in his first public ballet performance. In a school of hundreds of dancers, he is the only male dancer, with the exception of a boys-only teenage hip-hop class. It's impossible to miss him. He'll be in all black in the middle of a sea of jewel-bright tutus. He might not turn the right way or quite remember his place but he'll be up there dancing his heart out. He loves the ballet, you see, and gods bless him nobody has convinced him yet to be ashamed of it.