Trekhprudny Lane

I spent much of today cooking for the week: tomato soup, carrot soup, two loaves of bread, some pesto, some applesauce. It was a raw wet day, but I was not feeling especially cozy or domestic. Thrifty is more like it. Early this morning I went around the corner for a croissant, a cappuccino, and a bottle of water at a nearby cafe; my bill was just over $18. I'm no penny-pincher, but even I know that cannot be kept up for long. The pennies belong in the buy-a-farm jar.

EB's new game is to tell jokes. My job is to laugh (I am chided if I forget or doze off.) They invariably go something like this. "What if an ORANGE was on your NOSE?" Ha ha hahahah! "What if... a... MELON was on your TEETH?" Hahahaha! Toddler jokes: way too subtle for me. (I'm also remembering "There goes Dad down the street, on a... stick of butter!" -- a formula that stayed funny for at least a decade.) 

Last night, ballet at the Bolshoi! Well, the company if not the place. The historic theater itself is closed since, as I understand it, it is sitting atop pylons while its foundations, which have been removed to a suburb, are reconstructed and then re-inserted beneath the building. The program showcased American choreography and it was stunning. First Balanchine, everything a shade of powder blue that reminded me of Nummy; such minimalism -- I don't know anything about it but he seems to have been really fascinated by mechanics, the push and pull, the tension and lassitude, in a single body and between entangled bodies. He surprises, too, reversing or upending in some way I don't understand some of the traditional steps and gestures. (It's surprisingly satisfying on some primal level to watch bodies strain and relax, reach and then contract, expertly, for an evening. Every second you sense their momentum one way, then the change of direction and whether it's willing or not; with each sequence you feel either continuity or the interruption of the flow and it all satisfies somehow. Balanchine helped me see that.) Second came a kind of excruciating passion, saturated with color and heavily shadowed, set to music by Arvo Part, followed by a long, joyful, cumulative piece by Philip Glass and Twyla Tharp... I thought only the latter was less than perfect. That piece was so American, I mean so packed with many different identities... Again, I have no business critiquing dance, but I felt the Bolshoi dancers executed things with precision (apart from a few places where the speed was just killer, the choreographer's equivalent of Paganini), when in fact the point should have been a bit different: barely controlled exuberance! Some of the colloquial movements Tharp incorporated into the ballet looked too studied on the Russian stage. I wanted to see bodies of all colors and shapes and sizes up there, all leaping to the different heights that the laws of physics permit, with less delicacy and more raw and diverse energy. I got the feeling Tharp intended to create an event, not a tableau. There was a casualness missing that cannot be achieved through endless perfecting. 

In any case,