we went to the ballet

We went to the ballet and two girls came home dreaming of dancers and dresses. Just like I remember doing at their age.

The ballet was The Nutcracker. A wonderful first experience of the ballet for those two lucky girls. They sat enthralled through the entire performance, mostly still and mostly quiet, (which I thought was good enough!) They loved Clara, and loved to hate her naughty brother. They were captivated by seeing children their age dancing on stage. It's a beautiful ballet, perfect for children. And the cast from the Royal New Zealand Ballet did a very good job of entertaining the grown-ups too, oh yes. The three patients in dressing gowns and dancing on crutches were genuinely hilarious, and Sir Jon Trimmer stole the show as the hurrumphy large-bossomed Matron. I laughed and laughed!

It was also a lovely escape, a treat to be able to suspend our disbelief and enter a world where tiny snow flakes fall on ballerinas in perfect tutus, and hospital beds float suspended above swathes of blue. We need as much of this as we can get, us grown-ups. We don't dream as easily as our children, tied to our calendars and cell-phones and self-importance as we are. And we aren't so easily mistaken about what is real and what is not. Four-year-old Greer kept asking if the dancers were "real people," yet at the final curtain she was one of the first people to start clapping.  She knew, instinctively, that the story had come to an end.

So we bundled ourselves out into the city at night. Surrounded by people walking and talking and going places. I remember how this feels to a child. Like realising that another world exists, outside, after bedtime. This is the world where anything can happen. Where shop lights and street lights shine against the dark sky. Where cold water and cakes quench thirst and fill tired, hungry tummies. They are dreaming it all right now in their beds, in the heavy sleep of exhaustion. Living it all again, this time with themselves as protaganist and star - dancing, floating, applauded.