That sounds like there should be the grouchy ballerina, the dopey ballerina, and doc ballerina. Well, let’s face it, I’m sort of all of them at various times. But this week I get to be sneezy ballerina. I have cold. A pretty nasty one.

Ever wonder about the common cold? Here’s the deal with viruses like influenza and rhinovirus and literally hundreds of others. Viruses are spread by bodily fluids, that’s just nasty. Inspires one to never ever touching anything or come into contact with anyone ever again! Viruses have an incubation period once they enter your body. The virus gets into your healthy cells and parties down. While they are having a good time, you have no symptoms but the virus is well, going viral. Once the cells that have participated in Occupied Sickness start to die, that’s when it hits the fan = symptoms. Some symptoms are from the virus (like runny nose and sore throat) itself while others are actually from a compromised immune system (like fever and exhaustion). The virus jailbreaks from the dying cells and then your immune systems goes avenger and a battle ensues. If your relatively healthy, the whole thing takes place in about a week, longer for the flu. The basic gist with regard to being contagious… consider yourself contagious through the whole thing! Once your exposed through the end of your cold, you can be germy person!

So my ballerini, if you catch a cold – and positive thoughts for you that you don’t –  but now you know and we’re all going to be good ballet class citizens by being aware of ourselves when we are germy… aren’t we!

If you are really sick, stay home! But if you feel well enough to make it to class:

1.  Take a hand towel with you, to help you cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze.
2. Try not to be all “touchy” with things and people.
3. Take kleenix with you and once used, dispose of them properly.
4. Wash your hands and use antibacterials liberally. I usually carry antibacterial hand wipes and a purse sized canister of disinfectant in my dance bag anyway.
5. Wipe down your area of the barre with an antibacterial before moving to center.
6. Consider sitting out center or if you can, stand where there is some air circulation. Realize that dancing center means that you are going to breathe and sweat all over the room and that’s not the kindest thing to do to your fellow dancers when you are sick.
7. Wash all your things and/or spray everything with Lysol in order to kill germs.
8. Stay away from the teacher! The last thing we need is for our ballet teacher to get sick!!!

Taking care of ourselves also means taking time to rest and get well when we are sick or injured. It’s all well and good to be a trooper and sometimes we absolutely need to push through and work through the our fears, limitations, even being sore and tired. But illness and injury call for us to take it easy and be kind to the one body that we have. If you want to dance in your body, you need to take care of your body. Sometimes that means working out hard and sometimes that means taking a nap!

Today’s class was awesome… challenging, fun, got some compliments, got some corrections, got some good turns in, and pushed through when I got tired… and watched a little meltdown that didn’t have to happen.

Here’s the story… lovely girl in class, very very new to ballet, nice facility but needs to work on focus first and  then realize that ballet is not something that one picks up easily by taking class once a week for a couple of months, especially if one likes to chat during class rather than work. I have no idea what exercise in center freaked her out but at one point we were separated into two groups and when we switched groups, she ended up crying in the corner. In her words, she was the only one who wasn’t getting it and she had never been more embarrassed in her entire life.

First off I have no idea what exercise caused her little meltdown because I was paying attention to what I was doing not what any one else was doing… that’s pretty much the deal in ballet class, no? I mean, the truth is who could possibly manage to do frappes and rond de jambes en l’air in center AND scope out everyone else in class? Not me!!! The only time we really watch other people is when we are following someone and we usually pick out the “good” dancer. I didn’t judge everyone else as sucky in comparison, I just located the person who seemed to get it and followed along. I’ve been in plenty a situation where I was just not getting it and I can tell you my main focus was not worrying about looking stupid as it was about trying to figure out what to do and how to get my body to do it! And no one ever came up to me and said, wow, you looked terrible out there, you must be really embarrassed! Never.

My Awesome Ballet Teacher always says it’s just ballet, no one ever dies in ballet class. He also says that ballet is a process, even when we fail, we learn. Even when we fail repeatedly. So here’s the thing, my dear friends, ballet is not meant to be horrid. It’s meant to be beautiful and joyful, but it’s also incredibly difficult and it’s something that we never finish learning. Have you ever had a class where you did everything perfectly? me either and I’ve never heard of anyone achieving absolute perfection. Have you? didn’t think so. If we just accept that there will be mistakes and that we seek perfection but its an impossible journey then we can accept that making mistakes does not ruin the joy of ballet class, we can be ready to have a GREAT class even when we jacked up a few things. We can still rock a post ballet glow even if our turns sucked and sucked bad.

Part of enjoying ballet class is coming together with my fellow ballet class-mates. We work together, we sweat together, we dance together. And when it’s over we share the happiness of ballet class. I love that. When I tell my teacher thank you for the great class, I mean it with all my heart.

I feel bad that my little ballet classmate was not to be consoled today and I do hope that she will learn to listen to those of us who want so much for her to discover the joy of this insane challenge that is ballet. And I also hope that we will all continue to be happy in our dancing, to learn from our errors and bask in our progress and to continue to welcome with arms in second new and difficult challenges because ballet will not kill us, it will make us better.