Going to see Black Swan last night brought out an emotional reaction. At the end of the movie, I found myself crying. It wasn’t the movie. It was watching the ballet dancers, and it hit me that I will never be able to do that. Sure, maybe Viviana will have ballet lessons and maybe I will take them, but I’m almost 43 years old . . . let’s be realistic about what I can accomplish! The dance numbers in “Godspell” almost killed me (I was in pain through many of them) . . . I will never be able to credibly dance something like “Swan Lake”.
Rumor has it that some people really like my voice. Some people, over the years, hear my voice and can’t believe that I can’t sing. Yet, there it is. I’m only now taking my first voice lessons. I was a kid once: why didn’t I have voice lessons then? I get frustrated trying to sing: it’s like there is something that everyone else can hear but I can’t. I never learned to play a musical instrument. Didn’t my parents notice how much I loved music? They sure as heck grimaced when I said I wanted to watch an opera on TV: they sure as heck noticed that. Dance lessons? Maybe back then I would have resisted, but a few years ago I realized that I really love dance. I’m struggling with tap right now, watching the young people pick up steps quickly. I keep going, I keep trying, but it’s frustrating. I wish I had tap lessons when I was young. I wish I had taken ballet.
Hey, I loved to draw and I was quite good at it. I loved to act and get on stage. I loved to write and, again, rumor was that I was quite good at it. I won awards for my drawings. I won awards for my writing. What did my parents say? I was lucky if I got an “oh, that’s nice”. They never came to those “talent shows” at school. They never heard the applauses I would get. Before he died, my father said that he regretted that he never took me to an art school. Gee, I’m so glad he finally came to that realization, 30 years too late.
All the pieces of paper lying around with drawings and sketches . . . didn’t he notice? Didn’t he care? My dream of making a movie . . . that was something he (as well as the rest of my family) would use to tease me and make fun of me. Didn’t he notice that I loved movies? Would it shock him that, decades later, I still dream of making movies? Didn’t he care? I look at theatre groups like Viviana and the youth oriented classes at Hedgerow, and I ask: did things like this magically spring into being recently, in time for my kids? I am envious: my parents never thought about finding things like this for me when I was young.
I was clever and I was going to go to medical school and I was going to be a doctor. THAT is what they cared about. My father could brag about that. And bragging rights among the other parents was all he cared about. When I wanted to listen to a classical music piece or watch an opera, he would call it “noise” and scoff . . . but sitting around the other parents, he bragged about how his son has such tastes. Being clever was a trap. When I think back to my childhood, I remember tons and tons of people that wanted me to go in to their area, because Animesh would bring them glory. Forgive me if I am cynical right now: I can only look back at that and see that I was used. My job was to go to medical school and be a doctor, and no one cared about anything beyond that.
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