I got my timelines confused last week, and didn’t get my Ballet Lessons post written up before we left. I had also completely forgotten that the site where we’d be spending Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday lies in the Land Beyond the Signal, which is awesome except when you realize that you’ve failed to post something you meant to post.

Thus, my apologies. I’m never great at planning ahead, and sometimes I’m really bad at it.

The PlayThink festival itself was a mixed bag of awful and awesome (words that, taken at the most technical level, are basically synonyms, but that’s not how I’m using them here).

The awful part stemmed entirely from the spectacular failure of our pop-up camper to live up to its primary, indeed its titular claim — that is, its failure to pop up, replete with the snapping of not one, but three aircraft-grade steel cables. This, after it sat happily in our driveway in popped-up mode for three weeks while we lovingly cleaned and prepared it!

The late-night hotel-finding excursion on Thursday night and the lack of privacy for basically the rest of the weekend were also pretty un-great (though our friends Kelly and Tessa were gracious enough to put us up on Saturday night, which largely made up for it, because we all got to sit around ’til the small hours giggling like a bunch of schoolgirls). The worst part was missing most of the classes we really wanted to do while my husband stubbornly wrestled with the camper.

The rest of the festival, however, was completely awesome. Highlights, for me, included a stationary static trapeze class and a belly-dancing class. We also made some really amazing new friends, enjoyed oceans of playtime with the six-and-under contingent (Indy is six, so we had all kinds of awesome, shareable toys along), and got to hang out with my friends Robert, Tessa, and Kelly. That last bit was really, really seriously great, since I consider myself lucky if I get to see them once or twice in a year.

That said, for me, the coolest moment transpired when I was hanging upside-down from the trapeze in an inverted straddle. The teacher mentioned that I was really graceful and asked, “Are you a dancer?”

It was kind of cool to be able to say, “Actually, yes.”

Where the trapeze is concerned, I learned that I’m graceful but weak; specifically, that my upper body is weak. No surprise there. We also learned that Louisville is home to a place where you can learn to do all those awesome aerial circus arts, and we are definitely planning on pursuing that line of inquiry. Our teacher from PlayThink is one of the teachers from Louisville Turners, and I really enjoyed working with her.

I would really like to further explore the possibilities of aerial apparatus, especially since the techniques one uses on stationary trapeze harmonize well with ballet technique. Some of the elements even share the same names — an arabesque, for example, is an arabesque, though it seems that what is attitude in ballet is … um … a king scorpion (I think?) on the trapeze.

Where belly dancing is concerned, I learned that belly dancing is a blast, and that belly dancing classes seem to be populated with strong, smart, vivacious women, along with a few gay dudes — in this case, one guy I didn’t know, Denis (briefly; he then ran off to get his face painted), and me. I don’t think I’m going to try to cram an ongoing relationship with belly dancing into my schedule right now, but it’s definitely something I plan to try again at future festivals and so forth.

Nick snapped a bunch of pictures of Denis, Tessa, and me on the trapeze, so I’ll try to re-post some of those, but it may take a while, because they’ll have to make it from Nick’s facebook to Denis’ hot little hands to my cloudspace and then here. Denis and I were also photographed a bazillion times in our winged costumes (he paired his wings with sparkly, spangled tights and a hot pink t-shirt; I paired mine with my leopard outfit, which came together rather brilliantly).

Incidentally, the wings — assembled with loving care by sister-in-law Alice and Mom-in-law Phyllis for Nick, Indy, Denis, and me — worked beautifully. I continue to be impressed by the creative abilities of the family I’ve married into.

That’s it for now. Get out there and enjoy the world!