feliceImage credit: Boston Ballet
Last night my husband and I sat adrift on our couch after the 6:30 evening news which blasted the cruelest of realities, and bares no repeating here.
We wandered to the kitchen as the TV kept on, and when we returned to the couch, there was Hoda, narrating the Nutcracker story performed by the Boston Ballet.. Without a verbal redirect, Bill and I settled in and ate our bowl of turkey chili and watched Clara and her Nutcracker prince dance. Bill is not a ballet nut to my knowledge and I go once a year with my birthday twin to Alvin Ailey with our posse. I believe the last Nutcracker I saw was 25 years ago at Lincoln Center with the kids.
“Isn’t that beautiful, the lightness in those muscles, the floating pirouettes, the calm and joy of our Clara lost in a fantasy about her Nutcracker prince.”
“Tchaikovsky, that music, all familiar and transporting. Dramatic and light and so beautifully matched with every lift and extension, movements in perfect sync. The children, so talented! This is awesome.”
We talked about our granddaughters, the 3 of them all under 3 years old. “I can’t wait to take the girls to see this. Can you imagine their little faces. It will be amazing! Should we get tickets now for 2022?” We laughed.
You remember the story… “Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen’s The Nutcracker is based on the libretto by Alexandre Dumas père titled The Tale of the Nutcracker, which is adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. The story follows the wondrous journey of young Clara, who receives a nutcracker as a gift at her family’s Christmas Eve party. Later that night, her nutcracker is magically revealed as a handsome prince, who leads her through an enchanted forest and on to the Nutcracker Prince’s Kingdom.”
Here is the waltz of the snowflakes…
Mesmerized by the sugar plum fairy dance, and the mischievous mouse king and the little mice, soldiers and battle scene, Bill and I watched from start to finish and loved every moment.
And this started me thinking about how active our fantasy life has become these past 9 months.
We have definitely earned free mile status on our escapism couch travels in 2020. Thank goodness for our favorite new series, The Undoing on HBO Go as we are still debating who done it.
Swedish may become our second language as The Restaurant on Amazon Prime has filled our nights. We lived in Paris for a week with Emily in Paris, and then we were off to Buckingham Palace with The Crown and we wondered if the royals were watching it too. We were relieved to be holed up in the shoddy motel in Schitt’s Creek where we stayed up laughing with Daniel Levy, Catherine O’hara, Eugene Levy and the fam. And we exercised our brains and pulled out the chess set, learned the moves and played a few rounds inspired by Scott Frank’s screenplay The Queens Gambit and read his interview about creating it
Fantasy rules in 2020. I have been on a writing tear, love my on-line Cannasta games and Bill is lost in his Bridge tournaments. And when we aren’t escaping into technology we have worn out our sneakers 3x over with 20K steps a day being the new normal.
We have traveled, miles and miles, in circles, around our living room and the neighborhood. And we are grateful.
Never would I have thought that we would raise our glass and toast to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO and even the Cable Guy at Thanksgiving but this year is full of surprises.