Parentally Approved Torture

Day 394 – August 19, 2012

Today – August 19 – was celebrated in Peru as Dia del Nino (Children’s Day).

Now, I’ll put aside the thought that every parent has at this moment that every day (except for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day) is children’s day and get on with the story at hand.

In our household, we decided to honor this holiday by torturing two-thirds of our children.

We did this by taking our kids to the ballet.

The Ballet Municipal de Lima was offering up performances of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s work The Sleeping Beauty.

The one member of our progeny who enjoyed the show was our grade-school daughter who has done her time in a tutu at a ballet school and has even participated in a dance recital. She was excited about going to the show, but I did have to squash some of her expectations. She knew the story of Princess Aurora through the Disney movie, so I had to inform her that there would not be a Maleficent or a dragon-battling scene at the end. With that story clarification dispensed with, she settled in to enjoy the dancers leap, turn, and stand in all the five different traditional positions.

As for our two boys, this attempt at culture was summed up by the sole descriptive word of “boring”.

That’s too bad, because the ballet company will be performing Carmen in October and we will be going.

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