Peasant Pas de Deux.

I've been obsessed with watching ballet videos on YouTube this weekend and reminiscing fondly on my dancing days (I did ballet for 12 years!). Some of my favorites have been watching male dancers, especially Baryshnikov, doing amazing leaps and turns and watching Kitri's variations, including 32 fouettes in a row, from Don Quixote.

A special favourite, though, is the Peasant Pas de Deux from Giselle. When I finished my last year of ballet school, I performed the last portion of this as a solo in a tutu. What a wonderful feeling! "My" section starts at 06:40 in the video below, but the whole thing is worth watching. Natalia Osipova and Vyacheslav Lopatin do a fantastic job.

Remembering NYE, 2000

Skye over at Skylark and Son discussed clothing she'd made for a few New Years' Eve celebrations over the years, and asked her readers what they had been wearing on the first night of the "new millenium" (1999/2000). Here is my response, because I want to remember it:

I was a wee sprog, just turned 13. I went to a party with us teens and younger in the basement while the grown-ups socialised upstairs. I recall a table full of junk food, piles of boy band CDs and games of limbo. I wore a silvery, open crocheted top with long sleeves over a textured crimson full-length dress. I had my hair half-up and half-down with two horrid little tendrils in front, as was the fashion at the time. I could see myself wearing something similar today, actually (minus the tendrils and the spaghetti straps).