There is nothing quite so glamorous, so scintillating, so–auspicious!–as opening night at the ballet.  A new season lies ahead, new dancers have joined the corps de ballet, new works by new choreographers to be performed.  Of course I want to go! I told my wife.  I stuff myself into business clothes and commute downtown five days a week–what better way to spend an evening than by stuffing myself into business clothes, driving downtown and staying late-r than usual?

“Where do you want me to put this thing?”

It is with a sense of anticipation that I scan the program.  I note that Clarissa Khozas and Lasha Ponoma, both principal dancers re-signed for this year, have had syllables added to their names in the off-season in order to sound more Russian.  Clarissa’s patronymic is now Khozashvilikova, while Lasha has opted for Ponomarenkoguraneivichlysenkomartinanavratalova–and who could blame her!

“She looks . . . stronger than last year,” my wife says.

“I think she’s added muscle tone dragging around the big patronymic.”

Hey big spender!

We tip our sherpa for his expert assistance during the two-day climb from the box office, and settle back into our seats.  I gaze out upon the beauty of Boston’s refurbished Opera House and think back to twenty-five years ago when it was on the verge of collapse, both financially and structurally.  That night I saw Al Pacino in David Mamet’s American Buffalo, and begin to recite–involuntarily, I might add–the stirring opening soliloquy from the play: “Fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ RUTHIE!”

Sherpa:  “You should have enough jujubes to last through the Don Giovanni pas de deux.”

A few heads turn, and my wife shushes me.  Sor-ry–ballet isn’t the only art form I care about!

I close my program and make a little church-and-steeple with my finger tips.  It is in these last few moment before the curtain rises that my mind inevitably turns to deep thoughts on the state of the higher culture in America.  Think of it:  ballet was once a disreputable, even a scandalous art.

Dancers by Edgar Degas demonstrating the Cecchetti method.  Or is it the Zucchini method?

Nowadays, you can’t make a fart noise by blowing into an empty Black Crows box at the ballet without drawing the scorn and obloquy of all right-thinking men and women.  I know–I found out when I tried.

The announcer comes over the p.a. system and recites the usual prohibition against cameras and recorders, and asks that the audience turn off cell phones and other electronic devices.  The man next to me–caught in the middle of some urgent business missive–delays compliance while he searches for le mot juste to finalize his text message to some unseen correspondent.

“Excuse me,” I say.

He looks at me, a bit embarrassed.  “Sorry, I’m just finishing up.”

“No, no problem,” I say.  “That’s a sophisticated looking phone you have.”

“Thanks,” he says.  “It’s this week’s version of the iPhone, until Apple decides to come out with a Halloween model.”

“You really need to stay current with changes in personal technology,” I say.  “I was going to ask you–do you have an application for crappy white rock music of the 60′s?”

“Sure do–what’s your question?”

“Who sang ‘Down in the Boondocks’?  Billy Joe Royal or Billy J Kramer?”

My new friend flails at his keyboard with his thumbs, then allows himself a smile of self-satisfaction bordering on smugness at the speed with which his little doo-hickey produces the answer.  “It was Billy Joe Royal,” he says.  “Billy J Kramer covered The Beatles ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret.’”

“That’s a great song,” I say, and we begin to sing it together, call-and-response style.

“Listen . . .”

“Too-da-loo . . .”

“. . . do you want to know a secret?”

“Too-da-loo . . .”

“Let me whisper in your ear.”

A woman behind me taps me on the shoulder with her lorgnette–out of tempo, by the way–and my new friend and I break it off as the curtain comes up.

The dances are breathtaking!  I know because that’s what everybody says at intermission after my wife wakes me up.  There is Le Corsaire, in which a male and female dancer dress up like pirates and dance like somebody named Chabukani Vedtang thinks pirates danced.  There is the Tarantella, based on the spirited Italian folk dance, complete with tambourine.  As I sip my plastic cup of red wine, my mind is launched upon a reverie.  “Wasn’t it the Universal Robot Band that sang ‘Dance and Shake Your Tambourine’?” I ask our little group of balletomanes–or is it pedophiles?

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” sniffs one young man, assuming incorrectly that I’m a total low-brow philistine.  While I’ve promised my wife before that I wouldn’t get my back up when people look down their noses at me because of my ignorance of ballet, I’m not going to take this lying down.

Sailor and Brave New World albums by The Steve Miller Band

“I sensed that you might not,” I say, repaying the young man in kind.  “You surely do know, however, as between Sailor and Brave New World, which Steve Miller Band album contains the line ‘Somebody give me a CHEESEBURGER!’”

The fellow has a scarf around his neck–why do they all wear those things?–and it is almost as if he is choking on it.

“I . . . I’m only 28,” he says weakly.  “I’m not that up on psychedelic country blues from the sixties.”

“And seventies and eighties and nineties,” I add, making clear that The Joker, The Smoker, The Midnight Toker has stood the test of time, that final yardstick by which we measure artistic greatness.

“Well, let me ‘pull your coat-tail,” I say, with an undercurrent of malice in my voice that I’ve tried unsuccessfully to suppress.  “‘Somebody give me a CHEESEBURGER!’ is on the Sailor album.  Brave New World is famous for another reason.”

“What’s that?” the fellow’s date asks, apparently seeing through the thin veneer of her boyfriend’s ersatz coat of culture, and fastening upon me as the wise elder aesthetic statesman in the crowd.

“Aldous Huxley named a novel after it.”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Dance Fever–Catch It!”

Saturday night in Boston, and my boyhood friend Mad Dog is in town.  Normally  I take such an opportunity for a guy’s night out at one of Beantown’s four major  league sports venues, but this time Mrs. Dog is with him and my wife has put the ix-nay, as well as the kibosh, on any non-couples-appropriate  activity.

Pas de trois du kickboxeant.

“Why don’t we go to the ballet?” she suggests, and her distaff counterpart  can barely contain herself.  “I’d love that!” she exclaims, but her  spouse–for some reason–is less enthusiastic.

“Will there be male dancers . . . in tights?” he asks, fearing the worst.

“Of course,” I say.  “But those ‘tights’ are no tighter than the pants worn  by NFL cornerbacks.”

“Why is it,” Dog asks, “that male ballet dancers are always so . . .  overendowed down there?”  I get the sense he feels . . . inadequate.

“It’s because men’s ballet belts are padded.”

“Like Mary Jane Schlefke’s training bra in eighth grade?”

“You got it.  Male dancers aren’t hung like quarterhorses, they just look  that way.”

He seems mollified by this information, which does not mean he now feels like  a molly-bolt.

“So you actually like the stuff?” he asks, incredulous.

“I don’t know what it is that attracts me so much to the ballet,” I reply  thoughtfully.  “Some mysterious,  irresistible force, like my wife telling me I  have to go.”

“Isn’t there a sports event on TV with spoiled, overpaid men fighting over a  ball?”

“Game One of the Eastern Conference semifinals, but resistance is futile,” I  say.  “You just have to grin, or rather not grin, but gush–’Oh, it was  lovely!’–and bear it.”

That’s easy for me to say because I’m like the senior convict in a maximum  security prison when it comes to ballet.  I’ve served a 25 year sentence as a  ballet husband, and suffer from a sort of terpsichorean Stockholm Syndrome as a  result.

Resigned to his fate, Dog glumly accompanies us to the Opera House and we  make our way through the teeming masses of culture vultures.  We’re not the only  straight males in the place, but we seem to be the only men in the building not  wearing scarves.

How to untie a men’s fashion scarf while committing  suicide.

“I need a beer,” Dog says, and I caution my wife that if we don’t want a  medical emergency on our hands, an injection of malt-based beverages may be  required.

“Fine, here are your tickets,” she says and the Dog and I make our way down  to the Saltonstall-Cabot-Lodge Lounge, a swinging place for those who by lack of  breeding and training are incapable of appreciating boll-ay  (Baryshnikov’s pronunciation, not mine) without chemical stimulants.

“Yoo-hoo . . . Mr. Balletomane!”

“The line is long,” I say.

“With ma-ny a winding turn,” Dog replies, channeling “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My  Brother.”

“I don’t know if we’ll be able to get our drinks and finish them in time to  get to our seats.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Dog says with a glint of Irish madness  in his eyes.

“Well, I don’t want to miss the pas de deux,” I say scanning the  program.

“What’s a paw duh doo?” Dog asks.  My chance to teach him a little  bit of the art of dance, drawing upon my two years of high school French.

“‘Pas’ is French for ‘not’,” I explain.  “‘De deux’ means ‘of two.’  So when  somebody says there’s a pas de deux going on it means there’s more . .  .”

” . . . or less?”

“Correct . . . than two people dancing at one time.”

“Well, I suppose ignorance is bliss.”

The woman in line ahead of us turns to give me the hairy eyeball–excuse me  for trying to make a classical art form intelligible to the masses, I say to  myself as I give her a simpering little smile.

The overhead lights start to flash, signalling that it’s time for the  audience to take their seats, but they have an unintended effect on the  Dog-Man.

“What’s happening?” he asks, and I can tell he’s having a strobe-induced  backflash, back to a Freddy King concert in Houston sometime in the early 70′s.   Thankfully, the crowd clears out and we are left face to face with the  bartender, a degenerate scion of an old New England family who I’m guessing has  been reduced to his current lowly state by a felony conviction for unpaid  library fines at the Boston Athenaeum.

“This man needs a Miller Lite–quick!”

“You mean ‘quickly,’ don’t you?” he asks.  “He needs me to serve it to him,  so it modifies ‘serve,’ so you should use an adverb, not an adjective.”

Mad Dog’s eyes are rolling back into his head–this is no time for an  argument on usage.

“Fine–’quickly.’  Are you satisfied?”

“Most indubitably,” he replies as he pours a lager glass full of the liquid  nourishment that has sustained the dog for . . . God, it must nearly four  decades now.

Dog takes a drink and he seems to regain his equilibrium.  “I’m okay now if  you want to go in,” he says.

“I’m afraid, gentlemen, that you may not enter the auditorium once the lights  stop flashing.  You will have to remain here until the first intermission.”

Dog looks at me–not exactly crestfallen.  “Far be it from me to violate the  decorum of such an august cultural institution as this one.”

The bartender gives us a look of imperious condescension, then says “You may  watch the first piece on the television monitor” as he directs us by his glance  to an image of a red-curtained stage over his left shoulder.

Limbo lower now!

I know what vulgar idea is running through Dog’s mind before it takes form in  language.  “Can you . . . change it to ESPN?” he asks.

The barkeep laughs a mirthless little laugh.  “It’s closed-circuit–no  mindless, jock-scratching sports channels.”

“Okay–just asking.”

“You can at least try to learn to appreciate it,” I say to the Dog,  trying to shame him into giving high culture a try.

“I don’t know how you can even fake an interest in this stuff,” he  says.

“Like any other athletic endeavor–and these guys and gals are true  athletes–you’ve got to pick somebody to root for.  Here–flip through my  program and see who you like.”

Ekaterine Chubinidze

“Who’s your favorite?” he asks as he scans the corps de ballet for a  good-looking corpse.

“I used to be a big fan of Olga Maksakovmalinovslutskaya, but she’s on the  injured reserve list this year.”

“What happened?”

“Major off-season surgery.  She had a syllable removed from her last name,  she could be out for the rest of the year.”

“I kind of like this Ekaterine Chubinidze,” Dog says.

“Why’d you pick her?”

“It says she’s from Georgia.  My grandmother’s from Atlanta.”

“Not that Georgia, you dingleberry.  A member state of the former  Soviet Union.”

“Oh, right.  So how do I root for her?”

“When it’s her turn for a solo, you cheer her on.”

“How do I know when she’s doing good?”

“Well, say pirouettes. It’s like DiMaggio’s hitting streak–the  more you can string together, the better you are.”

The music gets going and pretty soon it’s Ekaterine’s (hip-hop name: E-kat)  turn.  She launches into her pirouettes en dehors and pretty soon has  knocked off five in a row.  “She’s hot,” I say to no one in particular, and all  the hangers-on, the dilettantes, the scum and the lowlife who are too far gone  in this indifferent world, who don’t care enough to get their asses out of a  crumby bar and join their wives begin to feel it too.

“What’s that–eight?” Dog asks.

“I lost track.”

“Go Ekaterine . . . go,” somebody shouts from the back of the room.

“Ten,” Dog says with a tone of awe.

“I’ll bet you twenty she don’t break twenty,” a wise-guy at the end of the  bar says.

“You’re on,” Dog says, just like that, and throws a bill on the bar.  He  turns his face back up to the TV and–as physicist Richard Feynman would  posit–seeks confirmation for the commitment his mind has made with his wallet,  fooling himself–the easiest person for one to fool.

Richard Feynman playing the bongos: Go, man,  go!

And yet . . . it looks like she may be able to pull it off.  The men in the  room crowd down front and begin to chant like plungers pulling for a horse  coming down the backstretch at Belmont.  “Go . . . go . . . go!” they cry and .  . . she does it!  She breaks twenty easy, then finally runs out of room stage  left at twenty-five and nearly falls as she hits the curtain just as the union  ballerina-catcher is going off his shift.

“Pleasure doin’ business with you, my good man,” Mad Dog says as he collects  his winnings.  Up on the TV screen the entire corps is out on stage for  the rousing climax, and soon we hear the echos of applause from the  auditorium.

Our wives join us and are so enthralled we don’t even get a scolding for  somehow not making it to our seats.

“Wasn’t the pas de deux lovely?” my wife asks and Mad Dog, now  trained in ballet lingo, hastens to agree.

“Oh, yeah, that was something else,” he says as he pockets his winnings.   “There must a been thirty people up there dancin’ at the end.”