{GBF Life + Style} Prima Ballerina

I've always loved putting my hair up in a bun when wearing a scoop neck tee mainly because I get to emulate the look of a prima ballerina. Although I love to dance and will drop it like it's hot at any given opportunity, I never had any formal training (one of my lifelong regrets) and have always admired the graceful agility and perfect posture of my dance trained friends. Actually, when I was in third grade, I did take ballet classes for three months. We didn't learn any choreography and spent most of class time stretching. But I took it very seriously and would sprawl out on my blue carpeted living room floor practicing each and every "move" for hours at a time. I was as limber as udon. My parents were impressed by my dedication and assumed I was rehearsing for an intricate dance number given the amount of time I was spending twisting and turning on the blue carpet.

One day, a few of their friends came over for dinner. When I excused myself to go practice, they all followed me to the living room. My mom, radiating with the trademark proud Asian parent smile, gently commanded for me to show our guests my dance routine. I was horrified and tried to explain that I hadn't actually learned how to dance yet. But she wasn't hearing me. So we stood there in sheer silence with my parents glaring at me through their smiles and their friends trying to fizzle out the awkward situation with their own smiles. The smile-off was quickly going south. So, I sighed, plopped on the floor in spread eagle position, and reached for my toes. For the next five minutes, I stretched my heart out and contorted, reached, and bent like a centipede. Once my parents realized I wasn't warming up and that the stretching was the routine, they quietly backed away from the living room, their friends trailing behind them politely muttering "Oh she can touch her toes."

After three months, I stopped taking classes because it was a shitty studio and the teachers didn't know what they were doing. We tried to find another dance studio but the search was futile. So I picked up piano and proceeded to "finger dance" for the next ten years. But to this day, I continue to be a huge fan of ballet and the art of dance in general. If you ever see me by a stop light on my nightly walks, I won't be standing still as I'll either be doing a pirouette or the Harlem shake.