Ten lords a'leapin'.

Long ago, in a place where the landscape can most aptly be described as "monotonous, but with shit-tons of corn" and where one can (and one has) nearly broken one's face open after almost plummeting to the earth after slipping on a three-pound, muddy-brown, Grizzly snuff-induced snot-and-saliva slick-rope, two young, dapper and happy lads got themselves all tarted up and went to the ballet.

One of these gents was - despite a cultured upbringing and a burning, seething, nearly incapacitating desire to experience the ethnographic, the exotic and and, most of all, the ceaselessly bizarre - never taken to a ballet. Since he was unsure that he was willing to be talked about behind elegant gloves and through clenched teeth as "the guy who goes to operas and ballets alone, and most likely has either an apartment filled with pet serpents named after people in the Bible or dozens of mewling, nearly feral house-cats he imagines are his savage minions", he'd waited until the right time - and for the right person - to take the plunge into the world of high culture.

As a small child, this gent would often be found curled up with a small book near holiday-time; within, the book told the thrilling story of living toys, of three-headed anthropomorphic rats, and of a valiant object whose humble beginnings as a servile, seed-coat-crushing oddity did not reflect the bravery and courage within him. Of course, the whole "what the living hell?" factor was significant when selecting the book over, say, a book about grisly, unsolved mysteries which he surely didn't ever read with a flashlight in bed until he nearly soiled his undergarments. Some things in life, he concluded, are inexplicable. Like that bag of potato chips that appear on top of the fridge - just out of reach - once a month, when Mom gets a little edgier and starts asking us to "get the blue feck out of her fecking hair." Or like how one's father could stand by as one was nearly murdered by waterfowl. Or like how, after asking for a sister to be produced from one's mother's swelling belly and then getting one, nobody really seemed as interested in purchasing the squalling, moist mass of evil as one would have hoped.

Many years had passed with little thought given to the illogical and, if one considers it closely, rather terrifying story when the other dapper chap presented him with two tickets to see it perfomed by real people as a holiday gift. Real people. Real people in remarkably snug clothing, flopping about on a stage on toes strengthened with strange wooden blocks. He could scarcely believe that it was finally happening.

As they sat in the darkened hall, beholding a cherished holiday classic being performed for them, Dapper Lad #1 found himself unable to gain sweet release from three thoughts that, like popcorn hulls, had lodged themselves somewhere they ought not be.

One: One can actually hear shoe hitting ground when a ballet dancer hits the floor from a leap. On television, one can't, and thus one magical thing that ought to have remained that way - the idea that ballet-folk were actually airy, weightless wind sprites - was murdered and was interred, and lay moistly mouldering in the humus.

Two: The story really didn't become any more accessible to the adult mind, and one should just really sit back, revel in the enchanted music, and forget that three-headed anthropomorphic rodents aren't really all that common.


Three: Those tights really do not leave anything to the imagination. As I silently prayed to Saint Martinus, the patron saint of blinding, gonna-vomit-in-your-own-beard testicular injury, I hoped that each of the leaping 'lords was packing a jock-strap at the very least; one of those pointy, wooden-tipped shoes to the twig n' bits would be enough to ensure that one would shoot blanks for the rest of one's life, to be sure.

And so, on this, the tenth day of Christmas, I am reminded of the realization of a cherished childhood hope to personally witness humanoid vermin attempt to skull-feck a young girl and a living parlor decoration, and of a fervent hope that ten leaping 'lords had at least packed a sock in that shet. Because damn.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic (thenutcracker,indeed) Potorti