I was fired from a rather prominent ballet company (for anonymity’s sake let’s call it the “Northern Ballet”) for having a “sloppy fifth.” In the process of being fired, I contritely sat on the director’s couch, which was really a hard-backed chair, and grappled with the pressing question of whether his spectacles were hexagonal or pentagonal. Such a pedantic interest in the geometric intricacies of eyewear, in addition to my getting frequently fired, ought to have alerted me to the fact that I was in the wrong profession, but I remained blissfully unaware.
Now, in retrospect, I am beginning to wonder whether the accusation of a “sloppy fifth” was a synecdoche for my entire being. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the parlance of professional ballerina-hood, a “fifth” refers to the fifth position of the feet … and “sloppy,” well you know what that means, don’t you. The artistic director’s word choice was interesting, though. Was sloppy really referring to my fifth position, or something else entirely?
Was he referring to the time in Madame Butterfly when my enormous red wig fell off? The reason I got stuck with the shitty red wig — which made me look like the conflation of Little Orphan Annie and a prostitute — was because the costume people thought it would be funny to give the red wig to the ballerina with the name Readhead. But it’s pronounced Reeeeeeeeeeeedhead people, not RED-head! However, the director wouldn’t have noticed the wig falling off had it been some muted or natural color, so that incident was clearly not my fault.
Or perhaps he was referring to the time in Romeo and Juliet, when I refused to wear my peasant headscarf — I was taking a stance against the romanticized representation of patriarchal feudalism. During the market scene in Act I, my friend Peggy played a Capulet, and I a Montegue. I had bent over my basket to select a nice plastic apple to through Capulet-ward, and as I looked up there was a giant, flying, rubber cabbage hurtling toward my face. Unfortunately, Peggy had a rather strong arm, and at the time I weighed about as much as a bookmark, so I was very nearly sent careening into the orchestra pit. These are just a couple of the shining moments in my stage career at the Northern Ballet.
Honestly, I don’t think either of these incidents even registered on the artistic director’s radar, but perhaps the fact that his boyfriend was trying to sleep with me did. I blame the downfall of my ballet career not so much on my sloppy fifth, but on the inaccurate timing of my sloppiness. For instance, when I was involved with a Chinese gentleman in Texas, I got my scholarship at the ballet academy revoked. Apparently, miscegenation was still frowned upon down south — well, at least within the ballet companies.
However, at the Northern Ballet I clearly hadn’t been sloppy enough, for two girls that were sleeping with men in the company were rapidly promoted. (The catch was when they were no longer sexually involved with these men they were fired.) And then of course I was stuck in the awkward position of trying to politely fend off the artistic director’s boyfriend: I couldn’t get involved, for obvious reasons, but didn’t want to be too rude about it, for equally obvious reasons — i.e. never piss off the chap your boss is boning. Even though I rebuffed this young man’s attentions, the damage was already done. I was stamped with the scarlet letter of the “sloppy fifth.”
But I cannot place my failure as a dancer entirely on the incestuous nature of theater life. The egregious sloppy fifth wasn’t my only crime against classical ballet. My technique was by and large sub-par, though I liked to think of myself as the type of dancer who just “gets it done.” Dancers who “get it done” have hot and sloppy, though highly functional, technique. On the other hand, some dancers employ the opposite strategy, using footwork that is scrupulously neat and precise. But sometimes precision is boring, and these dancers, who are perfectionists, are notoriously prone to performance anxiety. The dancers who, despite sub-par technique, manage to “get it done” don’t seem to have a methodical way of working, but they can pull off “tricks” and tend to be more exciting performers. (Am I still talking about dancing here?)
Unfortunately for me, though I aspired to be the second type of dancer who could just “get it done,” I neither “got it done” nor did I methodically work through technical difficulties. All this eerily reminds me of the process of writing my thesis, and the recent and, admittedly accurate, accusation that I write sloppy prose. Why, why, why always the modifier sloppy? Maybe I should wash my hair more often and lose a few pounds, so this adjective doesn’t leap to the mouths of my superiors when they are chastising me. Unfortunately, I don’t think that just my fifth and prose are sloppy … I think I’m sloppy on the inside — to my very core. Ah, well …
To have brash work ethic without the talent to back it up may result (as in my case) in getting fired by men with oddly shaped glasses and bi-sexual boyfriends. I am vaguely worried that this is going to be my fate in the legal profession, but something tells me that their glasses will be square.