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The friend of another fabled dancer writes in to describe a different singular pair of feet:  “I used to play with them, feel how they worked. You’d press down, first the ankles wrapped past 90 degrees and then the arch and toes went even further in a circle. He asked me to show mine, I did. Not very good arch, he said. Good enough, I replied. But his were extraordinarily beautiful, quite wide, too. . . They reminded me of lily pads.”

In Florence Foster Jenkins, Streep played the polar opposite of a Callas–an untalented amateur who had no idea how ludicrous she was.

I knew I should see the film but I didn’t see it in a theater when it came out two years ago. Personally I find it almost painful to see great art forms reduced or ridiculed–and Jenkins is a fat target indeed. A Night at the Opera is funny and inoffensive because it exists amid an entire landscape of lunacy–but would this movie just curl its lip in disdain at the entire classical musical scene? I didn’t want to spend its duration sliding under the seat in front of me.

Instead I saw it on DVD not too long ago and was pleasantly surprised.

In the depths of the parody, you could still see the quality of  what Jenkins was aspiring to, no matter how naively. She couldn’t get near the mountaintop, but her maladroit attempts to scale it allowed us to be able to see it too.

Dilettante Jenkins’ lack of self-perception was brutally apparent, as was her unfortunate legacy of a first marriage, but she didn’t become entirely ridiculous. Some human dignity was allowed her.

I know people who won’t see it for the same reasons that I was leery but I’ve said, “No, you should.”

Watch this:

A gay dancer came into the wings and walked over to a straight dancer who was watching the show, and started deeply kneading his arm–or nudged his foot, or put his arm around him–I’m remembering different things you’d see.

Was he harassing? No, they were on the same roster rank.

Was he making a pass? Or initiating some unfinished business? Or just being affectionate? Or just being a ballet dancer?

Whatever he was doing, in the banking world, let’s say, it would have meant something entirely different.

And now that I’m thinking back there was actually some long ago incident of gay in the largely-straight dancer–that’s the ballet world, too: it’s polymorphous.

Read Cordelia Tai at The Fashion Spot.

He knows the legal jeopardy that he and his fellow Republicans are exposing themselves to, and while it’s way too late to keep his ass clean, he can at least try to keep it out of jail.

We are seeing treason unfold before our eyes.

As Jared Yates Sexton tweets:

“It’s astounding that the story is the Nunes Memo didn’t work as a political maneuver and not that Republicans were willing to destroy the FBI and betray the country.”

Just keep yourself focused on the play-to-play. . . nothing more to see here.

Once again, the media is normalizing Trump.

is to sort of stovepipe into a word cloud and then almost randomly select words and phrases meant to be provocative, then arrange in no particular order, and then just almost blindly take aim, in the hope something they’re saying will somehow hit the bullseye.

Cornered rodent Devin Nunes–when will he be arrested?–gave a prime example of that after his “Memo” flatlined.

Next month, the Estonian choreographer’s memoir will be published–in Estonian. So I may not be able to read it right away, but I’ll remember the fun I had with her and Tchernichova in St. Petersburg in 1999. Earlier that year, she’d been in New York and I’d done an interview with her, which I quote from in Alla Osipenko. I’m now finishing transcribing the entire interview–will perhaps publish.

Murdmaa’s co-author, Heili Einasto, gave me the heads up.

It would be great to publish an excerpt from the book in Ballet Review. I’ll ask the chief.

We need a good Estonian translator!

As John Dean tweets: “Nunes co-conspirator on the Hill is his staffer Kashyap Patel. They both belong in jail for betraying national security with their scam.”

He links to Philip Carter’s indictment of Nunes and Patel at Slate.