I am Sixty, I do Ballet

I am sixty, I do ballet.

It’s not like I started at age seven and never stopped. I started last year, at fifty-nine.

One day I said, let’s try ballet.

I think that was to deceive my biological clock. As it pushes me downhill, I am fighting back with my pliés and ports de bras.

Another good reason to do ballet, as I discovered it later on, is to drive the men on Tinder berserk.

I noticed my ballet pictures are the most popular with Tinder men in France. I have over 1,000 likes in Paris. They say “Bonjour, Irina!” on my voicemail, and my mind draws a vivid picture of me sashaying on Champs-Élysées, my lipstick is brightly red, my hair flies in the wind.

Then, I look at my sink and understand it’s time to do the dishes.

I am much less popular on Tinder in Miami, where I live. Maybe Miami guys prefer Salsa dancers with hips and boobs. I have neither.

What I do have are long flamingo legs and even longer arms. So, when I throw my extensions around, I look like a four-legged spider in a vertical position.

I also suffer from an adult version of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and waiting idly is unbearable for me.

One day, I was standing at the checkout line at Trader Joe’s doing my pliés, and I noticed that one by one, other people began to repeat after me. It was an odd line, nothing like the Swan Lake, more like a multi-generational disoriented family that took too many sips of wine from the sampling table.

I am not a delicate rose. I'm the tough, hardy marigold flower that can grow anywhere and thrive under any circumstance.

Practicing in public is natural for me, and it’s well-received in Miami. I don’t know if that would be the same in my home city of Izhevsk, Russia. I am afraid they are not ready for a sixty-year-old ballerina prancing on a bus stop.

On the other hand, in Miami, I have to keep my game up. I can’t dance poorly. With my cheekbones and blue eyes, I am so Russian. If I don’t dance well, it will reflect badly on my country.

But at least, I can dance ballet solo.

In ballroom dancing, for example, you need a partner. A dancing partner, like any other partner, is a pain to procure.

I took ballroom dancing at my local studio in Coral Gables, where the price of a lesson package equals my monthly rent. Luckily, my studio had a deal. If I bring in a new student for a free private lesson, I get a free lesson myself.

Just so you know, the cost per hour is what you’d expect to pay your therapist. But if your dance teacher is as good as mine, you will soon let your therapist go.

It is so true what my friend Melissa says, “Ballroom is such a pleasure, I am surprised it is still legal.” Melissa, of course, can afford both her therapist and her ballroom teacher.

I can’t afford either, so I’m always asking people to take the free lesson, so I could get one for free.

I pitched it to my banker, Mr. Lopez, a hunky Latin guy in his 40’s. I came to deposit my check, and we bonded over joint memories of growing up in our respective communist countries.

In Cuba in the ’90s, 10-year-old Mr. Lopez, like all his peers, was taken away from his family by Fidel Castro and placed into a boarding school where sugarcane labor was on schedule every day instead of Physical Ed.

During my college years in the ’70s, I was sent to a collective farm to dig up potatoes for the entire month of September. It was the Brezhnev Stagnation era (Google it!) and an ingenious way to use the free labor of millions of students across the country.

So, I asked Mr. Lopez if he could please take a free class at my dance studio, emphasizing that I am not asking him for a date, just for a free dance lesson.

He said he’d prefer a date, and that was that.

Another time, I was introduced to Mr. Greenblatt, a retired Wall Streeter. He said, I reminded him of Maya Plisetskaya, whom he met at the Bolshoi Theater, during one of his frequent Moscow visits in the ’80s.

He said he had asked Maya if he could come back to shoot her portrait. He was an avid photographer exhibiting his large black-and-whites worldwide. “Yes, of course,” she said and stood him up.

With that, Mr. Greenblatt invited me to lunch. I said I’ll consider it, and while I was considering, he died.

So, now I keep all things in perspective.

When I stand at the barre in the morning, I say to myself, let’s do it, tomorrow your knees could go bad, and you’d be lucky to walk from your couch to the refrigerator. When someone asks me on a date, I consider it, seriously, because tomorrow he might be engulfed by some busty girl on Tinder.

Then, of course, someone, always, always could die.