well, it's gotta be rock 'n' roll musicif you wanna dance with me

Today was a day of art.

Barry didn't seem to hate me, surpisingly. He was kind. I felt like a flapper in my black character-tap shoes. I actually managed to keep up today. It felt great. I felt like a lady, like a tap dancer, like a woman and like a competent individual. Being able to dance was new to me; my lack of ability is notorious pretty much everywhere I go. It was refreshing.

Bob showed up twenty minutes late for jazz vocal today. I didn't mind. I sat on the bench where the seniors sit, at the very top and the very back and right in the middle, and watched Alida happily dance and flip coins and amuse herself with childlike grace while Adam played the piano absolutely beautifully and Dan and Greg wandered around. I took off my shoes and my heavy necklace and lay on my back and felt like a small, rotund Greek statue, surrounded by beautiful things. I wanted to be a dancer, elegant and tall and thin and beautiful. The last ballet class I took was ten years ago. I cried whenever my parents made me go. They finally let me quit when the teacher told them I was hopeless.

I wandered into the little-kids' courtyard behind the meetinghouse and watched the children playing. They all seemed to fit in. They all had friends. They all seemed happy. I was still barefooted, wearing only a slip of a dress (Ty called it a nightgown). Greg came out after a few minutes and stood next to me. "What's so fascinating?" he asked. "It's just... I have so many memories of this playground. From way back in third grade. And they mostly kind of suck... I always think of childhood as this horribly awkward, uncomfortable thing. But now I'm looking at these kids, and I'm wondering if maybe it wasn't so bad, you know? Or maybe people aren't really as happy as they look like they are." When I turned to see what he thought, he'd wandered away.

Bob did show up for a while, and we sang a bit, and then I memorized my vocab while walking to English and passed the test. After that came RM&M with Meghan. While she's not Fish, she's cool in her own right, and the dozen or so kids who showed up seemed fairly competent. I embarassed myself by jumping on the table and shouting "atten-TION!" in my bare feet when the room got too noisy. It continued at the same volume. Nobody blinked an eye. "It never works," said Clark. "Now get off the table." But he smiled, and I knew there was no malice left in him. We tried to brainstorm ways to raise money for our CD, whose sales are intended to raise money for the Battle of the Bands, whose profits are intended for some sort of charity, but nobody came up with a better idea than selling drugs or sex, so we settled on a bake sale. "But it'll be the most rocking bake sale that ever existed," DaSilva said. Nobody heard.

So I went home, finished all of my homework in an hour, ate some jello, ordered Seventh Son volumes 2 and 3 and Thoreau's Walden from Amazon.com for a grand total of $4.00, checked some webcomics, ate a cupcake and settled down to blog, only to be interrupted by a call from Harry.

And I'm going to a book signing tonight, and having coffee with my parents' friend, who's a college counselor but still kind of cool, and then I'll bake with my sister and gossip and watch a movie and it'll be a perfect end to a perfect day.