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Tonight is Passover! I am having a mini-seder with my mom - my first actual seder in four or five years, since I was not so much a Hillel girl in college - which will be expanded into a slightly bigger belated seder this weekend when my dad comes up from Philly and we actually cook instead of making soup-from-a-box. I am kind of looking forward to both, really, and they are guaranteed to be more fun than the highly stuffy huge-extended-family restaurant seder I get to skip by being in New York! I enjoy some extended-family holidays, but this is a little too huge and formal for my tastes, and also most of those relatives are significantly more religious than my immediate, highly Reform family.

(Becca: All right, so we've got the matzoh and the parsley and haroset supplies and all, but do we have a Haggadah?
Beccamom: Yes! I downloaded one from The Velveteen Rabbi! :D
Becca: . . . seriously?

Sometimes, my mom is awesome.)

Other things that are awesome: dancing! After a regency/Victorian historical dance class this weekend I am yet again determined that I need to find a new dance class to take ASAP, because my last one was in November and that is too long ago. In honor of this I also read the ballet book that genarti lent me last time I was in Boston, for . . . . no reason at all and certainly not any reason related to a ballet-tastic anime um, Walter Terry's The Ballet Companion: A Popular Guide for the Ballet Goer. Um, I would probably not call it the definitive work on ballet - for one thing, it is very much an overview of the 'these are what tutus look like!' 'this is what a composer does!' 'there was one great ballerina and one great composer of this era and this is who they are!' type, and for another it was written in the sixties, and it shows to a hilarious degree. (The author is very proud of our great living composer Stravinsky, for example.) It is so cute how enthusiastic he is, though! My favorite bit is the one where he is like "and so sometimes, as a dance reviewer, I have to go to FIVE performances of Swan Lake in a weekend, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT, IT IS STILL AWESOME. Because all dancing is unique! :D :D :D"

Also, embarrassingly, I have learned that my Tutu obsession is still great enough that even a passing reference to certain pieces of music is enough to cause scenes like this to occur:

Walter Terry: And the ballet composed to "The Dying Swan" is a wonderful example of -
Becca: Ruuuuuuuuuue!
Irritated Subway-goers: Why is that girl too busy clutching her book with one hand and her heart with the other to keep her balance!