This morning, gmail provided me with a link to this very cool article about how the body learns a dance.
Ted and I sent Mom and Dad to the Paco Peña performance in Dublin. Mom said it was fantastic and also the most pointless €5 she’d ever spent on a program, so, being unable to name the dancers, was forced to refer to the men as “Red Shoes” and “Cute Butt”. CB was Ángel Muñoz (who really did have a cute butt) and Red Shoes was, well, the other guy. She thought they were as technically proficient as each other, but that CB connected with the audience better. She also thought, oddly, that the woman was a superb dancer, but ‘oddly’ because Mom mostly kept forgetting about her while she was on stage. Which was pretty much my experience, too, but I ended up arguing that the ability to connect with the audience was part of the technical expertise, so I still think CB was the strongest dancer. :)
OH. MY. GOLLY! It was an awesome show! Thank you for the tickets. Wowza – and they got two standing ovations! I thought Dublin audiences would be a little more blase. When the guy started singing at the beginning I thought – Is he gonna dance, too? Then I saw the chubby woman and I thought – This may not be very good. I was v. relieved when the real dancers came out. : ) AND – I finally realized that I’d heard that style of singing many times on Mexican radio stations.
It was interesting to compare this company with the Jose Greco company I saw way back in the ’60s. The Greco company had equal numbers of men and women – and the women are all I really remember. Well, I have vague memories of maybe a man of two standing around clapping hands and looking Spanish. But the passion in both companies was equal. I think the musicans in the Pena company are outrageously good. How do so few make a sound that seems as like an orchestra. V. impressive. Really an outstanding evening of entertainment. : )
We’re going to go try to find one of those drip water bottle things they put on rabbit and hamster cages for Zilli, ’cause he doesn’t mean to put his foot in the water dish, but he shakes his foot and it lands in the dish and he can’t tell because there’s too much in the way for his paw to get wet right away, and by the time he’s noticed, well, it’s too late for the cast. (I watched this happen last night, but since I was watching I could go NO NO NO! and he leapt away from the dish and I hair-dryered his foot right away (which he didn’t think much of).)
Hokay then. Off to do stuff, and then to work.
in the mean time, would it help to put the water bowl up a bit on a brick or some waterproof books instead of on the floor? just to make it more awkward for him to put his foot in the bowl?
I’d defaulted to just sitting on the floor with a bowl in my hands, which worked perfectly well. I got a couple water bottles, though, and the cats cottoned on to how to use them immediately, so hopefully this will work for the next few weeks!
That dance article definitely resonates with me. Darn, I wish I could learn a dance just by watching it, but it’s weight placement and the spatial feel that do it for me.
Could you wrap his cast in a plastic grocery bag or cellophane or something to protect it from getting wet?
I’ve only ever met one person who could do that, and I never actually saw her do it. I’ve just been told about it. I envy that lots! I do think professional dancers learn to pick it up by watching it a lot more than regular joes do, and they obviously can learn really fast how to put whole sequences together, but wow. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to watch it once and Get It?
I have no idea how I “chunk” dance. I think it’s rhythmically. But isn’t that a *fascinating* article?
I could, but only very briefly. The vet says it’ll get just as wet from not being able to breathe as it would from being dunked, and there’d be the added factor of trying to get him to hold still so I can wrap it up. :) I think the rabbit bottles will work, though!
A certain Zillimonster used rabbit bottles while being shown at cat shows (because it’s unreal how much mayhem a JBT can create with a tiny bowl of water in two cubic feet of space.)
It is, in fact, unreal. And yay, that’s excellent to know. *beam* Thanks!
He should *also* be perfectly well acquainted with a hairdryer from said previous life. He’s probably going AUGH MY PAW just to throw you. ;)
Actually, he mostly sits there looking resigned when I take the hairdryer to him. His attempts at escaping are sort of for form’s sake, I think. He’s also taking to the stupid elizabethean collar, when we have to put it on him, more gracefully than I expected. He just looks really cranky. Poor cat. :)
It’s important to maintain the forms, otherwise the cat union takes away your membership card.