One day when I was just a lad my mother brought home a bicycle for me. Was this the Fuji 10-speed I had been wishing for (and which was highly rated by Consumer Reports)? I had been wanting this bike for months, expecially since I had outgrown my Montgomery Ward internal hub 3-speed banana seat bike. That bike was cool. It had a speedometer and a generator headlight, but it was time to move on. So anyway, was this the Fuji?
No.
This was a yard sale find. Faded red fenders, bald tires, warped, rusty rims. Think it might have been a Murray. Pretty sure it wasn't a Huffy or an Iverson.
I was speechless.
Eventually I came around and bought new tires and tubes, oiled the chain, and got down to the business of riding this bike. One thing I never quite got used to was the bearing at the top of the steering shaft. Under normal use it creaked embarrasingly like Cindy's step-sister's knee, but for extreme turns the bearings snapped in a loud and disturbing way. I never did anything about it, but if I did it would require at least greasing that bearing and at most replacing it.
This all came to mind the other day during our warm-up. Choreographer 1's instruction: Left and center, right and center. My neck! The noises my neck makes during this warmup take me right back to that Murray bike, and make me wonder if I shall ever have to grease or replace some of my anatomy. Memory can be a funny thing.
Have you observed Cinderella's horses? It is an incredible thing. The dancing girls don these horse heads and dance to the song Impossible. And here's the thing. The horse heads are sound-proof, vision-proof, and air-proof. So this dance takes place without the Dancing Horse Girls being able to hear the music, see each other or the treacherous hole in the floor, or breathe. And even so it's spectacular.
The scenery stairs we've been promised have materialized and we finally used them! It wasn't easy, believe me. My blocking calls for me to enter the landing from the back. The back is at about eye level. As Bugs Bunny once said, "Watch that first step. It's a doozy." Using MacGyver-like ingenuity, I formulated a plan. In the scrap wood I found a flexible dowel rod about seven feet long. With a running start, and carrying the dowel at chest height I planted the end at the edge of the stage flooring, and held on as the pole flexed and launched me vertically to the top stair. My landing was perfect and amazingly - NOBODY SAW. The worst part is that I realized I had forgotten my trumpet. So I walked down the stairs and retrieved it. And no, I did not repeat the pole vault exercise holding the trumpet.
That would have been ridiculous.
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