THE FAT BALLERINA (cont.)

Thursday 15 July NZ Time Well, for Annabelle it was very much like that - people all asked her "How did you do it?" and of course she wrote a bestseller full of wise advice, but none of all that was really the secret. The secret had been that, over a period of many years, she had gradually (actually, painstakingly slowly, with the most stupid reverses along the way) begun to live her life, and not attempt to repeat the life of anyone else, living or dead. Well, she'd lived this way most of her life, but only on the inside. Perhaps the turning point had been when she had started letting it show. Or when she really believed that she could, or, later, when she no longer believed that she had to apologise for so doing, or needed permission. Like the ballet. For years she went to adult ballet classes apologetically, hiding it: if anyone asked where she'd been, calling it a dance class. (She wasn't allowed to do ballet, she was too fat, too old). Or the clothes - after reading The Colour Purple she'd gone out and bought fabric and lain on the floor and cut out trousers for herself, and made her own bright tops and worn comfortable shoes. But she was a bit highbrow for the alternative lifestylers and a bit untamed for the intelligentsia - she didn't quite fit into any groups, although she had a few very good friends. None of whom seemed compatible with each other. And she bought a house in an area she liked although it wasn't very fashionable, and she was by now very well off, but she liked her quiet paths and bush and little rocky cove that she had to herself much of the time. And she'd never forgotten her French teacher who explained patiently to the fifth-form girls that no, she wasn't wearing her skirt back-to-front, the zip was meant to be at the front - that was the fashion all those years ago when she bought it - gasp! she was still wearing something from that long ago? Why? Answer: because she liked it, it suited her, and it fit her well. They couldn't get it, thought her weird, but Annabelle did. It was another - what's the opposite of a nail in a coffin? Another reason for her to admire her, anyway. And she wasn't allowed to do ballet. She knew she didn't have permission, but she fought hard to go against the unspoken bouncer. Sorry luv, this club's not for you. Too fat and too old, at forty. But she danced rather well,which people who knew dance could tell, even if the audiences couldn't. But even she might have given up or never started without two things. One was the other students - most thin, beautiful and well off, but two or three old, several plump and two other really fat. Within the ballet class itself she was well accepted. The other was someone she'd met at an adult ballet class when she was twenty and nine stone and thought herself too old and too fat. He was eighty-six and spry, probably the best in the class, and he had taken up ballet for the first time at the age of eighty-one. Three reasons to be a "not-allowed": age, sex and late start (of course, you've no hope of doing ballet if you haven't begun by about the age of seven, dahling). So all you fat people of low self-esteem and ugly exteriors: take up ballet! All your problems will disappear within the year. But no, seriously, that would the Christian follower's approach. Ballet helped Annabelle, because she loved it. Yes, it was the gradual following of her own centre, making her own choices, copying less and expressing what was genuinely inside her, even showing it to the world - but more than anything, it was doing what she loved. Following what she was drawn to, inhabiting her own world - not keeping away from the wider world, of course that's not what I meant at all - living in it all the more fully for living her own truth and her own love. Not trying to eat up the world outside her, but creating her part of the world from what she found within her. Like Garance in the wonderful French wartime film Les Enfants du paradis: "Je ne suis pas belle; je suis vivante, voilà tout." ("I'm not beautiful; I'm alive, that's all.")

THE FAT BALLERINA

She wasn't a ballerina, of course. Fat, yes; ballerina, no. A ballerina is the top female dancer of a professional company, top of her craft, dancing all the major rôles in all the major cities: Gisèle, Aurora, Juliette, Odette, that sort of thing. Paris Stockholm London. No, she just did ballet. Lots of it, mind: five lessons a week and practice at home every morning as dawn rose. She performed in the odd children's show: the Queen of Hearts, Cinderella's Ugly Stepmother, that kind of thing. When the show called for someone taller or more substantial than the leading sixteen-year-old, someone to play a parent figure believably, or just plain someone ugly who could do comedy and look, well - big. And one day she met a man and he didn't notice her (because she was fat) but they became jolly good chums (because she was nice and vitally alive and fun to be around) and, inevitably, they fell in love, she developed self-confidence, she lost weight dramatically and discovered that under all the lard she was actually beautiful after all, so she started using make-up seriously and they got married and lived happily ever after. Of course. But all that is merely the detail: what really matters is how she lost all that weight - or why, or what catalysed it. Because of course, she had always carried that possibility within her, and she had hitherto always ignored the knowledge of that possibility. So why did she do it now, and why not before? That is the crux of it, and of course you want to know so that you could do it the same way and get thin and beautiful and married and happy too, don't you? But it doesn't work that way, like with Christ - you know, he said be perfect even as I am perfect, and they all thought he meant follow the sandal, in other words, be celibate and fast in the desert and wander round telling the world to love each other, and, ideally, walk on water. But what if he meant more - ask questions of the learned cliques (and the dumb ones) even when it pissed them off? Study under wise and knowledgeable scholars from far-off lands and different apparent religions? Break the law if common sense and need appeared to indicate that it would be best? Live according to one's own very different truth, even to the point of seemingly opposing most of the truths everyone thought most important? Allow one's own power to resonate through one from one's own centre, find one's own path - and then put up with all those crowds of lazy or desperate seekers trying to grab the secret and the power off you and repeat it themselves without the hard and harrowing parts? Four-step Christianity was there right at the start, wasn't it? To be continued