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.")