The Blemish Ballet

He told me off for ringing during his ballet lesson.
Why his phone was on is beyond me. Imagine doing your pas de deux with some fragile flower of a ballerina on one hip and your mobile shimmying to the Black Betty ringtone on the other.
But that’s Daniel for you - Nokia tucked in his leg-warmers - ever-raising the bar on what is acceptable in dance class.
I was ringing to invite him around to dinner. I find volunteering to feed students is the single-best way to actually get to see them as during examination time they disappear off the radar completely. Then, come their four-month-long summer recess, you can’t get rid of them.
When Dancing Daniel arrived he still had homework to do. Dance homework isn’t like maths homework – it involves moving the coffee table and rolling up the rug. And after dinner, I was roped-in to help him with it.
(I am willing to provide a note to the teacher to say that the choreography was all his own work).
His class had been asked to create an interpretive dance for assessment. Most students had chosen to dance about fantastically tragic issues like death, suicide, and loss.
“I’m doing a dance about what it is to be a pimple,” he said.
“You’re what?”
“It’s a three-minute interpretive dance about acne.” The Blemish Ballet.
That’s a long time to fill and I wasn’t sure how Daniel would squeeze life out of the subject.
“I’ve just got to get inside the head of a pimple.”
He planned to dance to a voice recording describing the acne lifecycle.
To do this, not only did he borrow one of my old cassettes, he wanted to use my voice for the recording.
All I had was an old Beatles tape, so we recorded over that. Then he practiced his dance to check the length. His pimple had just finished erupting all over my living room and the patronizing-yet-informative dissertation on whiteheads - delivered in a tone common to instructional videos for home appliances - ended on cue. He was frozen in his final tableau, when suddenly, at volume: “We All Live In A Yellow Submarine…”
I suggested he record some silence at the end of the tape.
“Nah. I’ll use it as my exit music,” he said, raising the bar, yet again.