I sat in the classroom observing three of the middle schoolers. This class is designed for the students to better understand social cues and skills. Their teachers does a great job staying calm and doing her best to keep the three somewhat focused. She asks questions like, “Your friend borrows a video game but doesn’t give it back for three days, what would you do?” The three swap answers such as, “I would walk over to his house and personally fart in his face.” The teacher simply stays calm when these answers are repeated numerous times and does her best to keep them on track.
Today in the small classroom she had the three little middle schoolers play charades. The boys took turns taking a small white piece of paper out of Tupperware and acted it out for the other two boys to guess. One of the little guys walks up for his turn. He is wearing the same shirt as the day before, a Darth Vader sleeveless basketball jersey. He has a very high pitched voice and cheeks so large that no grandmother would be able to refrain from pinching. He grabs the slip of paper and says “oh boy this might make me look a bit gay,” and then instantly starts slowly twirling with his hands in a circle above his head. He tip toes around the room and attempts to swiftly dance to music that he is personally imagining in his head.
His friend is a bit smaller, he has a constant tick where he brushes the side of his face against his shoulder and adjusts the neck on his shirt as if his tag is uncomfortable and made out of plastic. He has an extremely hard time focusing and his mind changes as quickly as his physical twitch. He’s yelling repeatedly at his star wars basketball playing friend “Ballet! Ballet! Ballet” The chubby cheeked boy simply say’s, “nope, nope, nope.”
Time for the class runs out and the dancing and guessing subsides and we all are wondering what he was acting out. He simply says, it was “Balle’T'” emphasizing the “T” at the end of the word. I watched as his guessing friend should be frustrated and annoyed that he was right all along, instead he nodded and agreed that he had simply not guessed right and they walked out of class happy and energetic.
There are plenty of daily things like this that make me laugh in my head and enjoy being around these kids. And unfortunately there are constantly things that make me sad. Right after the charades class I hear the ballet dancing friend talk to his friend about his father and how he constantly calls him gay. He explained that he is sick of being called gay and he becomes triggered when others say things like that to him. It makes me think of what’s going on at home. How is this fair? Can you blame these kids when they act the way that they do? How do others treat them in public places who know nothing about them or where they come from? How would you react when they mistreat you or say something harmful to get a reaction?
Ballet is beautiful. People every winter spend big money to watch The Nutcracker and feel like they are on top of the world as the dancers float and synchronize to the music and tell a story. The dancers do a beautiful job to depict something beautiful. But once the play is over, it was all just an act. Each dancer has a life behind that light pink leotard, thick layers of makeup and tied up hair. They were able to create something beautiful together and create a facade to make you feel something.
These kids are not good at ballet. What I mean to say is that they do not act any other part than who they are. They are broken and they need love and everything about them is screaming, “Help Me!” That’s the truth with all of us isn’t it? The difference may come down to how good we are at pretending, or how well we can perform the ballet.
