Happy Feet, Part 2

So here's something: I've been tap-dancing again! In late spring of this year I began a Saturday tap workshop at a dance studio a few blocks from home. Since June, I've been learning some tricky, extremely challenging choreography to the song "Watermelon Man," by Pancho Sanchez. (Yeah, I have no idea who he is, either. But it's a fun, catchy song!)

My teeny class (there are four of us, total, and many Saturdays one or two are absent) just last weekend finished learning the choreography, and now we'll be practicing it and "perfecting" it (ha) until we perform for the public on September 9th. The venue is some sort of fair or street carnival or something in Manhattan Beach. I cannot wait! I'm a closeted ham. I love to perform---as long as I feel prepared. I think by next month I'll be ready to share my enthusiasm and mediocre grasp of intermediate-to-advanced tap moves with the world!

Seriously, you should see me doing this dance. I have to concentrate so hard; I do the worst job ever of "making it look easy." The moves are complicated and really syncopated. There's no "flap-ball-change, flap-ball-change" here! We do "riffs" and "drawbacks" and "the Eleanor Powell" and a crapload of turns. Grace, my teacher, is always reminding us that her style of tap is less Broadway and more Savion Glover. "Rhythmic tap" is what she calls it.

Whatever it is, it is truly kicking my ass! But in a good way. I love it and plan to continue tapping year-round.

Everything old is new again

A couple of stories in the media lately have gotten me thinking that American consumers are beginning to rebel against highly processed and manufactured goods. I get the feeling there's a movement growing to return to "simple," "raw," "basic," "unprocessed" materials, foods, and products. Goods not long ago viewed as "primitive" seem now to be sought after by a growing percentage of the consumer population.

The first article I read that got me thinking about this idea was this one, at Salon, about a return to the glass baby bottle by parents concerned about a possible danger posed by bisphenol-A, a "hormone disruptor" leached by polycarbonate (the plastic most baby bottles are currently made of). The article and some other Googling I did about bisphenol-A persuaded me to jump on this glass-bottle bandwagon, just in case. Earlier this week I ordered a couple of glass baby bottles called "Born Free" (i.e., free of bisphenol-A). What's interesting is that I remember about a year ago coming across a reference to glass baby bottles in an old Terry Brazelton book my mom gave me, called Infants and Mothers, and chuckling that baby bottles were actually made of sharp, dangerous, breakable glass back in the 50s, 60s, an 70s. Now I'm thinking I'd rather feed my daughter milk from a container made of heated sand than of heavily processed petroleum.

The other news story was in today's New York Times, and it was about the growing demand for raw (unpasteurized) cow's milk. Such milk is actually not legal to sell in many states, the Times reports, so raw-milk fans are going underground to get the stuff. The allure of raw milk to these people is its total lack of processing---it undergoes no heat treatment, like the milk on grocery-store shelves does. This "rawness" results in better flavor and possibly greater health benefits, say raw-milk advocates.

I wonder what other consumer goods and the processes used to produce those goods will soon be scorned for being too industrial, too bland, too unhealthful?