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Little girls love ballerinas. There is something nearly universal about them. Even I was in love with ballerinas, albeit for only a short while. I took ballet for one year when I was in the first grade. Our class uniform was a blue tulle tutu, and I’m sure the parents were charmed by all the fluffy little girls. I just didn’t last very long. She never said anything, but I suspect my mother was confused and disappointed, but I may have been saved by the fact that not long after my younger sister started ballet, and she took to it with a vengeance. Can you say that girls dance with a vengeance? Does that work? Anyway, Lisa danced all through school, the whole four or five times a week thing that required our mother to be a soccer mom before that term was invented.

Now I’m the soccer mom, only it’s still ballet. My youngest daughter is eleven and already has six years of ballet training under her belt - and it would have been even more if I had agreed to sign her up at age three, like she wanted me to do. I just thought that was a little young for organized activities, so we bought floaty tutu’s and danced around the living room at home with wands and long scarves. For my money, that was a lot more fun for both of us. However, the ballet desire was still in her at five, so I signed her up and she has been dedicated to ballet ever since. She now spends four days a week in class, a total of six hours a week, and shows serious dedication to the art.

And last week, her class started training on pointe. In the ballet world, this is the equivalent of losing your virginity. You look forward to it for years. You talk endlessly about what it will be like. You can hardly sleep at night for thinking about it. You romanticize to such a point that the reality can never live up to the fantasy. And finally, you do it. You buy your first pointe shoes, you rise up for the very first time - and discover, amidst all the exhilaration and wondering if everyone can tell that you are a pointe dancer, that it hurts. After that, although it is still exciting, you learn that it requires a lot of work, a lot of maintenance, and it still hurts sometimes.

I discovered a whole series of ballet information and training videos produced by the Anaheim Ballet. This one instructs in the proper way to tie pointe shoes - because, like sex, dancing on pointe is both simple and extremely complex at the same time.

But this video, like a Hollywood movie shows us only the romance of happily ever after, shows only the beauty of the art.