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Nightingale

Jazz is a new dancing adventure for me, but because of my ballet technique I feel like I handle it pretty well. There are occasional steps that trip me up (i.e. turning with my passé parallel, or axle jumps), but overall I feel like I make it through class with pretty minor embarassment.

It helps that the jazz teacher is super encouraging. He has complimented my technique before, telling me how clean and smooth my movements are. Sometimes I feel like this isn't always a good thing, depending on the music we're dancing to, but he seems to disagree. After class the other evening, he came up to me and told me that I make him laugh, but in the best way--"The music is going 'boom tiss boom tiss' and there's Miss Jackie, all elegant and graceful. You're like a nightingale." When I mentioned that I thought it wasn't a good thing for that particular music, he said, "No, it's great. Everything is so smooth and clean."

I wasn't entirely sure what he meant by nightingale aside from the bird (surely not Florence?), but birds are graceful right? I'd been wanting a fun dancing nickname (several other adults at the studio have them), and apparently that might be it.

Nightingales 
by Robert Bridges

Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,
And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams wherefrom
Ye learn your song:
Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,
Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air
Bloom the year long!.

Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:
Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,
A throe of the heart,
Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,
No dying cadence, nor long sigh can sound,
For all our art.

Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men
We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,
As night is withdrawn
From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,
Dream, while the innumerable choir of day
Welcome the dawn.


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