October 17: St Vitus's Dance, Pointe Shoes, Cobbler Fairy Tale

"What kind of an acrobat do you think I am?" said Charlotte in disgust.  "I would have to have St. Vitus's Dance to weave a word like that into my web."

Charlotte is referring to a medieval phenomenon in which large groups of people would, literally, dance for hours until they collapsed from exhaustion.  There are many explanations for St. Vitus's Dance, from mass hysteria and hypnosis to encephalitis and ergot poisoning.  Nothing really comes close to explaining the outbreaks.  Uncontrolled and unconscious movement.  The inability to stop.  Violent reaction to the color red.  Tens of thousands of people affected.

All associated with Vitus, patron saint of dancing.

Dancing is on my brain this evening because my daughter needs new pointe shoes for ballet.  Her teacher wants to take her to the dance store to fit her for a new pair, but I do not have a spare hundred dollars at the moment.  She has to get them by early November so she can practice for her ballet recital that takes place in February.  That gives me a couple of weeks to somehow come up with the funds.

It's at moments like these that I feel a little inadequate as a parent.  All the other girls in her pointe class have their shoes already.  If I had gone into the family business (plumbing), my daughter would already be leaping and balancing with the rest of them.  Plumbers make a lot more money than poets and part-time college instructors.

There's nothing I can do about it tonight, except lose sleep.  Maybe when I do finally drift into slumber, a group of elves will come in the dark and make a pair of beautiful pink silk pointe shoes for my daughter.  I'll wake up in the morning and find them in the middle of my living room floor.  It could happen.

Once upon a time, a poor cobbler named Banjo lived on the outskirts of a sleepy little hamlet named Hamlet.  Banjo used to make shoes for all the citizens of Hamlet until a new craze swept through the kingdom:  going barefoot.  After several barefoot months, everybody was walking around with callouses, toe fungus, and blisters.  And Banjo and his daughter were starving.

One night, before he went to sleep, Banjo got down on his hands and knees and prayed, "I need help.  If I don't sell some shoes soon, my daughter is going to die."  He stumbled off to his room and collapsed on his bed, exhausted from hunger and despair.

In the middle of the night, a group of elves came to his house and made hundreds of beautiful pink silk ballet shoes.  The elves lined them up on Banjo's workbench and danced around them joyfully until dawn came.  Then they glided away with the moon.

When Banjo came into his workshop the next morning and saw all of the ballet shoes, he couldn't believe his eyes.  He exclaimed, "What the hell am I supposed to do with all these ballet shoes?!!"  He took all of the shoes the elves had made, threw them in the fireplace, and burned them.

That night, Banjo set a plate of poisoned Keebler cookies on his workbench before he went to bed.  When the elves came back that night, they ate all of the cookies Banjo had left out.  One by one, the elves suffered massive hemorrhages and died.

Banjo found his workshop littered with elf corpses the next morning.  He laughed, threw all the elves in a pot, and made some elf noodle soup.

Moral of the story:  elves taste just like chicken.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

Yes, that's what I am...