Ida Stewart

Spinning Is the New Staying Put

My music box ballerina has spinning down pat. Technically, she is not a woman dancing. She’s a plastic figurine: pink crinoline at her nipped-in waist, tough metal coil under her slippers, keeping her on pointe and unwavering as the sound bites on Sunday morning talk shows, those pundits biting off each others’ heads, their spin like the world’s, progress imperceptible, all points lost in the end. (The leggy lady- Republican versus the young, war-medaled Democrat: she nullifies his pinko bleeding heart with her own blue blood. Pinking shears could cut deeper.) This bites, says my ballerina, weary of “It’s a Small World,” her metallic theme song. She channels the spinning “O” in As the World Turns, its gushy, gussied femme fatales, always re-resurrecting and re-remarrying. She points at the TV. I want to be like that. And the vixen is shot, point- blank. Never mind: I'm putting words in her pink painted mouth. It was me savoring, with my mother, a week’s worth of taped soaps, bit by the feminine bug and destined for lipstick, spinning class, stewardess career, and my own medal for “Mother of the Year.” See, I'm predisposed to meddling in others’ music boxes, so here’s the point I can’t ignore: the tiny ballerina spins and spins— nothing knocks her off-kilter—and remains tickled pink with her pink-collar job and her pretty bite- sized pirouettes, steadfast as the world. How lady- like. But, each fall, even Mother Earth turns on us: her sky shifting to gunmetal and then to black before we even have a bite of dinner. It’s not until the tipping point that someone says hey, wait a minute to the pink sunset slap-in-the-face that sends us spinning. Just like that, I draw my ballerina’s vanishing point. I close the lid and metal latch. Nose to the pink satin lining, she’ll bite her tongue until I spin the key.     return to 1.1