"Another World: Ballet Lessons from Appalachia" by Edwina Pendarvis

I suspect that when most people in the world hear the name Appalachia, they do not think of ballet, ballet dancers or teachers, or people whose lives have been transformed by ballet.  I have to admit, as a native Appalachian who is well versed in most topics about Appalachia, that I also knew little about ballet in the home region to which I have devoted a great deal of my professional career and nearly all of my writing career since my late teen years.  But I did know that the father of the famous television actor Richard Thomas had grown up in Paintsville, Kentucky, and had become a professional ballet dancer in New York City where his more famous son Richard Thomas the younger grew up. I had even attended one performance of "The Nutcracker" in Lexington, Kentucky, in order to expose my young daughter to the experience.  But I was not widely aware of the role ballet has played in Appalachia for hundreds of young women, and a few young men, until my good friend Edwina "Eddy" Pendarvis told me a couple of years ago that she was working on a book about ballet in Appalachia.  That book is now in print and I had written on this blog earlier in late July about having attended a reading and book signing in Huntington, West Virginia, where Edwina Pendarvis read  afew selected passages from this book and some of her earlier poetry in a joint reading with another of our mutual friends, Kirk Judd.  

At that reading, Eddy was gracious enough to gift a copy of her book to my wife Candice although we would gladly have paid full price for it based on our previous readings of Eddy's work in other areas including both poetry and Appalachian Studies.  The book was published by the Jesse Stuart Foundation in Ashland, Kentucky, where Eddy has been an avid and frequent contributor to the work of the foundation as both an author and sometime editor.  My wife Candice & I decided to read the book together as we often do with books on subjects or by authors who interest both of us.  Reading the book has been a joy and a fountainhead of information about a subject in which my prior information was deficient.  We learned a great deal about both ballet and ballet in Appalachia. I can happily recommend the book to you whether you are a student of either ballet or Appalachian Studies.  

Eddy interviewed and wrote about the ballet experiences and wider lives of twenty-four women who have been involved in ballet in Appalachia and, in some cases, in the wider world of ballet.  All of the women either live or have lived in Appalachia in the past although not all of them are native Appalachians and some did not experience their involvement with ballet in Appalachia.  But the common factors in all their lives have been the paired experiences of ballet and life in Appalachia.  All of the women have taken ballet lessons and, at some time, have lived in the region.  A small number of them have gone on to professional careers in ballet either as dancers or in other areas of ballet promotion and production including Eddy's only sister.  

 

The book also examines ballet in comparison to martial arts and it should be stated for the record that Edwina Pendarvis took ballet as a child and studied Taekwando in which she holds a black belt.  This is an interesting comparison to make and fortuitously tied in with another recent experience of mine in which several people, including myself, became engaged in a social media exchange about having taken typing in high school.  Several of us in that discussion were male and nearly all of us males stated that we had received lifelong benefits from having taken the class.  All the subjects in Eddy's book stated the same thing about having studied ballet even if they had not gone on to pursue careers in the art of ballet.  It is my considered opinion that most people who pursue some difficult subject, art, or recreation for an extended period do receive such benefits especially if our pursuit of it is lengthy, the pursuit involves a subject which requires a great deal of work and discipline, or if we have to make some form of sacrifice to pursue that subject.  Such efforts teach us discipline, compliance, and persistence.  

Nearly all of the subjects in Eddy's book have gone on to become markedly successful women and a few of them have succeeded in multiple fields of endeavor.  As I said earlier, more than one of these women went on some form of profession involving ballet.  Several others became educators at a high level including a few who received doctoral degrees and taught college.  Others became social activists working on a daily basis to help make the world a better place.  In fact, I need to correct myself about that previous sentence and say that, in one way or another, all two dozen of these women have made the world a better place.  They are also a diverse group with at least two who were born and/or raised outside the USA and later moved to America and Appalachia.  They are also racially and ethnically diverse with a few African Americans, one biracial person, and several who practice some form of spirituality which could be said to be outside the American mainstream.  

There is one chapter in the book which is devoted to a brief examination of the statistical data about the women, their upbringing, and some of the responses they have had to their ballet experiences.  Unlike most statistical analyses I have seen this short chapter is informative and well worth the brief amount of time it requires to read.  The concluding section of the book is devoted to brief biographical sketches of all the women and is one of the most satisfying sections to read since it brings into full focus just how successful the women have been in their lives both in and apart from their involvement in ballet.  I recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone, and especially to anyone who is mired in the sadly erroneous opinion that Appalachia is a backward place lacking in both the arts and sophistication.  It actually informs the reader of several instances when individuals from Appalachia have not only improved their lives with ballet but have gone on to become important contributors to the greater world of ballet outside Appalachia. 

An Unusual Sight In Nature In My Backyard!

 

Yesterday, August 27, 2023, I had one of the instances of being in the right place at the right time to see a very unusual, at least for me, sight while I was in my backyard.  For several years, we have fed birds at our house and have a fairly large flock of ruby-throated hummingbirds ever year.  This  year we have two feeders out for them and regularly need to fill one of them every two days and the other about every three days.  I have known for a while, maybe two weeks, that the young humming birds had fledged based on the sudden increase in numbers on the feeders.  

We have several Rose of Sharon trees around our house which the humming birds love when they are in bloom.  I was standing in the yard yesterday and saw a humming bird feeding on the large Rose of Sharon behind our house.  I knew the bird was either  female or a juvenile but it totally surprised me when it left the flower it was feeding on and flew to within about 3 feet of me and literally fell out of the air into the grass near me.  I knew instantly that it had to be an immature, freshly fledged hatchling, probably on its first day of flight and I was wondering if it would get airborne again.  But, after just a few seconds of lying in the grass, it was in the air again and back on the Rose of Sharon.  I had never seen this happen before although I see unusual events with wildlife at my house fairly frequently.  In February 2021, I opened my back door on an unusually cold night to see a mourning dove just sitting in the dark on my driveway.  That bird managed to fly when I walked close to it and started to bend over and pick it up in what would have been an attempt to get it to survive.  Once recently in what was a driving and freezing rain which turned into an ice storm, I saw, through my family room window,  a mink chase a rabbit around the corner of my house and into my front yard just out of my line of sight where the mink killed the rabbit brought it back across the driveway  headed back to its den.  I have had both red foxes, coyotes, and coons on my property in broad daylight and I have photographs of both deer and wild turkeys on my driveway eating bird seed.  But I had never seen a humming bird literally fall out of the sky at my feet.  This was a highly unusual sighting and well worth seeing. 

This Year's Shucked Beans--August 2023

 

The photo above is not great but it is the best I got at the time, about a week ago, near the middle of August 2023, when I was close to completing making shucked beans from two bushels of White Half Runners I had bought at what has become a relative deal of $30.00 per bushel in Floyd County Kentucky.  In past bad years, I have paid as much as $60.00 a bushel for good, clean Half Runners.  In the past, I have written on this blog about making and eating shucked beans which some people refer to as Leather Britches.  In recent years, I have been blessed to develop friendships with both Bill Best and Frank Barnett, two of the most experienced heritage bean experts in all of Appalachia.  I grew up eating and helping raise and make shucked beans in Knott County Kentucky.  Since I met both Bill and Frank, I have written a few other bean based blog posts including one about The Dog Eye Bean and The Eagle With Spreading Wings Bean, two of the most unique and colorful heritage beans in the region.  I also wrote another post called "Lazy Wife Greasy Beans, A Lesson In Appalachian Nomenclature", a post which I owe Bill Best for since he was the first to introduce me to the Lazy Wife Greasy Bean which has become one of my favorite beans at the supper table.  Also, indirectly from learning from Bill Best about the Cherokee Purple Tomato, I wrote a post about "Multi-Cropping In The Appalachian Garden", a post which was deeply rooted in my own childhood during which I helped my parents in our one acre garden to raise Irish Potatoes, Hickory King Corn, White Half Runner Beans, and Cushaws all in the same ground with the potatoes being planted, hoed twice and then having the corn and beans planted between the potato hills, and scattering Cushaw seeds here and there among the other three crops.  In short, I have always been interested in the traditional Appalachian food items on which I was raised.  But knowing Bill and Frank has increased both my knowledge and interest in traditional Appalachian Heritage Crops even though I stopped raising a garden several years ago due to both my intense work schedule as a substance abuse and mental health therapist and the serious health problems from which my wife Candice suffers.  Even though I don't garden currently, I buy traditional food stuffs any time I can, freeze quite a few items for winter consumption, and strive to learn as much as I can about those heritage crops.  Which brings me back to my freshly made shucked beans for 2023.  

I always make my shucked beans by stringing and breaking them and then drying them on a white sheet on my blacktop driveway until they rattle when I pick them up in the sheet to bring them into the house at night to be placed on an empty bed with a ceiling fan on the lowest setting circulating air over them at night.  This year, our 13 year old nephew, Connor Nehlson from Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin, was visiting with us for a week and got his first lesson in how to string and break beans.  He did work consistently on two occasions for about an hour which might have been his best work performance of his life.  The average Appalachian child of my youth would have had some dressing down if that had been their production for a day but training a child to work is a work in progress and I think the hour's performance might have been close to a record for Connor.  We got a bit of rain on two of the days when the beans were drying and I had to bring them in the house on those days for time under the fan instead of in the sunshine. I can't prove it empirically but I firmly believe that  drying in the sunshine, as opposed to being dried in a food dehydrator or by some other means gives them a far better flavor.  And I told someone who responded to my post on a Facebook post about drying beans that "there is no sweeter sound on earth than that rattle when you pick up a sheet full of shucked beans off the driveway to bring them into the house to be individually packaged in freezer bags for winter storage.  There is also no better taste on earth than a pot of shucked beans which have been soaked overnight to re-hydrate them and then cooked slowly with a nice chunk of smoked hog jaw thrown in for extra flavor.