I love ballet. I really do. That’s why, three years ago, I made a solemn vow never to subject myself to another Nutcracker. It’s not just a case of familiarity breeding contempt. I’ve given it a lot of thought (mostly through repetitions of that over-long party scene), and I believe the ballet is seriously flawed. It boils down to this: The first act is too literal, and the second act is too abstract.

By “too literal,” I mean that the first act is mostly mime. Since there’s little dancing to interfere with the story-telling, you feel it must be important, and you’re compelled to expend energy interpreting it. Who’s giving the party — the blue couple or the red couple? Look at the partygoers shunning the street urchins — is this meant to be a critique of bourgeois values? Obviously, the mice represent the corruption and rot that underlie the beautiful facade, and the toy soldiers are the military-industrial complex that the bourgeoisie has at its disposal. But wait, I’m detecting some sexual elements. Is that the girl’s brother teasing her, or a little boyfriend? Is the choreographer trying to comment on the traditional role of women in society by having the little girls dance with their dolls? In that case, what does it mean that Clara prefers her Nutcracker to a baby doll? Is this an expression of her budding sexuality? And what about her relationship with Drosselmeyer — is there an element of sexual menace there?

Then the second act starts, and it all breaks down. You might start by assuming that the Sugar Plum Fairy represents Clara all grown up, but then there’s the Snow Queen too. What’s she doing there? By the time you get to the dancers representing Coffee, Tea, Candy Canes, and Spain (?) you’ve given up. They all dance, for a long, long time. The end.

I broke my vow this weekend because my friend’s daughter got a part in a version of the Nutcracker in a pre-professional ballet company in my hometown. I thought it would be fun to support her, see the old stomping grounds, and let Aitch run wild with my friend’s four children for the weekend. So we said goodbye to Husband and Dog, hopped on a plane, and went.

My friend and I met in elementary school in the “gifted program,” where once a week children from all over the county were pulled out of our regular schools and bused to a central school for enrichment classes. We were known as the “BEEP kids,” after the acronym for the gifted program. (Yes, I was a Krelboyne.) Although we were vilified by the other “non-gifted” (by implication) students, and sometimes given a hard time by our regular teachers, it was overall a good experience. We got to meet kids from other schools and be exposed to different subjects, like theater and botany. The teaching style was rather loosey-goosey, typical of the ’70s — lots of self-directed learning, which translated to a lot of unsupervised goofing-off time. Our teachers incorporated whole language techniques that are used in the mainstream today, but which we would not have gotten in our regular drill-and-grill classes.

In junior high, the program changed. Instead of busing us out, our school created a section for advanced students and kept us together, the same 30 kids, through seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. This blatant manifestation of elitism (our class was named “7-1″ while the other sections were “7-G, 7-L,” etc.) did not endear us to the other kids, and the isolation from them pretty much ruined our social lives throughout high school. But after three years of being in the same class, we had bonded pretty tightly.

Almost every teacher seated us alphabetically, so I, with a last name starting with D, was always seated between C, a girl, and E, a boy. My friend (last name began with H) always sat in the row behind us. As it happens, the C girl grew up, moved to New England, and now lives several miles away from me, which is hundreds of miles from our hometown. My friend H married E after college, and they settled in our home town. There were at least two other marriages in that class — my friends S and K married after college, and other friends S and A married after law school.

The Es now have four children, the youngest of whom is two years older than Aitch. We tagged along on their weekend activities. In addition to the Nutcracker, with the company that is managed by my old dance teacher, the weekend featured a varsity basketball game at my old high school (my friend and I were cheerleaders back in the day, and her father was the coach; we saw two former cheerleaders from our class at the game) and a Christmas party hosted by my former junior-prom date and his wife, the aforementioned S and A from my old class. How strange is it to see all the old BEEP kids grown up and married with little BEEP children? Pretty darn strange, but also sweet, in a way. The circle of overachiever life, and all that.

I realized that in the past year, I’ve revisited most of the places I’ve lived in the US in the past 40 years (Philadelphia, Chicago, Florida, and now my hometown). Within the past five years, I’ve visited all the ex-US locations I’ve ever lived (Italy, Germany, Tunisia). In 2006, it might be good to get off of Memory Lane and go some place I’ve never been before.

Someplace new. That sounds like a good New Year’s resolution.