This past weekend my friend Joanna came in town to visit!! Joanna is @balletlibrarian on Instagram and she's the writer of the adult ballet novel Cantique, so you may know her across the online adult ballet community! You might also know her from my Kansas City vlog last summer when I went up there for an adult ballet weekend!
Joanna and her husband arrived on Friday and they came to my husband's brewery since I was working the bar that night! We were having a new beer release so I was a busy bee and didn't manage to grab one photo from that night! But it was super fun having ballet friends in the brewery. My life is so split between those two things that those worlds rarely collide - I want it to mesh more, because that was fun! If you're a craft beer drinker and also a ballet dancer, come visit me :)
So Saturday morning we went to class together! The Saturday class Kristin and I take with Alvin (who you might know from the "challenge" videos) is notorious for being really hard, which I think is part of its appeal to go! We prepped Joanna to expect it to be difficult and she was nervous about it, but she did great! She said afterward that the style was different than she was used to, but it's always fun to get exposed to new teaching styles! It was really fun having her in class and we stayed afterward to chat and do some fun video clips and photos.
We met back up a few hours later to film a video for the Ballerinas By Night YouTube channel. I am starting a new series which I will share more details about soon, but this first video features Joanna!
We were all dressed up to go see Oklahoma City Ballet perform La Sylphide at 8pm and had great intentions of going to have a fun dinner somewhere cool, but we ran out of time and we were all about to be hangry so...we went across the street to IHOP lol. It was quick and it was good, so it all worked out! :)
La Sylphide was so good! Our principal dancer, Miki, danced her retirement performance so it was a packed house full of emotions! Miki performed beautifully!! I got to photographer her final dress rehearsal on Thursday night, so it was a treat to sit in the audience and just watch her dance! Alvin danced with her that night and Joanna mentioned how she also loved getting to take a class from him that afternoon and then watch him dance that evening!
Since we didn't get to have a fancy dinner and a fancy drink before the ballet, we went for a fancy drink after! All the bars were packed, so we ended up back at Joanna's hotel for a drink from the bar. My husband had been hanging out with her husband so they met us downstairs and we all got to hang for a bit. It was so nice! Joanna, Kristin, and I stayed up talking until almost 2am and if it weren't for us getting tired we could have talked many more hours!
In my reflecting of this weekend I realized how awesome it is that I have met so many wonderful people since starting this YouTube channel and blog. When I met Kristin through Abby we instantly became friends - we never had the "get to know you" phase; we just went straight into best friend mode! When Joanna emailed us two years ago about her novel I had a feeling we would connect really well. When we finally got to meet last summer in Kansas City I knew immediately that we would be good friends! I'm thankful we got to see each other again - and we'll be spending a week together this summer doing an adult ballet intensive!!
I'm feeling so incredibly grateful for all of the support and love from this community online and my growing in-person community!! <3 <3
Jana
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