Oh, to be a chicken.

There's something quite empowering about doing things by yourself: drinking coffee alone, traveling alone, sitting in a park with just a book for company.
My favourite is going to the cinema alone and  treating yourself to a massive box of popcorn and laughing or crying as much as you want. It's not a place for conversation anyway so why not indulge your inner hermit and go it alone?
Today it was to The Royal Opera House that my solo travels took me. La Fille Mal Gardee by Royal Ballet. And as all the old ladies and gentlemen (it was a matinee, oasis of the comfortably retired) scrambled over each  to find their seats, I sat in my aisle seat observing and writing/pretending I'm some kind of dance critic.
This is an absolutely untrue state of affairs. I'm far too easily entertained to be any good at reviews. Almost everything could probably be boiled down to the sentence: "Well that was quite nice." Three years of dance history and criticism was entirely wasted on me.
Saying that, this is everything you could want from a ballet: a dame in clogs; dancing chickens; and a first-love story between boy and girl who look much better in tights than your average person.
I have two links with this ballet. The whole time I was a teenager I was taught by the woman who danced the lead role more than anyone, over 100 times. And she's amazing. Over seventy and still screaming. I blame her almost entirely for my deciding on dancing as a career. Hmm...
Second, the first piece of ballet repertoire I learnt was the chicken dance (obviously taught by Brenda), and as I was looking in the programme I saw that one of the girls in the role of chicken was in that class with me when I was ten. Oh my god, she's a chicken! That's exciting. If only I were a chicken...
And then there was the fire drill. I had been warned this would happen (inside information) but the patrons seemed a bit grumpy about helping prepare the building for potential emergency.
I, on the other hand, quite enjoyed standing in the rain with ushers, chefs, a horse...
I generally enjoy small (very small) disasters though. Possibly my favourite bit of the ballet was at the end of the pas de deux when the sit lift went wrong. Twice. Because then Laura Morera and Ricardo Cervera had a little stage hug which, even though it was probably choreographed, the audience aww-ed beautifully.
What a nice life characters in ballets have. Maybe not the main characters who have an alarming tendency to dance themselves to death or turn into swans and throw themselves into lakes. But in this ballet they are all happy and remarkably well dressed peasants. Imagine the worst thing that happens in life is a big storm spoiling the maypole dance.
What I'm saying is that this is a super sweet and funny ballet that doesn't take itself seriously. It's quite nice really.
But this wasn't supposed to be a review, it was supposed to be about my independent self.
Whatever...I'm a child again at the ballet. You should go. Alone. There, I covered all bases.