My Brother's West Side Story

I'm writing this mostly b/c Dolce Carina said I should write about it. It all sounds rather melodramatic, but I've been pretty upset.

Yesterday, my brother J. who is 15 fractured his hand during a performance of West Side Story. J is a dancer, and literally, for the last 8 years at least his dream has been to perform in WSS. There are many good dancing roles for a teen-age boy. Apparently, the director tells him he has a nice pirouette. But yesterday, during the opening "fight scene," he fractured his hand. So now he's in a cast, although he has quite a few more performances. And I guess he can still perform (the show must go on, after all), but I don't know that he can do everything. I guess some of his "moves" had to be modified.

Anyway, I really love him, and I feel sorry for him that this crazy, ironic, painful kind of thing had to happen now, as he was approaching his life-long goal. That was an overstatement, but that's how it feels. I wish I could be less engaged emotionally with the situation.

It seems like all these weird, unexpected things have come up in my personal life in the last couple of weeks, and any one of them alone wouldn't be a big deal to cope with, but all together, it's been overwhelming for me. And I'm not even the one in the cast. I think that part of my difficulty is wanting to be near my family but being on the other side of the country.

D