The ballet was nice. I don't really know enough about dance to talk or even think about it critically. It was the Nutcracker: it was beautiful and familiar.

We sat up in the fifth tier because we are poor (in comparison to the other people attending the New York City Ballet) and those are the cheapest seats available. You have to kind of lean over the edge to see the whole stage but on the whole it's not half bad. I didn't use my opera glasses though (not that they're great for the ballet anyway) because I was convinced that I would drop them all the way from the fifth tier to the orchestra and hit someone in the head. Death by opera glasses would at least be an interesting way to go, but I'm not sure my victim's family would have appreciated that so much. It's kind of interesting to be up so high because you see things that you can't see when you're at a lower level. When the tree began to grow, we could see the opening in the stage it was coming out of.

It sounds trite but it's nice to see something where money doesn't feel like the driving factor. So much of Christmas in NYC is purely about commercialism: the store windows, the Christmas market in Union Square, all the tourists making life difficult and paying an arm and a leg for the Christmas in New York experience...Of course Nutcracker is also about money. I'm not quite that naive and I'm sure it's a huge cash cow for the Ballet. But for the people attending it's also about tradition and magic and beautiful dancing and that's a nice thing. It's less gaudy and crass than the Christmas Spectacular and that's a good thing too. It's like good Christmas music in a way: sure it's about the money but underneath that there's something wonderful and clean.