The title was taken from a song that was playing on someone's iTunes as it was flashed on the screen-- a song by Taylor Swift which I didn't particularly adore, but I thought it best expressed how I was feeling as I was standing there in the auditorium, half alive at 5.30 am in the morning, looking at the raggers getting their make-up done. Today was going to be fairy tale.
So was the rag experience, and funny story, it had a bittersweet beginning and a bittersweet ending. The bitter part spurred up from the things once said by a friend of mine (not in law rag 2010): 'There's nothing in it for me.' I guess this thought kept playing in my head every time I hit rock bottom, that I was squandering my time and effort on something that was, well, ultimately futile. Thankfully, he was, or more accurately, I was proven wrong. Rag turned out to be an experience I would never trade for anything.
Ever so often in my hollow existence I felt hapless, tumbling into the pith of depression for all the wrong and sometimes illogical reasons (oxymoronic much?)-- pretty much a strangled old man.
Like this!
(Kudos to Julian for capturing this photographic masterpiece.)
More often than not, this is how I feel about me: an decrepit, wizened old man with beads of responsibilities hanging around my neck tugged in every direction... except that I would probably cover my nipples, but that's beside the point. As an aged soul I lived my life, with no apparent reason why I felt so, with no tangible reason why I couldn't snap out of it.
However, every once in a while, a glitter of hope would make its teasing appearance before me, too fleeting for my hand to grasp, too fleeting for my eyes to catch-- but there it was. It put this soggy feeling around your heart, and you tried to replicate it as closely as possible, although sadly, often to no avail.
Nevertheless, with rag the feeling stayed there for a tad longer. It stemmed from the earnestness that was shared amongst the raggers. For me, there and then, there was no expectations, no nothing, just me doing what I truthfully feel was best for everybody. I'm not talking about choreography, I'm talking about the then-felt-so-interminable practices as a whole. It captured me as a person when such earnestness, which I unwittingly put up out there in the moot court and auditorium, was reciprocated-- or to say the least, shared by others.
It reminded me that dancers were human too; that there was beauty in imperfections, beauty in hard work, beauty in pain and suffering; that souls-- even cold, aged and dried-up one like mine-- can be touched by imperfections, hard work, pain and suffering. This was the sweetness of it all: the cliched 'warm and fuzzy' feeling that crawled inside whenever 'Take Your Shirt Off', or 'I Am Not A Whore', or 'This Time (Klaas Remix)', or 'A Drop In The Ocean', or 'I Am', or 'Come On Get Up', or other five to six songs played on my iPod during practices.
I truly felt bad because at times it felt like I was being a bad father who always left his kids half way, leaving them in arms of an overworked mother who (as she put it in her own words) 'always came late because she couldn't wake up in the morning'. Haha.
And I missed the run that made everybody cried-- one thing I would always regret.
Anyhoo, ten minutes prior to the performance, it really felt surreal. Never in a very, very long have I had such an overwhelming feeling sweeping right through me like that. Funny enough, I couldn't-- no can't-- really pinpoint what that feeling was. Was I proud, just like when I saw them doing their own company warm-up in the morning earlier on their own? Was I sad, knowing that I was turning the last page of the fairy tale? Was I nervous, because there were people whom I knew watching the item for the first time? Was I worried for the dancers?
I don't know. Perhaps I shouldn't know.
I guess at the end of the day I just want to thank every single ragger-- seniors, juniors, heads, freshies, rag committee members and ad hoc OTOT helpers. Really, you're the best (a la Nicolette)! You guys made learn more about myself. You reintroduced me to a world I once left. On top of all, you did all of us proud. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you. Today was a fairy tale.
