In an episode of the second season of Saturday Night Live in the mid-‘70s, Gilda Radner wears a tutu, flailing her arms and legs on stage ungracefully, as her sloppily tied pointe shoes slip off of her feet. The title of the skit, appropriately enough, is Bad Ballet.
Radner’s performance was inspiration for Kathy Sena, a Manhattan Beach resident and freelance journalist, who started her own Bad Ballet, a group of women who support each other through changes and leaps onto new stages of their lives.
“(Radner’s) having this great time, even though things all around her are crazy,” Sena said, adding, “I always loved that concept of no matter what else is going on in your life, you can go out there and make things happen.”
After writing about parenting for years – she has a 15-year-old son – Sena realized diapers and car seats no longer excited her, especially since her son will soon be leaving for college. “I was driving my son to all these enriching activities — he’s taking drama class, he’s doing piano lessons and dance,” she explains. “I thought, what about me? What’s my enriching activity?”
And so the bad ballerinas were born – Sena keeps a blog (badballet.com) and has a host of contributors and members, in Italy, Australia and Japan and a group in Washington D.C.
“(The blog) gives snapshots of what’s going on in peoples’ lives,” Sena said, adding, “It’s a portal for other people to share their stories.”
One woman wrote about getting married for the first time at 51, and choosing to wear a bright orange wedding dress. “When one of my new cousins stopped me at the party and sniffed, ‘That’s not a typical wedding dress,’ I knew just what to say. ‘I’m not a typical bride,’” Pamela Toler wrote.
Jennifer Conrad, a woman from New York, wrote about starting a pig farm and backpacking through the Xinjiang province of China.
Wesley Davidson wrote about helping parents support their gay children. “I grappled with similar issues of denial, fear, guilt, loss and shame, before arriving at total acceptance of my gay son’s lifestyle,” she wrote.
In the future, Sena plans to produce an anthology of bad ballerina stories compiled on the blog.
The women’s leaps don’t necessarily have to be life changing. This summer, a handful of South Bay bad ballerinas completed a comedy improv class at Mira Costa High School through the South Bay Adult School.
JoBeth McDaniel, a Palos Verdes resident and Alabama native, enjoyed the class so much, she enrolled in a second, which she attends on Tuesday nights. “We will just laugh our heads off,” she said, adding that there’s something liberating about being wacky for an audience.
Sena also took the improv class. “My cheeks hurt when I’m done,” she said, about laughing so hard. “Where else do you get that?”
Not only does the class make her laugh for two and a half hours each week, Sena said it also puts her in a good mood for the rest of the day and she can bond over it with her son, who has also dabbled in improv. “It just makes me a more fun mom to be around,” she said. “I never come home in a bad mood from an improv class – it just doesn’t happen.”
The next bad ballerina event will be a luncheon on September 6 at The Soup Bar in El Segundo at 11:30 a.m. Bad ballerina, Michelle McKinney, and her husband recently opened the restaurant.
