Happy Hour Hack: Being a blank canvas and the perfect spring cocktail
The Ingrid Silva edition
Welcome to the Happy Hour Hack, a weekly Friday post of tips and inspiration to take you into the weekend. I always share one thing from my interviewee of the week, along with any ideas I receive from readers, plus some things that are piquing my own interest.
Hack
Our tip this week comes from the incredibly wise and self-confident ballerina Ingrid Silva, who has been dancing this week for The Dance Theatre of Harlem at New York City Center. Performances go through Sunday, April 23.
While I often go on about how we need to talk more and share more about…everything, Ingrid brings up an important caveat. You can’t allow others’ experiences to override your own:
Trust your journey. When I got pregnant, I thought of myself as a blank canvas, and I wanted to write my own story. As a society, we do a lot of research. We ask our mothers, we ask our friends, and we start printing in ourselves their blueprint, their experience. And most of the time, we don’t enjoy our own experience.
My best piece of advice: Follow your own instincts in everything. If you want to watch videos that will teach you something, do. If you want to talk to people, do. But if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. In my pregnancy, I mostly talked to my mom, but I didn’t know anything at all. And I didn’t want to hear birth stories because sometimes many of them are very scary, and I didn’t want to entrench anyone’s experience upon my own experience.
So become a blank canvas and write your own story throughout your pregnancy, to your motherhood, to raising your children.
The Forum
After last week’s Happy Hour Hack’s recommendation to watch Bluey to get a handbook for parenting, I heard from a couple readers who had a super insightful perspective:
Erik: My more cynical take (as always) is that Bluey’s parents make me feel very inadequate as a parent.
Liz: Haha same. Also is it just me or is the dad more fun?
Erik: Dads are usually portrayed as more fun since they usually don’t have to take primary responsibility for raising the children. Leaving them with all the fun. It’s a sad reminder of how low the bar is for men in parenting.
Which, really, is the theme for countless movies and TV shows: The dad is the goofball while the mom is the ballbuster. Which is insulting to everyone involved.
If you’re wondering how Erik acquired such an evolved viewpoint, he’s…Swedish. Everyone, eat more of the meatballs when you go to IKEA. Maybe we’ll soak up some of that beautiful egalitarian ethos.
Book
Ever notice how ballet shoes are pink? Well, Ingrid spent 11 years painting her ballet shoes with liquid foundation to get them to match her skin tone. The Smithsonian even has a pair of her painted shoes in its collection. Thankfully, that is starting to change.
Ingrid wrote a children’s book about her experience having to paint her shoes. As of now, it’s only available in Portuguese, but if there are any publishers out there reading this, pick this book up and publish it in English too, please! Here’s Ingrid on the book:
I’ve worked with children my whole life teaching ballet, and I’m very good at connecting with them. And I believe that the children are our future. We shape them to what we want to see in our future and in our lives. The book is: The Girl That Used to Color Her Shoes, which is my story, but translated to kids. And in that book, I brought joy, dreams, possibilities, and opportunities. There is an illustration that I love in one of the last pages that shows all kinds of bodies, shapes, forms, and skin tones. And that’s how people should be brought up to art. It’s for everyone. And you should be able to just enjoy art even if you don’t want to become a professional. Do it just for the joy of doing it.
Instagram
I recently learned that ballet dancers, perhaps because they have such an intense work ethic, are known for always giving back. Ingrid certainly fits that bill. One of the organizations she’s involved with is close to TCF’s heart:
Dancers and Motherhood is our Instagram that highlights professional ballet dancers and their professional journey as active. I think we’re breaking boundaries on creating an organization for the first time that supports mothers in their careers while they’re active in the dance world. Sometimes people are not very friendly when you become a mother because they think your career is over, that if you can’t come back to the way you were, it’s done. But we are changing that. There are a lot of moms who are still thriving and looking amazing.
Cocktail
As the days get longer, so does cocktail hour. This is a bright, beautiful drink that looks and feels right for the weather, and it’s low proof enough that you can sip it all afternoon and not get sloppy. Plus, it’s super simple to make, with an extremely wide margin for error, so it’s a great party drink. It’s killer for brunch (and is delightful for a hangover) and just as fitting for an evening cocktail party.
It doesn’t look like it from the above photo, but this cocktail is a…