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Talk About Splitsville…
Auditioning for Letterman’s Stupid Human Tricks
With My Extra Special Talent
Wanting to become a ballerina required incredible flexibility. Not just in adapting to whatever was thrown at you. Like the time I learned a dance on the bus taking us to the show, when someone got injured that morning. (I swear I didn’t trip her before the trip to get the “break”.) But also the flexibility to literally bend so out of bounds - it would make Gumby look like he was perpetually planking.
In my teens, I usually intentionally fell asleep in some sort of a contorted lifelike pretzel. Such as “the frog”. Our teacher told us if we emulated the amphibians’ legs at night, we would wake up with superior “turn out” of our hips.
And hip replacements a couple of decades later, as it “turned out”!
One particular stretch that eluded me, however, was rolling through a middle split position like in this video (also not me):
