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Notes toward the Mongolian State Ballet

The main ballet dancers are in white. The male lead is the one who did and interpretive wolf dance at the release of the book of wolf myths I edited. He stands out as the best, having had the opportunity to study elsewhere--Russia, Canada. I didn’t realize how much a good ballet dancer is a good actor--just look at how he looks down at her. He has more facial expressions than many dancers I've seen, says my mother. There's a 6 foot tall handmaiden, veiled, who I keep waiting to reveal herself as the hero, back from what would turn out not to be actual death to rescue the heroin. Rebecca invited us to sit in the box seats. She is working for mining responsibility. As of now there's no independent laboratory for testing the fine white powder settling over the town neighboring the largest state-owned mining site.

I've never been so close to the dancers before. The mother of the box seat guy painted the close ups of flowers in the VIP room. There is a dentist here doing volunteer work. 600-800 kids migrate to the pipes underground in the winter. 90% of them are from single-parent households. Many of the girls turn to prostitution. The boys don't often like the classes and strict rules of the shelters. So they steal instead. The dentist had to stop extracting teeth in the garbage district because he ran out of tools and there was no way to clean them.