Unless, of course, you’ve seen them portrayed by Christopher Walken. Let’s face it: children’s literature is a bloodthirsty gross-out and the nastier it is, the better they like it. This also explains the enduring popularity of Charles Dickens…

And for the old-skool among us, you can do your own Christopher Walken impression reading the most aptly-named fairy tales of all times: the Brothers Grimm.

We are aware, here in the Manolosphere, that there are those who do not love ballet. We feel sorry for them, and we assume that they were traumatized in a horrible pointe shoe accident as toddlers. We seek, therefore, to reintroduce them to this finest of all athletic arts one bunny hop at a time.

We will start them off on The Nutcracker.

Not the story; if you actually read E.T.A. Hoffman you quickly see that he was a nutbar of the very nuttiest type. We start them off right with the ballet itself.

Now, this ballet, it has many things going for it. It has magic. It has a mysterious sugar daddy. It has a prince. It has soldiers and cossacks and battles and rats. And, if it’s the Pacific Northwest Ballet version, it has sets designed by Maurice Sendak and special effects whipped up by Boeing engineers in their spare time (presumably making airplanes stay up is dull relative to making Christmas trees explode).

Oh, and it has dancing, too.

But, ballet fan though I may be, I maintain that the best part of the Nutcracker is the outfits.

Not those outfits.

These ones.

A full third of my motivation for going to this particular ballet is the chance to see all the cute little kids dressed up and looking good; given the fact that ballets are rarely performed adjacent to food or Play-Doh, it’s also the one chance they have to STAY looking good for several hours. Not a few parents cram the photo with Santa into this day; although their children may be overwrought and unhinged by such a jam-packed day, they do look fabulous, and that’s what counts when Aunt Fran is comparing your brood to her sister’s, eh?

But while there are a billion attractive options for girls formal dresses, what have we got for little boys?

Still.

Equal rights, my friends, include the right to be equally fabulous, and I’m afraid this just doesn’t do it for me, velvet though it may be. Go ahead, search: Amazon doesn’t even have a category for boy’s formal wear. I suppose the powers that be simply assume that your boys will be happy with a band tee, a mackinaw, and some overalls for their special occasions. Or variations on the sailor suit, which really hasn’t been the same since Tom of Finland. Really, there’s a huge gap where boy’s formal wear could be; if you trawl through “boy’s suits and sport coats” on Amazon you end up looking at orange pj sets and some hip-hop track suits with satin trim. It’s enough to give one the vapours, whatever they are.

Now, the vest thing I understand. Try wrestling a willful five-year-old into the sausage-casing sleeves of a suit jacket and tell me that vests aren’t a good thing. Indeed, I’m going out on a limb here and saying that, for small boys, vests are an acceptable substitute for suit jackets. This special exemption ends when the child is old enough to learn cursive and/or l33t. In the meantime, may we suggest:

You’ll recall wee Vlad here from our Caption Contest of last Friday. It’s now time to announce the winner of our deliberately un-seasonal captioning challenge.

Taunt Talli Says:
December 16th, 2007 at 1:45 pm

“Excuse me… which way to the nearest poetry reading?”

 Congratulations to Taunt Talli, who obviously has had her own experiences with my beloved subculture. Is that Rilke he’s carrying?

And now, the imaginary footwear for the imaginary investiture ceremony:

Goth enough?

Glinda speaks!

Quick summary, for those of you who didn’t tune in to yesterday’s episode: Glinda lives in Southern California and spent much of yesterday watching wildfires creep closer and closer to her house.

They couldn’t open the windows because of the hurricane force winds bearing burning ash.

She watched transformers explode, scattering PCBs in columns of blue flame!

And she was worried about the blog!

Honestly, we love her but sometimes the girl has no sense of perspective!

Here’s the update:

Chicken Little has left the building…for now, anyway.

We are back at home, the power came back on around 4:30pm, and the winds around our house have died down considerably. Hundreds of trees uprooted, mostly beautiful large firs, oaks, and pine trees. Our home was never in any imminent danger, although where I live has lots of chaparral and large brush areas, so there is always a chance of embers being carried by the wind and igniting. There were lots of fire personnel prowling around, looking for any flare-ups that might occur from a stray ember. Totally a surreal scene here. The big fire in Irvine was being carried away from us by the direction of the wind.

Other people, not so lucky. Hundreds of homes lost, although miraculously, minimal loss of life. The entire SoCal region is an inferno, or at least, it certainly feels that way when the smoke and ash are everywhere, blotting out the sun and turning the moon brown.

Thank you for the well-wishes, and let us save our prayers for all those who are still in danger, of which there are many. For now, we are blessed to count ourselves safe, and unless the winds kick back up again or some crazy pyromaniac starts another fire nearer to us, we should be fine.

Manolo says, Glinda the Good, who lives in Orange County, has just sent the following message to the Manolo.

Our power has been out since 10:30pm last night, and it isn’t looking good. I’m typing this at the library. The winds here are incredibly bad, trees are knocked over everywhere and basically it is like living in a hurricane. They clocked the wind speed in the canyon we live in at 85mph. So, we are not sure when our power is going to be restored, and we may have to relocate for the night if the power is not back on soon. We’ve already probably lost all the food in our fridge. It is too hot to stay in our house, and we can’t open the windows up because ash is being blown everywhere due to all the brush fires that surround us on three sides. Fun times.

And now the Manolo must ask that the readers of the Teeny Manolo please keep Glinda in their thoughts and prayers, that she and her family and friends be delivered safely from this disaster.

I looked at this picture, and I knew there were just some things going on here that I didn’t really like.

1) Aside from the fact that her son looks exactly like her but is male and has blonde hair, I wondered, why can I see his handsome face? Where is his helmet? I don’t care if he has training wheels, he still needs a helmet.

2) When out with a young child, girlfriend should not wear skirts that will allow everyone to see her butt if she needs to bend over.  In a bar? Fine.  With your kid?  Not fine.  Although I hate her for her nice legs.  Maybe I’m just jealous. Whatever.

3) Probably the worst thing is the cellphone that is attached to her head.  One of my pet peeves is parents who go out with their kids and do nothing but talk on their cell.   And it doesn’t even look like it is a fun conversation.  My son’s school has actually gone so far as to ban cellphones from the campus.  When at events or picking up their kids, parents are not allowed to yak away while their son or daughter tries to tell them about their painting.  Glinda approves.

4) The child has a Rolling Stones shirt on.   In pink.  I’m gonna say no.  The Rolling Stones just don’t do pink.

And, for those of you scratching their heads and saying to themselves, who is this woman, anyway?  I have this clue- Chris Isaak, Wicked Game. 

Now it can be told…

Halle Berry once occupied the treadmill next to my friend Zahid for a full hour, and he, in his particular way, noticed. Men are so competitive! Yes, this black chick (unusual in Vancouver, unless Somali FOB and thus unlikely to inhabit the gym, as the robes get caught in the belt) was not only keeping pace with him, but actually going measurably harder than him. And my friend, whose pride is not inconsequential, yet is open to correction, decided to engage this intimidating Amazon in conversation.

So he did.

And after the better part of an hour of who he was, what he did, how he’d helped the various tribes renegotiate their treaties with the Canadian government, etc, etc, you know how men are but she seemed interested and asked all the questions but eventually he got to feeling guilty for doing all the talking and he said, “but enough about me. Tell me about yourself!”

“Well, my name is Halle, and I’m an actor,” said the woman who was even then taking in several million for starring in Catwoman.

And he silently went, “D’oh!”

In unrelated news, here is a photo of Halle Berry rocking her newly-announced pregnancy, and it must be said that few rock it better or harder. She looks, to my unpracticed eye, farther along than three months, but she looks dead hot.

I’m not so all about the visible nips, nor the unexplained diagonal tension points on the outfit (I suppose it’s avant-garde) but I love the draping and the tightness and the fact that this reveals an unabashedly preggo body, in flats. She’s not going for a win in the Drop the Baby stakes!

Yes, she’s pregnant; yes, she’s the superfantastic!

I need to focus on some children other than my own right now.  Especially since mine just spilled his drink all over his father’s library book   And so I give you Maddox and Pax Jolie-Pitt.  I never realized, but I wonder if they purposely named them both so their names ended in x?  I know, I have way too much time on my hands.

This picture is what life is all about.  This is exactly the kind of super fantastic-ness that the Manolo alluded to in his introductory post.  When the world becomes a place where a kid can’t parade around in silly glasses, then that’s a world I don’t want to live in anymore.

And, how much do I love Maddox and his bad self?  Pax is a cutie as well, although I think that with all the hauling around of children that Angelina does, methinks she has no need for the gym.