The Horror Of Ballerina Farm: a cautionary tale to all young women

I will be telling my daughters and grand-daughters this story

“I love to dance,” she told the beast.

“Then let me tie you up with strings

Let me hollow your dreams, as you dance to my own

My stage is your cage, where you labour alone

A vessel of nothing, a servant romanced,

A woman erased, a slave who once danced.”

Snow now flickers across the barren plains of Utah as night licks her way across the fields. A broken looking woman balances an infant on her hip, her worn clothes faded like her face to a dull grey. The sadness in her eyes haunts me long after the reel has ended. A sadness that doesn’t fade as she displays her teeth and attempts a smile. You want to reach out and save her. The princess, in this story, never escaped the monster in his castle. No one ever arrived on a white horse to carry her far away from the scrubbing, scouring and sweeping set by her cruel master. No one ever turns her back into a beautiful dancer and lets her out of her cage to fly free. She is tied by apron strings to her fairy-tale fate, decaying and rotting in the prison her master has built her, trying to suffocate the memory of the woman she once was, and the dream she once had. She has become a cautionary tale we will tell for decades to come, if not centuries.