Artistic Disillusionment

Poor Chris Taylor recounts the sad tale of his youthful loss of artistic faith:

Don't ask me how, but somehow I got it into my pea-brained mind that the Ontario Place Forum must be the natural venue for Swan Lake, because Ontario Place had a huge population of waterfowl — including actual swans. Since my only prior experience with ballet was the opulent and costume-heavy Nutcracker, I figured that Swan Lake would be a lot like it. Nutcracker featured tin soldiers come to life, battling household mice with their rifles and bayonets. I expected nothing less from Swan Lake — amazing feats of animal husbandry, wherein real live swans would somehow be coerced into ballet performances.

So I sat there for a half hour or so watching these women with feathers in their tutus dance around the stage. Then I poked mom in the ribs and said "Where are the swans?" She explained very patiently that the ladies in the feathered dresses were the swans. Well, my enjoyment of ballet went into the sewer at that point, and never recovered. Ladies pretending to be swans? Here we were, in a venue absolutely crawling with real live swans (who were busy nosing about for dropped french fries) and the best they could come up with was ladies in dresses with the odd feather attached? I considered this a monumental failure of the art form and never made an effort to see another ballet performance.