The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-05-16
RECRUITING THE BALLET,
Forty Maidens Who Would
Wear TinSel Mustered on
q Midday Stage.
Painstaking and Ambitious Girls
Who Seek Glory Before the
FootlightS.

A theater in the cold, realistic light of
day, the CLINT through the chinks furnish
ing the realism and the yellow gasjets the
rest, is harmonious setting for a raw
ballet girl in her street clothes minus the
frocks. When the genuine article, who
has floated and pirouetted and balanced
since infancy, is commonplace without
the gauze and glitter OF the regulation
costume, how much more Disseminating is
the green uniformed aspirant to the rose
crown of the premier danseuse, the dia-
mond absorber of young blooddom.
The California Theater stage, morning
and afternoon, is the parade ground of
the recruits for the "Humpty Dumpty"
ballet. Many were called to form that
band of grace and beauty and forty were
chosen-forty of all ages from 16 to %, and
forty as illustrious and painstaking young
females as the City can produce. There
may not be much honor or glory in being
a ballet-girl, but those bounding, swinging,
posing neophytes think there is, and that
is the right spirit after all. They feel that
they have been honored in having been
selected to dance before q critical but APP
preciative public, and they are going to do
their level best.
In the dim, religious light of the Cali
IOTuld SldSc ycStcIQdy dlteTuOOH tut CuOS6u
party looked we'll. The majority of them
here were pretty, and not few with
proper grooming might be classed among
the beautiful. And they were not bit
''tough," no matter what quarter of the
City they came from or what necessities
had forced the acceptance of legual labor
upon them. They were not, however, of
that shrinking, timid class which fingers
its tattered shawl and bushes when adj
dressed by sympathetic stranger. On
the contrary, the young ladies were per-
fectly self-possesed, and individually and
in groups rehearsed their steps, and es-
sayed the very apex of high kicking with
out any consideration of the limited and
scattered audience.
The ambition of a Fanny Elsler and a
Taglioni combined burned in the hearts
of these young Californians as they were
mustered by their indefatigable trainer,
Miss Nellie Callan. Young in years, but
with broad experience In the dazzling
combination of amazon marches and gilt
tering massing OF graceful beauty and all
the glamor OF the spangled fairies, she
was patient but exacting, stern but re-
lenting, to those who really wanted to. do
the figure all right, but whose legs and
arms were for the time mutinous. Miss
Nellies costume was cool, as became the
weather. Her sandals were strictly pro-
fessional her other things light by compar-
isen with the fashion plates of midday
attire. But she was a general in that
goose-step part of the ballet, and the girls
knew it and obeyed her.
A young man played the piano. He was
a good player and kept perfect time. The
neophytes evidently regarded him as some
thing more than human. They clustered
about that happy young man, and had pro-
have taken the liberty of stroking his plas-
farad hair *
The ambition to kick high was strongly
illustrated in the efforts of those recruits.
While the main body were doing the skip
and waltz and tableaux as set down in the
regulations under the generalship of Miss
Cailan, detached beauties were straining
their anatomy to beat all the records, and
were coming "koplunk" in that most try
ing exercise. the split, and not few of
them looked after this feat as if they
wished they had not done it.
Foot and foot together, two pretty little
girls tried to dislocate two nicely turned
limbs. One audacious dame turned a
handspring, and half a dozen imitators
followed her. Another tried the coach
wheel and brought following to her side
of the stage. But this did not interfere
with business, for the skipping and group
ing went on, and the clear voice of General
Cailan rang out:
s'Now, girls-easy there-mind your
tableaux-oh, shocklng-that won't do
once again, and the virtuoso at the piano
played on mechanically with the air OF one
to whom the ballet was a sodden fruit and
who took no stock in female beauty, with
or without uniform.
Yesterday was the fourth rehearsal
and the girls did well. Their am
bition to reach that altitude of alteration,
that lofty pedestal where the small finan-
cial annoyances of the past shall be like
tale that was told, or dream that had no
reality, has no low splace in the mingled
aspirations that urge the orator, poet and