Hubris, Mix-Masters, Chocolate Cakes In Heart Shaped Pans And Dancing All Mixed Together Elita Sohmer Clayman

I heard this line today on my favorite soap opera, Young And Restless. An arrogant man there said about another arrogant man “his weakness is his hubris.” This was a lot of chutzpah (gall) for that character to say about the other man. They are two of a kind; both insolent people and they always try to best the other person. Of course, this is soap opera and the words are written for them by the writers. The writers keep them in line and they are always the same type of person, once in a while, they show their soft and decent side to other people, like their lovers or wives and children.

Do you know someone like this, I think we all do. They can be family members, friends or even people we work with. They have the gall to talk about someone doing things, when they do the exact same thing.

When we dance, sometimes we meet folks like the person mentioned above. They walk around like they are special people and look down at others who may not dance as well as they do. Of course, the others can be new to dancing and the arrogant one can have been dancing for twenty years. The majority of dancers that I know that frequent the dance hall we go to, are usually kind and caring people who try to encourage the new dancer,whether young or old in age, that learning comes by doing.

When we first started to go to social dances in 1978,it was after we had taken about twenty lessons and thought we were kind of prepared to go out and try to do what we had learned in class. There were mainly nice people who were kind to us new folks and encouraged us to get up and dance and that is how we would really enhance our dance. That became my silent motto and my personal proverb.

Enhance our dance means we practiced, danced and really became extra competent dancers.

Dancing is like an old fashioned mix-master. I do not know what they are called in these modern days. In my young life, Mom had an electric mix-master and that is how she baked her marvelous chocolate cakes, mondel bread cookies, strudel fruit loaves and all kinds of cookies. She rarely bought store bought cakes or pies or cookies. Sometimes, she went to the day old store many miles away on her way home from work to get us some dessert specialties that were individually wrapped. In those days, if a packaged sweet was not sold on the day it was put out, it was placed in a bin called day old. Actually now every packed sweet item has a sell by date and so you can buy something put out today and the final day for eating it would be maybe a week later. In those old days of my youth, one day made it day old and they were usually half price and that was a big savings.

Mom use to go usually to that store on a Thursday and it was on her bus stop changeover and she would shop there and they placed it in a large shopping bag or two and she carried home many day old goodies and then she need not bake so much that week from scratch. It was fun as a kid to open up a pack of chocolate Tasty Kake brand cupcakes  and they were all for only you.  I like cold desserts, so I popped them in the refrigerator until they got nice and cold. So Thursdays were a special treat and when Mom came in from the bus stop with her bag of goodies, I felt quite rich to be the recipient of some of them. So did Dad and my brother and Mom too.

Dancing is like popping the flour, eggs, sugar and whatever else there is and turning on the electric mix-master and twirling it all around until it is all blended. Dancing is a blend of learning, twirling, combining and pouring out the routine into a bowl.  The batter being the stirred results, that turns into a fine dance like the batter of the dough turns into a nice cookie or cake. The icing put on the top of the cake or on some cookies is similar to the dance becoming performed and perfected. With the cookie or cake, we eat it and it is gone for now until the next baking event. With dancing, it is still there ready for the next performance at a dance.

The mix master as it was called in the old days when I was young is washed out and popped up on a shelf like an instrument of honor waiting for its next use. Dancing is also waiting for its next use by going to a dance or a lesson.

Of course if you consume too many slices of delicious cake or eating lots of cookies, your body is consumed with carbohydrates which turn into a sugar high. With dancing, you can get the sugar high, after you dance several dances and decide you are doing great.

Both the cookies, cakes or dancing can give you the high and you can have a bit of nice hubris, because you persevered, came to a dance, and did dance many times and you feel not arrogant, but fulfilled. So it can be a sweeter side of hubris, if that can happen and you can use the hubris to be happy that you attained the dance knowledge. You need not think someone else has hubris about his dancing,because you know the feeling yourself about being a little uppity in your own snooty la-di-da way. That is allowable because you worked hard to get this feeling.

So if you sometimes feel a bit confident, let us call it a nice hubris and it really can ‘taste’ as nice as a piece of Mom’s homemade chocolate cake, which she always made in heart shaped baking pans. She said the heart shaped cake that turned out tasted better than if she made it in a round and normal shaped baking pan. Somehow, the heart design looking so pretty gave the dough a better taste. That was not really so, but it was a sweet thought for a sweet cake from my sweet Mom. Everyone wanted her to bake them that heart shaped two layer giant size chocolate cake and only wanted it made in the heart design.

Everyone thought it was extra special and delicious because of the shape. Now days, on Valentine’s Day, all the bakeries make heart shaped cakes. In those days of the forties and fifties, it was difficult to find heart shaped pans. Mom did find them and it became associated with Aunt Lea for all the cousins who ate it and from sister or sister-in-law Lea to the other family members. Once in a while, Mom would make us one of them in a regular tin and we all swore it was good, but not as tasty as in the heart pans. It was the same recipe in the same mix-master and yet everyone had the illusion that it somehow was a bit different.

So illusions are good, proper and come in handy in baking a cake, having some hubris and also in ballroom dancing. Some dancers give the illusion that they are better than they really are, and that is fine too, just like the chocolate cake tasting sweeter, if made in the heart pans.

A good heart is always welcome to us from anybody we know and a heart shaped cake is pleasing too.