Yearly Archives: 2011

Back in my ballet-dancing days, I heard a lot about Alexander Technique but never pursued it until a recent serious injury sent my entire body in a general state of Wonk. Now in my mid-30s, I’m re-teaching myself to climb stairs, to bike and to walk without looking like the love child of a chicken and Buster Keaton.  As I searched for new ways to improve integration of my body and brain, I jumped at the chance to explore Alexander Technique for Wallyhood and betook myself to Jeanne Barrett’s Wallingford practice, Alexander Technique Center Seattle.

Alexander Technique is best described …

The first time I heard Dylan Thomas’s classic poem, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” it was just after a typically enormous Thanksgiving meal and we were all cuddled up around a woodstove in a New Hampshire farmhouse listening to the sonorous, Welsh-accented voice of Mr. Thomas himself purring on about snow for six days and six nights when he was twelve, or twelve days and twelve nights when he was six. His frenetic, disjointed style captured each of his fleeting memories of cold mailmen and burning houses and happy uncles in Wales in a mushed-up, run-together way that recalled exactly …