Bellagio Heist Pt II

Bellagio Las Vegas

Bellagio nixing $25,000 chip after casino heist

By OSKAR GARCIA, Associated Press

LAS VEGAS – Las Vegas casino bosses are serving notice to the bandit who made off with $1.5 million in chips from the Bellagio: Try to redeem those worth $25,000 soon or they'll become worthless.

Bellagio owner MGM Resorts International is giving public notice that it's discontinuing its standard chip valued at $25,000 and calling for all gamblers holding the chips to redeem them by April 22.

After that, gambling regulators say each red chip with a gray inlay won't be worth more than the plastic it's cast from.

"The bottom line is that they're not money," said David Salas, deputy enforcement chief for the Nevada Gaming Control Board.

MGM Resorts first posted notice of the redemption last week in the classifieds of the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper. That's one week after a robber wearing a motorcycle helmet held up a craps table at gunpoint and made off with a bag of chips of varying denominations.

Police and casino officials have been working since the Dec. 14 heist to try to locate the bandit and keep watch on anyone trying to cash in the chips, which ranged in denomination from $100 to $25,000.

A police spokeswoman said Wednesday there have been no significant developments in the case since then.

MGM Resorts spokesman Alan Feldman told The Associated Press the chips were switched out at the tables within an hour of the robbery, and the Bellagio immediately filed to discontinue the chips.

Feldman said the move was designed to avoid inconveniencing players using the high value chips. He said he did not know how many chips existed and were uncashed.

"Obviously, anyone walking with one of the old series is going to be subject to a certain amount of questioning as to how they obtained them — assuming it isn't someone we know," Feldman told the AP. "It's pretty unusual for someone we don't know to come strolling up with a handful of $25,000 chips."

Discontinuing chips — though done in this case because of the robbery — is not uncommon for Las Vegas casinos, even at high denominations, Salas said.

Commemorative chips to mark a noteworthy prizefight for example, often have a finite circulation. On Wednesday, the Silver Nugget Casino in North Las Vegas posted notice it planned to discontinue chips with the Mahoney's Silver Nugget logo.

State laws require casino operators to serve notice, file a plan with regulators and give gamblers a reasonable amount of time to cash in any chips they're holding — in this case four months.

The move may be moot given other casino safeguards designed to track patrons who cash high-value chips, but will help the casino by lessening the number of chips outside its possession.

"If they have people that they know are players redeem the ones that they know they have, pretty much it's process of elimination — you're left with people who aren't supposed to have the chips," said David Schwartz, a former casino security guard and director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

It's not immediately clear how many of the chips that were stolen were $25,000 chips, though it could be as many as 60.

Personal comment: The quicker the chips are worthless the better.

Pointe shoe quiz December 28, 2010

Who is the maker of these shoes?

This one may be a bit tricky.

Natalie Portman pregnant by choreographer

An Ortho progestin/estrogen pill dial pack

Natalie Portman to wed `Black Swan' choreographer
Associated Press December 27, 2010

“NEW YORK - Natalie Portman is pregnant with her first child and is engaged to Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer of "Black Swan."

A publicist for Portman confirmed Monday that the couple are engaged and expecting, but declined to give any further details. People magazine first reported the news.

The 29-year-old actress and Millepied, a well-regarded ballet dancer and choreographer, met during the making of "Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller that stars Portman as a ballet dancer. She's been nominated for best actress by the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.

Millepied played a small on-screen role in the film as a dancer. Portman also stars in Ivan Reitman's upcoming romantic comedy, "No Strings Attached."”

Personal Comment: There goes her figure! Sigh! Because she isn’t a dancer she doesn’t have to stay in that great shape, but still… I wonder if there was a birth control method failure or if she forgot to take her pill or was taking another medicine that reduced the effectiveness of the hormones? Because of the timing that’s what I think happened. But, perhaps not, since she is almost 30 and nearing the age where her fertility will be decreasing. Maybe they just said “let’s go w/o protection and see what happens”… you think? Apparently this time the plumbing was working just fine.

And speaking of the effectiveness of hormonal birth control, below are the results of a large study testing the effectiveness of a 24/4 dosing regimen.


Real life tests of the effectiveness of oral contraceptives

A typical monthly regimen of oral contraceptives includes 21 days of active pills -- usually containing a combination of the hormones estrogen and progesterone -- and a 7-day break of inactive sugar pills.

Oral contraceptives boast annual unintended pregnancy rates well below 1 percent -- if used correctly and consistently, that is.

But in the not-so-perfect real world, longer lasting ingredients and shorter monthly breaks between active pills could prove useful in bolstering this form of birth control, hints a new study from Germany.

A typical monthly regimen of oral contraceptives includes 21 days of active pills -- usually containing a combination of the hormones estrogen and progesterone -- and a 7-day break of inactive sugar pills. The intent is to prevent pregnancy by obstructing ovulation, or the release of an egg during a woman's monthly cycle.

"Forgetting the first active pills of a treatment cycle has the biggest impact on contraceptive failure as this time interval may allow the process that leads to ovulation to start," Dr. Jurgen Dinger of the Berlin Center for Epidemiology and Health Research told Reuters Health in an e-mail.

To test whether decreasing the pill-free interval and using hormones with a longer duration of action may help counteract this common problem, Dinger and his colleagues studied more than 52,000 U.S. women who took part in the "International Active Surveillance of Women Taking Oral Contraceptive" study.

The participants' average age was 26 years, and each had started on a new contraceptive. More than 80 percent of the women had previously taken another version of the Pill.

The researchers did not interfere with the choice of oral contraceptive, but rather categorized the women into three groups based on their new hormone regimens: 21 days of 3 milligrams of drospirenone (progesterone) plus 30 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol (estrogen); 24 days of 3 milligrams of drospirenone plus 20 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol, or another regimen.

The 21-day drospirenone regimen is currently sold under the brand name Yasmin and the 24-day regimen, with longer-lasting progesterone, is sold as Yaz. Generic versions are also available. Bayer Schering Pharma, maker of Yasmin, supported the study.

Over the course of 3 years following the women, more than 1,600 became pregnant unintentionally. About 1,400 of these contraceptive failures were due to an imperfect use of the Pill.

Unintended pregnancy rates for the 21-day and 24-day drospirenone regimens were 2.8 percent and 2.1 percent at the end of the first year, respectively, and 5.7 and 4.7 percent after the third year.

Women older than age 30 were significantly less likely than younger women to get pregnant unintentionally. Women with a college education and who had never carried a child were also less likely to become pregnant.

Obese women -- who made up nearly a quarter of the U.S. women studied -- had about a 50 percent greater risk of contraception failure after accounting for age, education level and whether or not they had prior children.

According to the researchers, under all the situations studied, the 24-day drospirenone regimen yielded more protection against pregnancy than the 21-day drospirenone regimen, as well as the other oral contraceptives.

However, compared to findings from the same study conducted in Europe, U.S. women showed an overall four-fold higher unintended pregnancy rate.

Dinger suggested that multiple factors could explain this gap in effectiveness, from higher rates of obesity in the U.S. to cultural, behavioural and genetic differences between the regions.

Dinger also noted that most programs that have tried to improve the proper use of the Pill have failed. "Our approach," he emphasized, "did not intend to investigate ways to improve compliance but to look at whether specific oral contraceptive regimens are more 'robust' against incompliance than others."

"This should not mitigate the need for good counseling of female adolescents and women intending to use the Pill," added Dinger. "A highly effective oral contraceptive regimen in conjunction with good counseling is the only way to minimize unintended pregnancies."

SOURCE: Obstetrics and Gynecology, online December 3, 2010. The full text of the article can be found at: http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/2011/01000/Effectiveness_of_Oral_Contraceptive_Pills_in_a.6.aspx

Personal comment: We have known since the introduction of Yaz in the U.S. that the long half-life of drospirenone reduces the chance of breakthrough ovulation during the hormone free interval. Most students on oral contraceptives at St Lucy’s are on Yaz the 24/4 dosing regimen of 3 milligrams of drospirenone plus 20 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol. There are no obese students and roommates buddy to make sure each girl takes her pill at the same time daily. Even so there are times when a student is on meds that decrease the effectiveness of her pills and will ovulate and a few of these instances will result in the need for emergency contraception to avoid an unintended pregnancy. The availability of ella (the five-day EC pill) has increased the effectiveness of EC for St Lucy’s girls.


FDA Approves Gardasil for Prevention of Anal Cancer in Both Sexes

December 23, 2010 — FDA on Wednesday approved Merck's human papillomavirus vaccine, Gardasil, for the prevention of anal cancer in people ages nine through 26, Reuters reports. The vaccine already was approved to prevent cervical, vulvar and vaginal cancers associated with HPV for the same age group.

On Wednesday, FDA cited data showing that Gardasil was effective in a study of men who have sex with men, a group that has a higher incidence of anal cancer than other populations. The agency said the data support the vaccine's efficacy in women because the disease is the same in both sexes.

Although anal cancer is less common than most other types of cancer, with about 5,300 new U.S. cases diagnosed annually, FDA said incidence of the disease is increasing (Krauskopf, Reuters, 12/22). About 90% of anal cancers are linked with HPV, according to Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal (Solsman, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, 12/22).

Karen Midthun, director of FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said, "Treatment for anal cancer is challenging; the use of Gardasil as a method of prevention is important, as it may result in fewer diagnoses and the subsequent surgery, radiation or chemotherapy that individuals need to endure."

As of the end of May, more than 65 million doses of Gardasil had been distributed since its 2006 approval, with sales reaching $1.1 billion as of 2009 (Reuters, 12/22). The vaccine once was expected to be a blockbuster for Merck, but sales have declined as more individuals are immunized and GlaxoSmithKline's HPV vaccine, Cervarix, provides more competition, according to Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, 12/22).

Personal comment: Starting last year our clinic began giving Gardasil injections to male dancers and all escort candidates as an off label use to protect men from anal cancer.

Dive-sex on Trimix

An Ocean Technologies Guardian FFM

Discipline facility maintenance: Taryn wanted to dive Trimix while she is home and the only place deep enough to do that is Adolph’s 216 foot deep by 36 foot diameter well at his discipline training facility. Adolph lets us dive it when the facility isn’t in use, mainly for training young European Rubber-Girl Submissives. Adolph has one of the few very deep all-year training facilities so Doms are willing to pay transportation, room and board to get newbies to the fetish taught the basics of being sexually dominated underwater while incased in rubber. The Dom gets videos of her training to savor in private moments or show to friends.

I’ll do a Trimix dive at Adolph’s occasionally when I want to have a lover plant sperm in me while I’m 200 feet below the surface, which is a huge thrill for me! In return I’ll clean up the debris on the bottom of the well. Abi, Adolph’s Pool-Assistant (and Lorelei in residence), is afraid of diving to the bottom of the well with Adolph because he is very rough with her and she is scared of rough sex at that depth. That means the bottom doesn’t get cleaned very often, but that gives me a chance to be useful to him in a matter concerning the training facility which grants me access to it.

So Taryn and I took two of our fave deep diving stallions and went on a prearranged ‘bottom-date’ in the well this morning. We wore the Gottex thong bikinis that are the casinos signature swimsuits. And we both had Reflexions inserted as gas-guards because our lovers both enjoy the feel of thrusting into the thin stretchy latex membrane of the domes. The water in the well is heated to 85° F and circulated so the pool is a uniform temperature throughout it’s entire depth so wearing thongs on the bottom was comfy, but then dive-sex is strenuous so we were working with heavy respiration quite a bit of the time.

We used Ocean Technologies Guardian FFMs equipped for Trimix and a Trimix blend of 19/30 in Worthington HP steel X8-130 twin sets with tanks of 100% oxygen pre-positioned at our 40 ft. deco stop. The importance of a using an FFM for deep dives and dive-sex can’t be overemphasized. For dive-sex if it gets rough and having her cervix rammed causes the woman to expel her reg at best it interrupts the moment and at worst she ingests enough water that she needs to terminate the dive. The other reason a FFM is so important is in case of decompression sickness (DCS) where the diver might pass out or have a seizure and expel his or her regulator and it may be impossible for the dive buddy to get the reg back in her mouth. That is a very common cause of dive fatalities especially where the ascent will take too long for there to be a reasonable chance of survival w/o being able to breathe.

The men took care of our needs, twice for each of us, and then we let them go while we cleaned up the bottom. We could have used their help, but I didn’t want them to pay attention to what was on the bottom and start asking questions and getting ideas. What we found was chilling. I’ve mentioned before seeing training pools where women’s birth control and cervical protection devices littered the bottom and that was the case on the bottom of the well. What I found exceptionally scary was that there were three GyneFix IUDs (the gold standard for non-hormonal contraception) on the bottom. In the case of two the implanted knot had come out of the fundus and the entire device had been expelled. On the third the cord holding the copper sleeves had broken and only two of the six sleeves were still on the cord. I’m hoping the expulsion of GyneFix IUDs can be explained by the fact that several years ago when GyneFix first came on the marked in Europe the implantation process hadn’t been perfected and the expulsion rate was about 10 – 15% during the first three months after implantation. Our clinic hasn’t had any expulsions or cords breaking in the two years since we have been using the new implantation procedure. In addition to the GyneFix devices we found:

• Ortho latex Coil spring diaphragm, one, 60mm with a thin spot that became a hole in the dome
• Ortho latex All-Flex arcing spring diaphragms, two 65 mm one of which had a tear in the dome.
• Silicone All-Flex arcing spring diaphragms, 7 of various, but mostly 65 mm sizes two of which had punctures in the domes.
• Cooper Surgical (Milex) Omniflex silicone diaphragms, 2 a 65 mm and 70 mm
• Reflexions latex flat spring diaphragm, one 75 mm.
• FemCaps, 3 one small 22 mm and two mediums size, 26 mm
• Prentif Cavity rim cervical caps, 2 a 22 mm and a 25 mm.
• Oves cervical caps, 2 both 28 mm
• ParaGard framed copper IUDs, 3 two with bent frames
• Mirena, IUD, 1 with a bent frame
• FC1 condoms, 16
• FC2 condoms, 27
• Filled DiveGel applicators, 7
• Empty DiveGel applicators, 37
• Filled Semécide applicators, 1
• Empty Semécide applicators, 43
• Filled Conceptrol spermicide applicators, 3
• Empty Conceptrol spermicide applicators, 5

From the Number and type contraceptive products we found it seems clear that: Women being sent for training at a facility deeper than 30 feet were not being told that if a diaphragm was to be used for training only a Reflexions flat spring latex diaphragm would provide under-thrust and distortion free protection down to at least 200 feet. All the women sent are beautiful and slim. It seems likely that the 65 mm silicone All-Flex devices were too small (under-sizing is a common mistake made by inexperienced fitters) making them easier to dislodge and expel. The number of full lube and spermicide applicators on the bottom suggests that the women were nervous about being in training and not confident about the use of vaginal applicators. And, additionally, a lot of their diaphragms or caps were being either expelled or intentionally being pulled out by their partner/instructors. That being the case one hopes they are being removed after providing protection as gas-guards during dive-sex. Contraception is a different matter entirely and can be taken care of easily with emergency contraception especially since Ella is now available in the U.S. And pregnancy at least through the 8th week with Mifeprex so while it might put the woman in a moral quandary she has options readily available. That isn’t the case if she gets an embolism because her gas guard was pulled out during dive-sex before she was penetrated.

It was a fun morning and Taryn and I enjoyed ourselves immensely! We masturbated each other while we were tethered to the deco buoy at 40 feet so we were really relaxed by the time we reached the surface. I kept all the debris we collected on the bottom and will give it to Jeff for analysis by his technicians at Labia Labs. They can sometimes get the wearer’s DNA from the devices and test the effectiveness of lube and spermicide remaining in the empty applicators. It’s amazing what you can learn about the women who pass through Adolph’s training facility by doing that.

Punitive pointe training explained

A teacher preparing to teach a punitive pointe training class

A reader asks: After reading about punitive pointe training from my December 27, 2009 entry ‘Jill pads and punitive pointe training’ Risa asked “Can you explain deeper what kind of pointe training used as punitive pointe training? I really interested to this topic”

The section of the entry she is enquiring about is: “Anya and punitive pointe training: Because Anya is a masochist and enjoys brutal pointe sex along with other specialties she accepted a commission from a unit of Taryn’s Adult Media Empire to advise the Swiss head mistress on what additions should be made to the classical syllabus for pointe training to heighten its punitive aspect and exactly what the disciplinary regimen should consist of to achieve various levels of pain for training purposes. She will also examine the physical plant to see if any changes need to be made to introduce ‘solitary barre’ punishment and if there is need for any additional machines and devices creative punitive pointe training can require. The trip will also give her an opportunity to see Castle Deiter for the first time since its renovation with Tanaquil and one of her lieutenants, who used to be one of Deiter’s girls, giving the tour.”

Punitive pointe training, the details: PPT can and will vary from school to school and from teacher to teacher. I see it needed when a student with potential doesn’t take her pointe classes seriously enough and isn’t performing at the level she is capable of. I think that is showing disrespect for the art and the tradition of the skills being handed down from one generation of dancers to the next. Therefore, every teacher who administers punitive point training under my supervision wears a short (classical) tutu and pointes and is on pointe with the student being disciplined during her entire disciplinary session.

There is nothing elaborate or particularly special about the punitive pointe training regimen I use. Well, not to begin with, although the punitive regimen calls for the woman undergoing PPT to take class with a special vaginal plug inserted. The plug is inserted to give the student something to block out of her mind – a lesson in partitioning - while concentrating on the steps she required to perform. It also has a more sinister purpose if it turns out that she is very stubborn and refused to be compliant.

We find using classical steps and poses at the barre and then center work are usually enough to bring a student with a recalcitrant attitude in line. Using steps from the classical idiom provides justification for the very intense training needed to make certain the student in question has that step, combination or pose committed to memory and the stamina to perform a long series of an exercise correctly.

We first have a dancer undergoing a punitive training regimen do a twenty minute barre – in pointe shoes – to make certain she is well warmed up. Then we take her through a series of steps depending how naughty she has been. Basic steps like:

Relevé from straight-knee positions, fully rolling through the foot while both rising and descending is very important.

Relevé from demi-plié, springing strongly from the heels and drawing the toes slightly under the insteps so the feet are in first position on pointe with the toes directly under the heels. It’s important to work through demi-pointe when returning the heels to the floor.

Échappé on pointe, in second or fourth position. Standing in fifth position, demi-plié, then spring out to second position on pointe, pushing off strongly with the heels. The feet can be exchanged, front, back after an 8, or 16 count or changed each time you close.

Relevé en Arabesque, with the left leg extended back in arabesque à terre well turned out from the hip, demi-plié. Spring up into Relevé on the right foot extending the leg back parallel to the floor. Lower through demi-pointe to demi-plié maintaining strength in back not permitting the left leg to drop and keeping a strong point in the left foot. Repeat 8 or 16 times on the same foot then repeat the series on the other leg.

Administering PPT: The class is taught by a very experienced instructor. I teach PPT with a 30 inch riding crop with a thin leather tress on the end. To make corrections I flick the tress against the sole or toe-box of the dancer’s pointe. The steps are basic, but the number of repetitions is not. We start with fifty 16-count reps on each foot and go through the series of steps while I judge the mental attitude of the student. If I don’t think she is cooperative and giving me her best effort we go through the process again with one hundred 16-count reps on each foot. This will generally separate the determined from the serious bloody toes masochists. Very few students can do one hundred 16-count reps w/o going rubber-legged and falling off pointe at which time the girl is grounded until she can perform the required amount of discipline successfully.

Occasionally a teacher’s authority will be directly challenged by a new student who has been to a more liberal school as far as pointe training is concerned. Or, one who has burnt out and no longer cares, but doesn’t want to quit. It those cases as a last resort to bend the naughty dancer to the teacher’s will she can operate a small remote transmitter that sends a charge of electricity through electrodes in the trainee’s plug. One electrode is in contact with the ring of nerves just inside her vagina while the other electrode is along the anterior wall of her vagina against her G-spot and bladder.

The teachers administering PPT have all worn ‘spark-plugs’ as they are known and had the plug activated while we are trying to hold a pose or perform a step. You are thinking about getting the step done correctly when the shock hits in total surprise. You feel this tremendous jolt and every muscle seems to contract at the same time. Some gasp and fall off pointe, some double over with severe cramps, most start to cry. We all empty our bladders spontaneously and it’s a scary and humiliating experience.

In the three years I’ve been administering PPT at St Lucy’s I’ve never had to activate a girl’s spark plug. I consider it a failure on my part if I can’t get a student to perform to the best of her ability w/o shocking her. Driving her into exhaustion takes a bit longer, but when I’m administering punitive training I’m doing what I ask her to do along with her step for step and they know after the first hour or two that they aren’t going to be able to get away with anything less than their best effort. I usually bond with those students during their PPT session and we end up being best friends.

ABT’s new Nutcracker: a review

Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg as Clara and her Nutcracker

The New York Times
December 24, 2010
A ‘Nutcracker’ Sprouts Alter Egos
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Once you’ve seen a number of different “Nutcrackers,” you might think you know all the main ways that the old ballet can be retold. But you don’t.

In Alexei Ratmansky’s new version of “The Nutcracker,” currently in its world premiere season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Ballet Theater has a production like no other. Made with complete theatrical authority from first to last, it shows many aspects of Mr. Ratmansky: satirist, storyteller, dramatist, poet. I’m impatient to see it again, but a large part of the delight it affords on first viewing lies in not knowing what’s going to happen.

This work (to which critics were first admitted on Thursday) isn’t a “Nutcracker” that leads us back to the original story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though it takes a few unusual points from there. Instead its basic structure is that of numerous Russian “Nutcrackers” since the Stalinist era: little Clara (the Russians usually call her Masha) no sooner sees the Nutcracker, once he’s transformed into a Prince, than they fall in love-love-love and at once turn into adults. Never mind going to meet any Sugar Plum Fairy — instead they get to dance the music of her pas de deux themselves.

But Mr. Ratmansky takes that formula, tweaks it and makes it new. When his boy (transformed) and girl meet, they’re kindred spirits but from different worlds. They suddenly become doubled — they acquire mature alter egos, a twist that transforms the ballet’s sense of time and space. They’re like the hero and heroine of Philip Pullman’s superlative trilogy, “His Dark Materials” — young lovers from parallel universes.

At first it seems marvelous that we see the grown-ups they’ll become, but then Mr. Ratmansky takes us one step further and shows us how those adults still feel like the children they were. Their grand pas de deux is alternately formal and informal: they show the big, classically perfect dance shapes, arcs, gestures and steps that reveal their ideal qualities, but they also just can’t help expressing their own lesser-mortal amazement about this.

The main story is still focused on their younger selves. Mr. Ratmansky has animated the entire company. (I don’t enjoy a few supporting performances, but at every moment they’re precisely considered.) Yet amid several superb interpretations on Thursday, none surpassed those of the two central children. Young Catherine Hurlin’s partly angry, partly vulnerable, never picture-perfect Clara exemplifies the individuality of Mr. Ratmansky’s approach. Tyler Maloney as her Nutcracker Boy has the same courage and the same vulnerability. Mr. Ratmansky asks him to sustain one particular pose — arms open, face upturned, not facing the audience but on a diagonal — that suggests his mix of astonishment and gratitude, and it strikes home as something unusual in ballet, a private moment that is emotionally huge but not being sold to the public.

When these two children find themselves in the Land of Snow, it’s not a winter wonderland for them — it’s an adventure, now frightening, now freezing. The poetry of Mr. Ratmansky’s vision here is very striking: no Snowflakes were ever more ambiguous, and they have been given pouncing jumps, spinning arcs, and insistent gestures that make us feel we’re in the land of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen.”

Later this young heroine and hero do meet a Sugar Plum Fairy — in this case, an exotically regal, nondancing one. It’s thanks to her presentation that suddenly they have another moment out of time and see their adult selves united in love and, finally, marriage.

As the older Clara and Nutcracker, Gillian Murphy and David Hallberg gave performances on Thursday that count immediately among the high-water marks of their already distinguished careers. Mr. Ratmansky has given them roles that wonderfully yoke their dual commitment to ballet classicism and to dramatic sincerity. There are spectacular throws and catches in the pas de deux, and yet acrobatics aren’t the point here; what you think about is the spontaneity of love’s first excitement.

Mr. Hallberg’s solo starts with a slow fall sideways that’s exactly what nobody expects to see in a ballet, but this quirky impetus becomes the humanizing force within the beautifully bobbing series of jumps that follow. Just as Ms. Murphy’s Clara finishes the main part of her solo (one of the blander passages of the work, admittedly), she goes right off into the wings, then sticks her head out as if sharing a joke with us. She pops straight back on and tears up the stage in a circuit of jumps and turns in which her own terrific academic clarity and fullness become charged with renewed rapture.

Mr. Hallberg starts the coda with a solo of extraordinarily shimmering delicacy, building up to a more conventional display of heroic jumps around the stage (danced with unconventional finesse). Yet not long after, within the very same number, both he and Ms. Murphy, amid a busy phrase, suddenly stand on flat feet and reel a little — as if unable to believe what’s happening to them. These dances keep saying both, “This is perfect,” and, “We can’t believe this is happening”; you feel how full their hearts are.

The production seizes your attention surely from its opening kitchen scene. True, I don’t care for the two synchronized dancing maids. (Here and in some other character dances, Léonide Massine’s choreography comes to mind, not for the first time when watching Mr. Ratmansky’s.) But the whole “Upstairs, Downstairs” layering of this household, funny and touching, is vividly, intimately introduced to us here — and there’s a memorable preview of the mice. Richard Hudson’s sets and costumes perfectly complement the choreography, giving us a partly caricatured Dickensian world that changes unexpectedly into the silver birches of a Russian winterscape.

The cartoon quality in those maids becomes more irksome when whole groups of children repeat the same gestures in unison. Then, as Mr. Ratmansky’s version proceeds, these notes of caricature become part of a pattern. The effect of this is to make Clara and the Nutcracker — like Alice in Wonderland — by far the most real and three-dimensional figures onstage. The parents and Drosselmeyer are all vivid, but these grown-ups are almost as not-quite-real as the mice and the Snowflakes and the Sweets.

That’s fine, moment by moment and dance by dance. There are various kinds of laughs to be had from the Arabian and Russian dances, as well as from Mother Ginger (whose skirts contain a real surprise). But we never sense that Clara and the Nutcracker have become visitors to a realm of purer, larger forms. Though Mr. Hudson’s Sweet Kingdom designs are bright, they have none of the poetic dimensions of his Snow Scene. Even the main point of the Waltz of the Flowers is primarily just fun — with busy, silly male bees pollinating happy, silly, jubilant female flowers — though arranged with absorbing complexity.

The entertainment level doesn’t flag. Missing, at any rate on a first view, is the all-embracing generosity of spirit that marks many good “Nutcrackers.” Instead — and it’s a beautiful paradox — the large moments of Mr. Ratmansky’s version are intimate ones.

This version will repay re-watching. Ormsby Wilkins and the American Ballet Theater Orchestra were at their very finest on Thursday, apparently loving — without rushing — the score’s rhythmic interplay and fantastic instrumentation.

Several alternate casts of dancers follow, probably bringing other nuances. I plan to see at least one more of them this year and hope that it won’t be long before I have the chance to see this exceptional first cast again.

Personal comment: I think he liked it! Merry Christmas everyone!

Merry Christmas!

Wishing all my readers a very Merry Christmas!

Post tour physicals: Anya, Cyndi, Gigi and I went for our post-tour physicals this afternoon. There weren’t any surprises because as I’ve mentioned earlier in a previous post we all used FC2s for every encounter. Even as great as our stamina is we are all pretty much achy and exhausted after constantly being mounted for three days and seeing the extent of some of their wounds.

So it will be lovely snuggling and sleeping with a girl for a change. We are all Bi (to an extent) and it’s at times like this – even though we are all fertile – that sleeping with a woman is divine! Anya will be in my bed, I haven’t had her in ages! And Gigi will sleep with Cyndi. No need to wear plugs or gas guards or DiveGel just a flavored lube for oral sex and a good solid night’s sleep. I think we are all suffering a bit from adrenaline withdrawal after the three-day high of our hospital tour. Tonight our men can play with themselves or each other.

Christmas day: I’m having my circle – the same group that was here for Thanksgiving (less Fiona and Colin) - over for Christmas dinner tomorrow and look forward to relaxing diving The Pit with a friend or two after I recover a bit tonight.