As I walked into the ballroom of the DoubleTree Hotel in Somerset, NJ, I thought to myself, Is this all there is? Surely this dimly lit room, with its tacky maroon-and-cream geometric-print carpeting and a paltry expanse of parquet flooring for a stage could not have been the competition sphere that my classmates had talked up for months. Surely these three disinterested-looking middle-aged men and women sitting in front of that parquet floor could not…

Samantha Powell's previous work for The Toast can be found here. In my childhood and early adolescence, Boston was filled with movie theaters. Over time many of them shuttered as the city transformed from a place that felt like home to one that I had trouble recognizing. Most of those old theaters were hidden away. One neighbored a Chili’s in a corner of my local mall. Another sat tucked next to one of the…

A little while ago, I moved from New York to San Francisco in a fashion that was radically out of character, which is to say quickly, and for a job in software. This was painful and exciting and lonely as hell, but I came to enjoy everything a lot more when I stopped trying to understand San Francisco within the framework of New York, and when I suspended as much cynicism as possible and began…

More than any other art, classical ballet makes gender its problem. The focus is obvious but subtle. Almost every class is two-thirds female and the hallways of a ballet school are always disproportionately pink. But ballet also curates a vision of femininity as the very ideal of its practice. The vision is manifest not only in the old, narrative productions of the nineteenth century—like The Nutcracker, or Swan Lake, or Giselle—full of the tiaras and…