I went to see the Nutcracker the other day at the Houston Ballet.  It was a beautiful, elaborate performance, the best production of the Nutcracker I’ve ever seen.

The scenes of the Nutcracker ballet largely take place in a dream by a little girl who just before going to bed had experienced an ugly run-in with her brother.  In that run-in, her brother broke her new toy, a nutcracker.  In the dream, the battle between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” plays out with the “good guys” being the toy soldiers, led by the nutcracker, defending the poor little girl and the bad guys being mice, let by the mouse king who is the little girl’s brother.

As I sat there, my mind wandered into the story.  I watched the scene with the toy soldiers battling the mice, I realized that maybe the way I look at things has changed over the years.  

These toy soldiers had the guns and they outnumbered the mice.  Were they actually the good guys?  Why were the mice fighting in the first place?  I found myself especially interested in why the “good” guys with the guns were at one point losing to these unarmed mice only to be foiled in the end by the valiance of the nutcracker himself.

I eventually snapped out of it.  It was, after all, a ballet, not a critique of social structures.  At least, I assume so, after all Tchaikovsky was most probably a gay man living in Imperial Russia.  Maybe there was something there.

What I walked away with is that the line between “the good guys” and “the bad guys” is less and less clear the older I get.