Thanks to everyone who has called or written me to tell me how much they enjoyed my column Sunday about my pal Lydia and her struggle to understand her autism; I’m sorry it has taken me so long to post about it. As I wrote, ballet is Lydia’s passion, and fortunately her parents have found a wonderful teacher, pictured here, to keep Lydia dancing. Pointe shoes, for those of you who know about dance, require more strength than Lydia probably will ever have, so she’ll only dance en pointe with help. But one look at her face, and you can see just how much it means to her.

As you know, autistic kids aren’t stupid, and are often quite a bit more perceptive than we might think. Lydia wrote the following story the week after the incident I described in my column. Her mom added some punctuation to make it more readable, but the story is all hers. (FYI, Yakko Warner is a character on the cartoon Animaniacs.)
Yakko and Lydia: A Nutcracker Tale

Once upon a December 15th, the Nutcracker Ballet was performed to
everyone’s delight.  While this ballet had many admirers in this
theater, it had no better fan than Yakko Warner and Lydia.
Now Lydia must sadly wait another long year until the
next performance. Nothing for Lydia in this empty place!  Except her
love of the ballet: If only she could dance.  What’s the use in
pretending?  These things never change.  Why, that would take a miracle.Zap! A pink spotlight went above Lydia’s head.

White sparkles went above Lydia’s head until she was the Ice Queen.

Lydia’s white pointe shoe moved.

And then she did a jump, a ballerina-like run and a leap, and a bouree,
an arabesque, a twirl, and an assamble.