Walking into Knockout Cuts Barber Shop on Hackberry Road, I'm hesitant. This is the ultimate man cave. The smell of shaving cream is pervasive, and chairs are set up facing a wide-screen TV, where a 1990s Jim Carrey contorts for the two gentlemen waiting to be called. The walls are covered with signed pictures and posters of fights and fighters. The only name I recognize is Oscar de la Hoya.

I'm quick to offer styling tips to anyone who asks, but like the plumber whose own house is full of leaks, I wouldn't be here if this story hadn't been assigned by my editor. Perhaps she's trying to tell me something. When it comes to hairstyles, everyone's a product of their generation. A style often reflects the time in a person's life when self-esteem was at an all-time high. We all know that woman sporting Farrah Fawcett hair and accompanying bangs well into her 50s. My all-time high is set to somewhere in the early' 90s and I cringe at the idea of leaving my post as a representative of the decade when saying “Yo!” was a revolutionary thrill.

Eighteen-year-old Moses Martinez is sitting next to me awaiting a “skin taper fade” – a style that starts off bald on the sides and blends into hair.

Without going back as far as Marco Polo, whose creds regarding the introduction of pasta to Italy and beyond have come under increasing scrutiny anyway, it seems fair to say that food is one of the most important ways in which cultures shake hands with one another. Maybe the most important. This can be both good (think sushi, for example) and bad (consider pizza) — and sometimes both at the same time (consider pizza once again).

When opening day arrives for Ballet San Antonio's cast of The Nutcracker – plus one (that's me) – we're ready to make some holiday magic at the Majestic Theater. The backstage chatter conjures a spirit of cheerful anticipation, while random instruments can be heard going over what may be the more difficult passages of Tchaikovsky's immortal score. When I close my eyes, it isn't hard to envision opening night at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg when the ballet first premiered in 1892.

In dressing room M6, between painted homages to Oliver! and State Fair, corps de ballet dancer Dylan Duke, chin raised almost undetectably higher than the rest of his colleagues, casually applies his stage make-up. To my left, 15-year-old trainee Aiden Carrasquel kneels on a chair to get a closer look at his eye-liner. Corps dancer Ernesto Lea Place walks back and forth – oblivious to my admiration - ensuring that his costumes aren't in wardrobe purgatory. The wardrobe master and his staff are still hemming and stitching steadily.

I didn't know how or when it would happen, but deep in my soul I've always felt that I would cross paths with a production of The Nutcracker. But as the years passed I began to wonder if that premonition was just a product of my whimsical imagination; I hadn't even made an effort to see the ballet much less take part in the holiday tradition. So joining this year's Ballet San Antonio production of The Nutcracker to explore not only this magical story, but to pull back the curtain and step (toe, ball, heel) into the world of ballet culture – a world most of us never get to see firsthand – felt like a dream come true.