Put on Your Dancing Shoes

I found this article about how ballet shoes are made:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/SHOWBIZ/02/02/ballet.pointe.shoes/

While I have done a lot of dance in past musical theater productions, I have never put much thought into how the shoes were actually made. As a dancer my only concern was making sure the shoes stayed on my feet. (I once watched in horror while my shoe went sailing through the air into the unprepared audience after doing a choreographed kick into the air.) So the details of gluing and baking a ballet pointe shoe came as a bit of a surprise to me.

And the amount of money that a professional ballet comapany budgets for ballet shoes alone was astonishing! $400,000.00 a year is a considerable expense when you are budgeting your productions for the season. I thought being an actress was a money pit, but that was before I found out that ballerinas go through 6 pairs of pointe shoes a week. Wow!