Up Close and Personal with NYCB's Sara Mearns

Sara Mearns is back! The gorgeous New York City Ballet principal has been out for eight months—eight months—with a back injury. But a couple of weeks ago she was finally able to return to the stage, and we were finally able to recover from our SMearns withdrawal.

The news gets even better: Sara has decided to document her comeback in a series of weekly video blogs for The Huffington Post called (cutely) “Barre None.” Why? Because, as she explains in her introduction,

“…what you see on the stage does not begin to capture what ballet or our lives are all about. You see the performance, but what you don’t see—the rehearsals, the costume designs, the frazzled nerves, the learning of a new ballet, the constant travels around the world, the injuries and the oftentimes long, painful road to recovery that lead us to wonder if this is the injury that can end a career—it’s all a part of what we do and who we are.”

Her debut video, which went up on Friday, is a series of little confessional-style updates over the course of her first day back in the swing of things. She gives us a tour of her dressing room (which includes a photo of her with her idol, Natalia Makarova), shows us her super-dramatic stage makeup, talks about her nerves as she prepares to dance the “Waltz Girl” in Serenade for the first time, and then gives us a post-performance recap, showing off some beautiful flowers from her “good friend David Hallberg” (the American Ballet Theatre/Bolshoi Ballet superstar—because of course, of course they’re friends). She also wears a fabulous babushka scarf that I need, like, right now.

Take a look—and visit HuffPo each Friday for a new video from Sara!