Last Sunday, aided by the generous Bing Overseas Program, I went to see my first ballet, “Giselle.” Twenty minutes before the show, I called my friend in a panic to ask whether it would be translated from the original Italian into Russian or English.

“Um, Kat, you’re thinking of opera,” he told me. “Ballet doesn’t have any words. And I think it’s French anyway.”

A night of cultural enrichment in Moscow without the burden of the Russian language? Even I could understand that. My smug reaction, I imagine, was something like the look on Columbus’ face when he proudly announced to his fleets: “Dudes, India is like 10 miles hence.”

The evening started out normally: I made it to the Bolshoi Theatre in plenty of time to stand around pensively, flicking cigarette ash in the snow. A few passers-by took my indie aloofness for criminal intent, apparently, and offered to buy tickets off of me — one woman went so far as to offer a hefty fee in my choice of rubles, Euros or British pounds. Unfortunately I had to duck inside before she got a chance to up the ante to dubloons.

Once we checked our coats and idled in the lobby among a mass of tourists, I felt sophisticated and debonair. Prompted by the ads I saw on the Metro for the new Bond movie, I decided to saunter over to the bar for a devastatingly overpriced martini. The first warning bells went off when the surly bartender poured an oily liquid straight from a bottle to a wine glass and sloshed it over the counter to me. But I was game: I handed over what could have been the down payment on my firstborn’s braces and lifted the glass to my lips. Then promptly put it back down. Martinis are light, crisp, delicious; this tasted like Mel Gibson’s morning breath after a hot post-Passover drinking binge. Like a potentially toxic by-product of legitimate alcohol.

Oh god. I was drinking straight vermouth. As I sipped the last few drops, I felt like a Lifetime Original Movie character played by Delta Burke.

When I finally took my seat to watch the performance, I kind of wished I were watching that Lifetime movie instead. Going into the show, I thought I had a leg up on my fellow American spectators. A few years ago there was a Final Jeopardy! question about a ballet where a female doll comes to life; I distinctly remember all three contestants answered “Giselle.” However, after 45 agonizing minutes squinting for any remote sign of a toy shop, I realized that no one left the studio with big money — not only was there no doll angle to the story, but I couldn’t find much in the way of a recognizable plot arc either.

One of the slight pitfalls to the theory that dance is the universal language is that while concepts like love and jealousy are easily conveyed, character relationships can get a little murky. With minimal help from the people sitting on either side of me, I managed to gather the basic gist of the piece: two crazy young kids fell in love; one or more of them died; dancing was somehow involved? But the finesse of the story totally eluded me.

In order to fill in troubling narrative gaps, after the first 10 minutes of painful brow-furrowing, I started creating my own back stories and names for the characters. This method actually kept me going pretty well until intermission, when I asked a friend about the evil archduke Eduardo and was politely informed that he was actually a woodcutter. Which I guess explains the axe.

The second the curtain fluttered down over the first act, I bee-lined straight for the bar. I needed another vermouth. After I realized that during the break all of the characters had changed costumes and thus become totally unrecognizable to my poor frazzled brain, I wished I had brought the bottle.

When I finally collected my coat and headed back out into the snowy night, it was as a confused but intellectually challenged girl. Before “Giselle,” my only previous ballet experience was watching the movie “Center Stage” every Thanksgiving, so while I was basically prepared for the ballet’s lush sets and breathtaking costumes, I wasn’t expecting the art to go so over my head. I respect the dancers I saw both as artists and athletes and recognize that what they did, they did well — I just didn’t have a clue what it was.

In my comfort zone of literature, I can discern the shades of meaning between explanation, explication and elucidation, but the subtle differences between a flutter-flounce-flip and flip-flutter-flounce are way out of my league. As a not-unintellectual Stanford student, I swaggered into the theatre assuming I could follow the basic flow of an immortal narrative then was stopped dead in my tracks. And I thought getting lost in the Metro was embarrassing.

Although the nuances of my virgin ballet experience may be lost forever (along with half of my taste buds), I left the theatre resolved to look more into this ballet business once I get back to San Francisco. But next time, I’m going research the plot before I get into the seat — and definitely stay away from the vermouth.

Know where to find a subtitled ballet or good martini in the Moscow area? Direct your recommendations to klewin@stanford.edu.