Northwest Indiana, aka The Region, was scruffy, insular, rough-around-the-edges, a bit New Jersey, or South Boston, conservative, religious, fifty percent steel, and filled with a kind of optimism based upon a combination of faith and lack of knowledge that there was really another world outside its tiny borders. It was east of Chicago, a steel-mill, an oil-refinery kind of place on Lake Michigan, but wonderful in the sense that there was probably no other place like it and probably never will be again. In the first volume, All My Lazy Rivers, an Indiana Childhood, Buddy recalled his years of kindergarten through sixth grade, stumbling from one little adventure to the next with his brother and neighborhood friends. This Ain’t No Ballet presents a Buddy who is still maturing slowly but acquiring increased awareness of a world that is still astonishing but at times even more difficult to understand.