Dance

Early in December back in 1955, my first grade class filed into what was respectfully known as the “movie room.”  I’d never been inside a big screen theater, and my parents had not yet purchased our first black-and-white television.  Movies were spectacular and bigger-than-life.  This was the third one I’d seen at school. 

Our teacher, Mrs. Burkhalter, pulled black blinds to cover the room’s huge, awning-type windows. The projector box stood ready with its two reel-to-reel spools filled with shiny brown tape.  My classmates and I sat on our cold metal folding chairs, wiggling and swinging our legs in anticipation. 

The principal, whom we revered like a god, entered the room to run the projector.  He would remain to view the movie with us and be available for repairs should there be a break in the tape, which was not uncommon. I sat on the front row, immediately to the right of the magical machine with the bright light bulb that would shine moving pictures onto the big screen, with no idea my life was about to be changed forever. 

We watched the Nutcracker ballet, or whatever version of it existed at that time. I fell prey to its enchantment as if under a spell.  What I witnessed on the screen was another world entirely, one where music stirred the heart and inspired human bodies to respond with grace and beauty.  My heart pounded.  Surely this was my destiny. 

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I’d been blessed with good tonal memory.  I recognized one of those songs over a loudspeaker while Christmas shopping downtown with my mother soon after, and embarrassing tears involuntarily welled in my eyes.  I said nothing. No one knew about the strange desire that burned within me.  I couldn’t have explained it if I'd tried. 

During Christmas vacation, I asked my parents if I could take ballet lessons.  I repeated this request again and again for years. Mother was a seamstress and sewed tutus for me and for my dolls, but lessons never materialized.  So I began dancing on the patterns on the oriental rug in my parents’ living room.  There was no music in our house, but I moved to the music inside my head, leaping from oriental bird to bird, prancing along the rose-colored border. I spent hours twirling and pirouetting on that rug in silence.  It was choreography of desire.

My passion for ballet never faded, but rather retreated into the background, covered by regrets tinted with bitterness.  I envied a friend in high school who danced at a studio weekly, and had done so since elementary school.  She seemed to take her lessons for granted, which seemed very sad to me. In years to come whenever I heard Nutcracker music, familiar emotional tears faithfully welled up to remind me that passions don’t die, but rather hide.

One of our daughters studied ballet and fell in love with it.  During a phase when our finances were pinched, I cleaned the studio to pay for her tuition so she wouldn’t have to quit. She danced in the Nutcracker, and her final year she was one of the principles who performed a pas de deux as the Arabian princess.  I wept for joy - joy for her achievement, and consuming, vicarious joy for me. 

But that was all a long time ago.  Today I attended an outstanding performance of the Nutcracker with my daughter-in-law and two preschool granddaughters.   We walked several blocks to the auditorium amidst frigid cold and softly falling snow, and then found our reserved seats in the balcony.  In a very personal but impassioned way, I waited for the magic to return.  And as the curtain lifted and the live symphony orchestra began to play, it did.

For the duration of the performance some part of me was six years old, back in McKinley School’s “movie room,” falling in love with dance all over again. Another part of me was forty-something, watching my daughter, feeling my heart pulse inside hers. 

But yet another part of me was a very realistic sixty-four.  I have never had a ballet lesson, and at this stage of life because of arthritis and orthopedic issues, never will.  And yet this God-given passion refuses to die.  I sense, as I have for some time, that dance is still part of my destiny, perhaps in eternity.