I recently got back in touch with a friend from high school who has, as it turns out, spent the last three years dancing with Martha Graham's dance company (Kerreck, you need to move to NYC!!!). Funny that right before we got back in touch I was thinking it was the first time in my adult life I haven't had a professional dancer (as in ballet, not pole) as a friend. I was showing his pics to my sister and we both started laughing about my childhood dance experience...
Besides wanting to be an engineer when I was a kid, I also wanted to be a ballet dancer. I realized the first dream would be easier to meet than the second as we had a house full of math books. But when I was 8 I finally convinced my mom to sign me up for ballet lessons.
This is how badly I wanted to be a dancer: my mom decided that we only had enough money for lessons, but not anything else, so I wore my bathing suit to practice. A fucking bathing suit that was white with red stars and blue stripes on it (I had forgotten about the stars and stripes until talking to my sister today - oy vey).
Worse, I didn't have any tights. My mom had me try on some of her panty hose before deciding I was better off going with these thick ribbed tights that I wore with my school uniform in the winter so I wouldn't freeze during recess, although at the time of this story it was spring and it pretty warm. For shoes my mom decided I could wear my little tennis shoes that she used to buy at the drug store every time my teacher sent a note home about the condition of my shoes (once I had a teacher staple my shoes back together because they had extreme structural failure and I couldn't walk in them - then my dad "fixed" them by putting some kind of contact cement on duct tape to glue them back together - the contact cement formed these weird lumps that caused my toes to bleed - and you wonder why in my adult life I once owned 300 pairs of shoes...okay fine...400 pairs of shoes).
Picture it: I show up my first day, 10 minutes late because our car wouldn't start, wearing a star spangled bathing suit with lumpy ass tights under it and tennis shoes. I vaguely remember the teacher trying to talk my mom out of the lessons while I ran over to the barre thinking that day was the best day ever of my life. I can clearly remember the smell of the mirror and the sound of the wood floor and, at the end of the lesson, running to the other side of the room to the adult barre thinking I would never be tall enough to dance at it.
My ballet teacher ended up getting me a proper leotard, tights, and shoes for the next session, and even gave me a little white hat box to keep them in at the studio since I wasn't allowed to take them home with me. That night at home I made a label with my name on it for my hatbox using my dad's label machine, which was only supposed to be used for labeling his various academic binders, which are still in the library in his office to this day with blue labels and white lettering on this super industrial plastic strip with god knows what chemical as an adhesive.
I did 8 lessons. I practiced my ballet religiously every night in the room I shared with my sister using this old writing desk where my sister did her homework as a barre because the top of the desk had a rail on it. For some of the dance moves that I made up myself I also employed a wooden ladder that my dad had made that went up to my sister's bunk bed. The only record I listened to was Nutcracker Suite.
On the day of my eighth lesson, my mom brought her sister, my Aunt Michelle, to watch me dance. I had my sister fix my hair with a curling iron and was nervous to be performing before an "audience". My mom and my aunt laughed through my entire lesson, and were eventually ejected from the studio by my teacher. It occurred to me then that maybe I wasn't a very good dancer. That was also the day I found out I would not be able to participate in the recital because it cost money. Also, my mom was mad about being asked to leave the studio and told me I couldn't take anymore lessons.
I packed my leotard, tights, and slippers into the hatbox for the last time and gave it to my instructor. She gave me the white and gold outfit that I would have worn in the recital and she gave me the hatbox. I'm not sure if that was an act of kindness or if she had to give it to me because she couldn't get the label I put on it off. I wore that costume every day until it didn't fit
me any more. Every picture of me from that period, including family reunions, birthday parties, me riding a bike and a skateboard, and even a get together in someone's backyard after my mom and a bunch of other neighborhood wives decided to learn to shoot guns, shows me in that outfit.
My sister said she had wanted to take ballet too but after watching what I went through, she decided it wasn't worth it. She recently started taking dance lessons.
Besides wanting to be an engineer when I was a kid, I also wanted to be a ballet dancer. I realized the first dream would be easier to meet than the second as we had a house full of math books. But when I was 8 I finally convinced my mom to sign me up for ballet lessons.
This is how badly I wanted to be a dancer: my mom decided that we only had enough money for lessons, but not anything else, so I wore my bathing suit to practice. A fucking bathing suit that was white with red stars and blue stripes on it (I had forgotten about the stars and stripes until talking to my sister today - oy vey).
Worse, I didn't have any tights. My mom had me try on some of her panty hose before deciding I was better off going with these thick ribbed tights that I wore with my school uniform in the winter so I wouldn't freeze during recess, although at the time of this story it was spring and it pretty warm. For shoes my mom decided I could wear my little tennis shoes that she used to buy at the drug store every time my teacher sent a note home about the condition of my shoes (once I had a teacher staple my shoes back together because they had extreme structural failure and I couldn't walk in them - then my dad "fixed" them by putting some kind of contact cement on duct tape to glue them back together - the contact cement formed these weird lumps that caused my toes to bleed - and you wonder why in my adult life I once owned 300 pairs of shoes...okay fine...400 pairs of shoes).
Picture it: I show up my first day, 10 minutes late because our car wouldn't start, wearing a star spangled bathing suit with lumpy ass tights under it and tennis shoes. I vaguely remember the teacher trying to talk my mom out of the lessons while I ran over to the barre thinking that day was the best day ever of my life. I can clearly remember the smell of the mirror and the sound of the wood floor and, at the end of the lesson, running to the other side of the room to the adult barre thinking I would never be tall enough to dance at it.
My ballet teacher ended up getting me a proper leotard, tights, and shoes for the next session, and even gave me a little white hat box to keep them in at the studio since I wasn't allowed to take them home with me. That night at home I made a label with my name on it for my hatbox using my dad's label machine, which was only supposed to be used for labeling his various academic binders, which are still in the library in his office to this day with blue labels and white lettering on this super industrial plastic strip with god knows what chemical as an adhesive.
I did 8 lessons. I practiced my ballet religiously every night in the room I shared with my sister using this old writing desk where my sister did her homework as a barre because the top of the desk had a rail on it. For some of the dance moves that I made up myself I also employed a wooden ladder that my dad had made that went up to my sister's bunk bed. The only record I listened to was Nutcracker Suite.
On the day of my eighth lesson, my mom brought her sister, my Aunt Michelle, to watch me dance. I had my sister fix my hair with a curling iron and was nervous to be performing before an "audience". My mom and my aunt laughed through my entire lesson, and were eventually ejected from the studio by my teacher. It occurred to me then that maybe I wasn't a very good dancer. That was also the day I found out I would not be able to participate in the recital because it cost money. Also, my mom was mad about being asked to leave the studio and told me I couldn't take anymore lessons.
I packed my leotard, tights, and slippers into the hatbox for the last time and gave it to my instructor. She gave me the white and gold outfit that I would have worn in the recital and she gave me the hatbox. I'm not sure if that was an act of kindness or if she had to give it to me because she couldn't get the label I put on it off. I wore that costume every day until it didn't fit
me any more. Every picture of me from that period, including family reunions, birthday parties, me riding a bike and a skateboard, and even a get together in someone's backyard after my mom and a bunch of other neighborhood wives decided to learn to shoot guns, shows me in that outfit.My sister said she had wanted to take ballet too but after watching what I went through, she decided it wasn't worth it. She recently started taking dance lessons.
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