Nothing Personal

Because I'm not going to sleep anymore I might as well write it out.

I dreamed that my mother and I were sharing a bed with our old cat, Spud.  For years my mother has fretted that Spud is “on the verge of death,” it’s become something of a family joke.  The dream begins with her fretting this way and me rolling my eyes.

But then I am petting the cat and his fur feels strange: coarse, matted, grotesque.  He begins to curl up in my arms and I suddenly know that my mother’s tired prediction is coming true at last. He is on the verge of death.

I want to alert my mother but she is dozing peacefully.  Spud, I can tell, is in distress.  Not physical pain but he knows it’s the end.  I have a crisis-driven moment of clarity: my mother will be upset and will not be able to suspend her own suffering at a time when Spud needs clear, sweet, tranquility.

So I stay quite and calm and take him firmly into my arms.  I look into his eyes lovingly as I have for all the years of his life and I think the thoughts, “It’s ok.  It’s time.  It’s right.  It’s ok.”  I can see in his eyes that he is afraid but he listens to my eyes and he relaxes.

Then he closes his eyes and presses his face to mine and I know he is half thanking me and half begging for comfort, for more reassurance, for help.  I give it to him with my body, return the pressure against his cheek, let him know I am there, and it’s still ok.

Then I feel him take his last breath.  He lets go and dies.  My mother wakes up next to me and she is confused only for a moment, after which she is sad but absolutely relieved, and more than anything relieved that she did not have to make any hard decisions regarding this passing, that it happened sweetly, smoothly, and naturally.

I woke up sweating buckets and immediately burst into tears.  This dream is about my mother.  In 2003 she had a large mass removed from her liver, for months before it was discovered she was intermittently in mysterious bad health.  A woman who had the same procedure on the same day died five days later but my mother was lucky and survived.  Now I have been noticing a pattern, she “feels bad” intermittently, lately.  I don’t think it’s anything, not really (God I hope …).  But someday it will be something.  Some day that prediction is going to come true at last.

And this dream is me coaching myself for how I am going to do it, for what I have to do.  I have to be ready to suspend my own suffering for her when she needs clear, sweet, tranquility, and I need to able to tell her, with my eyes, words, body, and heart, that it’s ok, it’s time, and it’s right, and even though none of those things will be true for me they can’t be lies, they have to be honest so that she can have that comfort and reassurance.  I have to be ready to give that to her so that she can let go and die.  If there is any job I was born to do that is certainly it and I don’t want it to be any other way.

I’m still momentarily overcome.  Life is hard on virtually every level.  Relationships are hard and finding work is hard, boredom is hard, rampant injustice is hard.  Keeping in shape is hard and finding contentment is hard.  Productivity is hard, responsibility is hard, failure is hard, success is devastating.  If you’re lucky enough to survive it all, if you’re lucky enough to have the best kind of people in your life, eventually even that becomes hard.  I don’t feel up to it even though I know I am.  I don’t want to be up to it, I want to be like my mother in the dream and sleep through it, wake up sad and relieved that the hard part has passed.

Except that I don’t want that at all because what I just learned from my dream is that the most important part of it all is going to be how I let it go.  The dream is like rehearsal, me telling myself how I want to do it.  In a few hours I’ll go back to being my jokey, nerdy, silly self.  But right now I’m still in rehearsal and I almost think I don’t want to let the sadness go, because I don’t want to let any of it go … which is why I am rehearsing the letting go.

Je reve de vous

I’m sitting in a bar on the Upper East Side at two in the morning and the world is running in reverse.  The night is starting to feel like an afternoon and if I order another drink I’m in danger of becoming entirely sober.  The dude I’m chatting up is less mysterious than he was at eleven o’clock when the band was playing Oye Como Va for our first dance.  He’s explaining the mathematical theory behind the calculations he’s using at work.  I’m pretending I can’t do long division, god only knows why.  

It’s going to be four am and we’re going to be desperate for pizza.  He’s lactose intolerant and since I’ll lose our three am game of pool I’m going to be required to convince the pizza guy to make us a slice without cheese.  We’re going to talk about all the places he’s lived and at least twice I will have the chance to say, “fuck LA!” and when a stoner starts making googly eyes at me behind my back he’s going to say, “Hey watchit, that’s my wife.”

Just before two am he was ordering soda water and I was having my best dance of the night with a dark guy who led everything so musically you’d think he wrote the song, showed me where he wanted my hands, my hips, my heart, too casually for eye contact and so comfortably I didn’t need it.  We shared sweat and collaborated to make my body do what he wanted.  My future pizza buddy at the bar might have been watching, or might not have.   Who cares.

At two-thirty the bartender is will start ushering us out and Mr. Mathematics will glow when I accept his offer of “one more somewhere else.”  At four-fifteen I’ll discover the 1 train is only running express and so opt to share a cab with a stranger I’ll meet on the abandoned platform.  At seven-forty-five I’ll get out of my own bed and head for  Grand Central and all my obligations.

But at two in the morning I haven’t accepted any offers, lost any games of pool, shared any cabs, or zigzagged across a deserted Columbus Circle with the words “my wife” and “fuck LA” (distressing and comforting in their turn) ringing in my ears.  At two in the morning all I have done is dance several dances and laugh over a cocktail while you stood behind me, or by the wall, or with the girl in the orange dress who I know you want to take home (did you?), wherever you go always behind me because I put you there and because (or do I imagine it?) you put yourself there.

It’s just past two am when I can’t shake your shadow, am sobered by it, excited by it, reversed by it, and we leave and it informs everything that comes next until I wake up and find my way to thinking of you the same way I find the downbeat for a dance, equal parts method and instinct, something I want because I feel it and feel because I’ve taught myself how, and even in a sweaty, dreamlike state I can count on it because with patience it always comes and anyway it started off as a dream.

Red Light, Green Light, 1-2-3

When I take a walk and it gets so cold that I need to distract myself I sometimes play a game with upcoming stoplights where if I see they are red I close my eyes and try not to open them until I suspect the light has turned green.  I’m pretty bad at this game, usually I have to alter the rules to “getting it right more than three times in ten” before I can pretend that I won.

Today was a good day for a walk because it was rumored snow was coming - best to appreciate the ice-free world while you can - and because I had absolutely nothing to do.  It’s quite a dangerous condition, “nothing to do.”  A girl can find herself following attractive men to Europe in just such a condition.  A walk is dangerous too (especially if you’re planning on closing your eyes periodically), but slightly more prudent than many alternatives.

I have lots of thoughts vying for my attention when I take a walk.   There are silent alarms going off, and existential questions, and nasal, accountant-type voices asking for a few minutes to look at the numbers.  There’s an injury preventing me from dancing, a few places on my body that scream if I put too much weight on them while sleeping, and a previously stumbling career now totally stalled as a result.  There’s two or three new pounds curving out my bras and jeans; I see them reflected in the eyes of men on the street.  None of their looks say, “Ah, a ballerina!”

And someone whom in the past I have not been able to trust quietly begs my forgiveness, and for a second year demonstrates he will endeavor to deserve it while withstanding quite a few valiant attempts of mine to punish him with hurt and rejection.

Walking around with all that in my head is slippery enough without help from the weather.

There are so many icy questions to avoid.  “Is this the end of my ballet career?”  Younger dancers than I have been retired by their bodies.  But it’s too soon!  I haven’t yet done what I set out to do, what I’ve had my eye on (sometimes more than others) since I started my training at the age of ten.  Whether or not I believe in destiny, I can’t face the thought of giving up now, no matter how stridently my body appears to be asking for it.

“Will I ever truly succeed at anything?”  I know I have potential to do well at other things.  But I had an extremely high, extremely rare level of potential to do well at ballet, and look how that’s gone.  

“Do I want to give him a second chance? Can I live with myself if I don’t? What happens if I do and he lets me down?” I’m so fucking terrified of this line of questioning that I’m just going to leave that alone.

This is where the game with the stoplights came in handy on my walk this afternoon.

On the first three tries I got it wrong.  “Red, still red, and … still fucking red what-the-fuck!  Ok, calm your shit down, breathe, close your eyes.  You know that shit has to turn green.  It’s only a matter of time.  There is no fucking question it’s going to turn green, it’s just not you who’s gonna make it happen.”

When I opened my eyes again the light was still red but “whatever!” because I was already thinking that maybe the answers to all of my questions were like that:  The green light is coming and I just have to sit tight and wait it out.  Closed eyes, open eyes, it doesn’t matter, because it is inevitable that it’s coming down the line.  I can sit at the intersection, or I can run around in circles, or I can close my eyes and breathe, or I can stay up all night reading physical therapy articles relating to hip and psoas problems, or I can talk on the phone for five hours about how fucking unfair it all is, or I can put on the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack and dance, dance, dance - my choice.  The green light is coming, but not until it comes.  If you want to believe in destiny you have to believe in the sanctity of a red light.

It’s either a little bit profound or else total bullshit.  Certainly it is suspiciously religious-sounding, and pseudo-philosophical at best.  Essentially I’m struggling with the same old human stuff.  Life handed me lemons and I made one heck of a lemonade, so then Life stole it, drank it, and pissed all over me.  It happens to everyone!  Hard work is repaid with only vague or fleeting success, optimism is repaid with usury, loyalty with betrayal, faith with ridicule.  When I stopped trying to keep from being bitter what I discovered is that just like everything else, morality has a selfish motive embedded at its heart: You don’t treat the world the way it’s treated you because if you think loyalty is repaid poorly, well, you don’t want to see what you get in return for utter faithlessness.

No more lemons, no more lemonade, no more games where I try to convince myself I won, and for the love of self if not God, no more utter faithlessness.  To all the red lights I say, “I believe!” and even if I don’t, I have to say, the suggestion of belief is at least exciting.

Playing God

Yesterday I went to Balitmore and held an audition on behalf of one of the professional schools at which I teach.  It was my first time doing this on a professional level.

Personally I have never been one to get too nervous at auditions so it broke my heart to see how jittery some of these kids (14-18) got.  At first I went into teacher-mode where I use “soft eyes” and “soft body language” to try and set them at ease.  But then I realized it was my job to determine which ones we wanted and which ones we didn’t.  When I’m looking with soft eyes I see the best in someone, I see potential no matter what.  Potential is important but we need to see the dancer has solid technique appropriate for his or her age, we need to see undeniable, natural artistry, we need to see something that doesn’t have to be coaxed.

I could feel my eyes hardening with every circuit of the room.  By the time we got off the barre and moved on to centerwork I had learned that any correction I might give would be met not with the usual teenage skepticism one encounters in the classroom, but with a ready and all-encompassing reverence.  To them I was not a teacher, I was not an authority figure.  I was fate embodied, a goddess of fortune.  They did not want to anger me.  They wanted to please me, and for that brief moment they couldn’t stop themselves from wanting it more than they wanted anything else.

Have I ever been there!  I probably enjoyed it so much precisely because of how clearly I can relate to the passionate submissiveness an audition can inspire.

I have never deluded myself into thinking a career in teaching could suffice for me, I have always felt it was something I could use to supplement my income, but that I would never be able to have it be “my real goal.”   As I sat there and watched my directions met again and again with happy obedience I thrilled at the power and heard the thought in my head: Perhaps this is my destiny after all.

Late in the afternoon I called to the table a girl who had just performed exceedingly well.  Her number had curled in on itself and I couldn’t read it and wanted to make sure I had her on the acceptance list.  By this point in the day my eyes were as hard as rocks and my face was stone-cold, but when I asked what her number was I gave her just the slightest hint of a smile.  I was a cross between a parent and a judge, letting the veil of impartiality slip, enjoying the pleasure of bestowing favor on a favorite.  In front of me the girl bloomed and every step she took after that was taken with goddess-given confidence.  The rest of the room - the walls, the kids, the air between them - was swathed in envy.

I was pretty satisfied with myself when we got to the end.  I sat behind the table and looked over the audition cards as my coworker briefly explained to the kids where our school is located and what it’s like to study in New York City.  I looked over the acceptance list, the rejection list.  It was right.  Based on what we had seen, we had chosen well.

I happened to look up, and while one or two of them were looking at my coworker as she described the dorms, the great majority of them were looking earnestly at me as though at any minute I might betray some clue to indicate the outcome.  Closest to the table was a girl I had eliminated hours ago upon seeing she couldn’t complete a simple pirouette.  She smiled at me, eyes wild with hope, and I didn’t have the heart to do anything other than smile back.  

Horrible, horrible, horrible, to lie to a child!  I nearly threw up on the table, the contrast was so extreme: to her, acceptance was still possible, the dreams my coworker described could still be her dreams, while I sat there knowing that for her it was already over.  Hope vs. reality.  Dreams vs. the truth.

It’s a place I’ve been before, and yeah, all those other times I was on the other side of the table, I was the one still dreaming about boarding a ship that had already sailed.  But even though on this side of the table I have the power to say who gets on the boat, I realized that having that little bit of control doesn’t actually change anything.  The ship is still going to sail and it’s going to leave a whole lot of deserving, great, inspired - even talented - people behind, with as many crushed hopes as can dance on the head of a pin.

During the audition I had fooled myself into thinking I’d found a career in which I could answer prayers.  But all it really is, to be a professional ballet teacher, is the ability to witness the praying, to stand with those audacious enough to try, and then, if you can bear it, to judge them at their most vulnerable.

So I’m back to thinking that no matter how good I am at teaching, it probably isn’t for me.  When I’m done being a dancer I want to be done with situations where genetics and luck matter more than passion and heart.  

On the train ride home I thought about a friend who knows that certain people in his office are about to be laid off.  He hates knowing that they are to go before they themselves know it, feels like he can’t look them in the eye. I suddenly wondered if there was any escape from that audition table, if we aren’t forever going back and forth, being first on one side, then the other, now crossing names off the list, now having our own name crossed off while we look the other way.  Perhaps this is what God intends for everyone everywhere, seeing as it is undeniable that under these circumstances there is nothing so satisfying as answering a prayer.  Perhaps this is the only way prayers can exist to be answered.  Perhaps this is our destiny after all.

The High Life

When I get home to my apartment after dark the first thing I do is close the window shade with righteous indignation.  I just know all those perverts are waiting over there across the alley, waiting to watch me change.  The nerve!  

But now I’m cat-sitting in a place that has a living room with two gigantic windows and I find that even when I’m in my undies I don’t want them totally shuttered.  I keep the blinds angled to give me some privacy without totally obliterating the small squares of light suggesting the existence of many other windows, many other buildings, the luminous “many others” that make this difficult city worth the trouble.

At home I let my computer shuffle the music.  Here I pick from a collection of CDs purchased by people who have more schooling than I do, have danced in better companies than I have, people who have successful careers and children who win awards for politeness and for soccer.  They own an upright piano and keep it in their two-story apartment in a great part of Manhattan.  Their wedding invitations were hand-written, her dress was designed by a friend who works in fashion.  Their round marble kitchen table seats six comfortably, their living room couch could sleep two.  Their fireplace works.  Their groceries are from Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.  At home I eat canned veggies and popcorn.  Here I eat leftover homemade penne a la vodka and miniature organic chocolate chip cookies.

I would never eat in bed here, like I do at home.  

There are two bathrooms here, one downstairs and one up.  There are two high-quality TVs, two nice-sized bedrooms, two silent, narrow cats.

This place is like life in New York as it appears on TV.  It feels how life is supposed to feel, like comfortable success, like good mornings and good nights.  It’s a place where elegance gets undressed and power relaxes, where values and principles can just be themselves.   There’s a list of chores for the children to perform each week, there’s a subscription to Women’s Wear Daily and the New York Times.

Nobody is waiting across the alley, hungry to feast on the image of my naked body.  Here there is no such thing as vulnerable nudity.

I don’t like it here for the same reason I hate taking vacations.  I have to cross quite a chasm to get here, it’s hard not to look down and once I do it takes a lot of work to un-remember how far I am from living the dream.

For the record.

(I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago.  Then some shit happened and I thought maybe I didn’t need no stinking life, and Tumblr being a part of said stinking life, I took a detour into less verbal pastures.  So, the info here is dated.  Chronologically speaking, we’re talking about three weeks.  In Zorica years that amounts to barely enough time for me to get my head out of my ass and rejoin the world.  A portrait of my sanguine, pre-breakdown thoughts follows.)

In the theater world we have a tradition in which the performers in a dance company or Broadway show will all autograph a copy of the season’s poster.  It’s a symbolic product, all of those distinct, personal flourishes adding up to a keepsake greater than the sum of its parts.  But there’s always a problem with who gets to keep the damn thing.  The whole point is nobody owns it because everybody owns it.  When “everybody” owns something one of two things usually happens: it becomes accessible exclusively to the powerful, or else it gets forgotten entirely and shoved in some random, anonymous basement.

New York’s City Center has found a really beautiful way to circumvent this problem.  Rather than have the performers sign a poster, one of the production artists for every show or company that has toured to City Center since the late 90s has painted the show’s logo on the wall of the stage-left stairwell and then the company performers have all signed their names directly onto the wall.  It turns the theater, a place obsessed with the “here and now” on which live performance depends, into its own chronicle.  That which would be archived becomes the archive itself.  

I can only imagine what it’s like for a performer to pass by all of those signatures while loading into his or her dressing room, preparing to step on one of the most famous stages known to the performing arts.  The signatures in the stairwell definitely captured my imagination and I was only on my way to the bathroom, about to step onstage not as part of art history but as an unofficial guest of the Miami City Ballet, the company that shook the New York ballet scene with its weekend engagement a few weeks ago.  You could call my three-day tenure with the company an “audition,” but that would imply that there was some sort of job at stake.  Fact of the matter is that there are no jobs in ballet right now, especially not at Miami City Ballet where they are cutting millions of dollars out of the budget.  They pretend to audition people because that’s part of their job description and we out-of-work dancers continue to audition because as feeble as it is, it’s our only hope.

I was very lucky to be there, pretend-auditioning for a job that didn’t exist.  MCB auditions dancers by invitation only and it wasn’t an easy invite to get.  Walking through the stage door, warming up and dancing on the stage, wandering the halls pretending to look for the bathroom but really exploring, peeking into the wardrobe room packed with tulle and sequins, I felt like one of the chosen few.  As my father, a 40-year veteran of the performing arts, said just the other day, “Things are so bad that you feel blessed and honored just to be considered for work.”  Gypsy, the Broadway show on which he’d been head carpenter for the last year, closed last month.  He’s since found another gig, and under the heading of “silver linings” he counts trading headlining star Patti LuPone for the new show’s Jeremy Irons.  ”I’m no shrinking violet but Patti, well, she scares the living shit out of me,” he said to me at least once a month while Gypsy was up.

When he heard I was going to be spending a weekend at City Center he reminded me that it was the same theater where his production of Gypsy had first been produced.  He’s always been insistent upon details like that, especially to his children as we began to cut our own teeth on the boards he’d walked for years.  I never went into a theater and saw only the show that was on the stage; thanks to my father the ghosts of shows-past were always hovering at the periphery, providing a wisp of perspective on the “here and now” like the silent signatures do in the City Center stairwell.

In my wanderings up and down that stairwell I eventually got brave enough to venture down the hallway leading to the star dressing rooms.  It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, but there was no painting on the wall to memorialize the production of Gypsy in which Patti LuPone starred and which later employed my father at the St. James Theater on 44th Street.  

But there, quite far down the hall, right outside a superfluous and virtually unused bathroom, is a nondescript metal fuse box, and scrawled aggressively on its cover is Patti LuPone’s larger-and-louder-than-life autograph.

I could only assume that that first production of Gypsy being on a shoestring budget and inevitably strapped for time as well, the stairwell-signature tradition fell by the wayside and Patti took things into her own hands to see that she, at least, would not be left out of the archive.

There was no note indicating in what show she had performed.  No sticker or painting of any logo.  Just the name, “Patti LuPone.” Two big, curly P’s that, with their round possessiveness, implied nothing so much as a warm and friendly, “Fuck you very much but I’ll not be forgotten!”

Nothing that weekend made me quite as happy as that signature, not any of the compliments I got on my dancing, not any of the pirouettes that went well, not even the sense of accomplishment I had when it was all over.

When I saw my dad on Monday I told him about Patti’s hijacking of the fuse box.

“Good old Patti,” he said fondly.  He seemed to already have forgotten that, for forty-five weeks at the St. James Theater on 44th Street, she scared the living shit out of him.