Curly would have been labeled as a "dangerous jumper" because he did not bring both knees up together to go over the jump. I have never had more fun jumping, though, or felt safer than when I was riding him. Texas 1990
Jon loved seeing himself in the viewer screen on the back of my camera. I got this one of him, looking at us, reflected together in the mirror backing a Chinese ceramics display in the Smithsonian. Maryland 2010
Brent and Nate and I went on a road trip to Fort Lauderdale. The art museum was a WAY BIG disappointment, but at a museum collection of old Packard cars, there was more to see. Florida 2010
I did this one while trying to get ideas for a "self portrait that you didn't look like yourself in it" assignment for a black and white photography class I took at PBSC. Florida 2009
This is one of the first shots I ever took of myself in my kitchen window. After dark it is as sharply reflective as a mirror. I was wearing my favorite shirt. Florida 2008
This is a photograph, also a reflection in the kitchen window, that I took and think of as my "50th Year Old Portrait." Florida 2009
"Every Little Step" is an old film, a retrospective (their word) on the casting process in preparation for the revival of A Chorus Line. It is a slap in my face that yells at me that I never could have done what those people did. I didn't start dancing soon enough or seriously enough. I didn't. I was too chunky as a teenager. I was. I would have killed myself had I broken through the constraints of my father's advice and lost myself in the mirror that frees and contains a dancer. I am preoccupied now with my own reflection.
Our kitchen window looks out over the sink onto the lanai and, at night, reflects my own face back at me--but softly. I have taken dozens--maybe hundreds--of photographs of myself looking back at myself. Perhaps it is the dearth of ("women's tears"--"dearth of women's tears" is a line from a war poem I studied at BYU) images from all the years when the children were growing up. Perhaps thousands of photographs--the majority of them thrown out or lost or ruined in the flood--I took. An acquaintance once said that she took so many pictures of her kids growing up so that when she got old and got Alzheimer's, she'd still be able to look back and know that she had lived a life full of people and places--even if she didn't remember that she had been there or was related to the faces in the photographs.
Nikki from Fleetwood Mac put photographs of herself posing in toe shoes and ballet costumes on the covers of her record albums (back when there were photo albums) and anyone who ever danced could tell that she's never had any real experience as a ballerina or even tried to stand "en pointe." I had. I had worn and bled into real toe shoes. Though I never got paid for dancing, after class one day, I was told by a fellow dance student at BYU: "It's beautiful to see you. I love watching you dance."
And that has always been enough for me. I am a dancer.
But I am not a professional dancer. Actually I'm not a professional anything. After finishing my Masters, I did get to teach a few semesters of college English and worked as a Legal Assistant while Brent was in law school. I have played organ and piano and sung and played flute. I have written hundreds of pages of prose--and half again as much in essay response and/or literary analysis. If I lived by "Publish or Perish," I'd be long gone and buried. My mom loved my letters and Megan is doing amazing artwork to accompany a children's narrative that I composed.
Seeing anything about the theatre always makes me feel morose and begin to self-assess based on my teenage need to face myself by losing myself in the character of a play. I got lots of chances to do that. There was little competition from others 15-to-20-year-olds who could not exist without a ready-made façade to hide behind. Desperation breeds excellence.
Especially in front of a full-length mirror.
Am I depressed tonight? No. I am just upset that I did not have the chance to ruin my body sooner in a more dramatic way. At the end of "Every Little Step," one of the actresses who got a major part was the daughter of a ballet dancer. He danced for 20 years and then blew out a knee. He thought that he was finished as a dancer--and then Baryshnikov called him and told him to get back to the theatre. In six weeks he was dancing again. At the end of the evening's performance, his dance slipper was full of blood.
But he ended his comments by telling the viewers to ask any dancer, any gymnast who participated in the Olympics--would they give up the ruined shoulders, damaged ankles, arthritic knees?
It was worth it. What ever was lost--it was worth it.
And really . . . I feel the same way about all the injuries I sustained from my horseback riding time. And even now after surgery on my left knee, I hate laying on my back on the couch, with my knee above my heart, doing needlework and watching old movies and writing in my blogs and trying to remember when to take the extra meds and make appointments for the doctors and physical therapy. But . . . still, offered the chance, I would not have given up a single moment of flying over the earth, of becoming all the mass and grace of a 700 pound horse. I would not. Blood in my slipper. Scars on my shoulder. Bone spurs on my spine. Concussive bruise marks on the inside of my skull.
I would do it all again.
I have not gotten any wiser as I have gotten older. Half a century and I still cling to the memory of the feeling of being on a horse--of having someone who thought it was beautiful when she saw me dance.
One moment of being a dancer.
"Kiss today--"
I don't want to be pointed only toward tomorrow--not if it means that I have to leave my past behind.
I feel much better now.
