Allow Me To {Re}Introduce Myself Part I

Hi.  I'm Lela.

Here is what I look like:

I just graduated on May 11th from a small liberal arts college in New England.

While in school, I double majored in Dance and Theatre:

              {I know. I wore some weird shit.}

I also spent a lot of time {as in all of my "free" time} doing tech and learning stage combat:

{It was pretty awesome}

College was amazing.  I learned so much - which I know is the point of higher education. And I was an avid consumer of everything my faculty shared with me in the classroom, taking 20+ credits at a time. I improved my technique as a performer and artist, explored new horizons within myself as well as in the world around me, and pursued new avenues.  Between all the classes, rehearsals, auditions, performances, the voice lessons, the three-on-campus jobs, the a capella group, etc. etc. I was really busy and kind of a bad blogger.  But blogging has always been something I love: something I turn to as a further form of creativity and inspiration.  Of release and exploration.  Simply put, I love telling stories: and words were invented, I think, just for that purpose.  So I'm reintroducing myself to the blogging world: a new venture for me to more seriously commit to moving forward.  

It's a pleasure to meet you!

The Music & The Mirror

For those of you who don't know, the title of the post comes from a beautiful song of the same name from the musical A Chorus Line.  In this number the lead character declares "God I'm a dancer - a dancer dances!" and explains how the only things in life she ever needs are "the music, and the mirror, and the chance to dance for you."

In that moment, I feel for Cassie.  I understand exactly what she means - because I feel the same need, the same urge to move that has my feet tapping and my heart racing and my very bones aching if I sit still too long.  If I go overlong without singing enough notes, I can feel my throat tighten and I get grouchy, listless, bored.  Without a character to painstakingly create and build and loose myself in, I become so antsy I irritate even myself.  I was nervous at the thought of a summer spent this way - with no "home dance studio" anymore, no money for voice lessons, and not much access to theatre where I live, it didn't seem likely I'd be performing or creating very much.

But my fears were proved wrong by a wonderful chance to perform!  I'm part of a community theatre's production of "Aida."  It's a beautiful show and a talented cast and a well respected theatre, so that alone is a great opportunity.  I'm part of the Trio of Dancers in our production, who like the Trio in the Broadway production narrate and enhance the story through dances to instrumental music through out the score. The Trio often take the lead during the ensemble dances, and portray various ensemble roles.  Additionally we're part of the Prologue and Epilogue sequences, set in a modern day museum with all of the key characters intermingling and forming connections.  During the Prologue, the audience doesn't realize the crowd is composed of the lead characters - but when the Epilogue comes, they've met everyone and are aware of their roles/connections/etc.  It's one of my favorite bits of stage magic and I'm quite excited to be a part of it!

And perhaps even more excitingly, I have been given a wonderful opportunity to perform a solo in this production!  The way our director has decided to stage one of the dance sequences, it will be danced by a soloist in an exotic costume, en pointe.  I almost cried I was so excited when he informed us at the Read Through that soloist would  be me!  Me, my pointe shoes, and a live band alone on the stage. . . what more could I want? Because stereotypical as it is to say, performing is my life. The practice studios and rehearsal halls are my home, with their cool barres and familiar smells of rosin, tea with lemon, tiger balm, and honey, the ancient creaking of floors a thousand feet have danced on, the solemn black music stands waiting to be burdened with librettos.  The dark curtained wings are my horizon, a strange mix of heavy red velvets and blinding yellow lights - and beyond them lies my entire world.  The stage.  Without songs to sing and steps to dance and characters to breathe life into, I am certain I'd have gone mad.  Now, I am going home instead.

Words To Stir the Soul.

"Your epitaph will begin: 'She redefined what it meant to be a good woman.' It will say 'She scaled mountains, in hiking boots and in heels.  She started in her own backyard and then went all the way around the world.  She accepted challenges with curiosity and determination.  She emerged victorious regardless of outcome, knowing both the pleasure of success and the grace of failure.  She tasted long hot days and cool still nights, at home wherever she found herself.  She wasn't always popular, but she was always true.  She wasn't always comfortable, but no one can say she didn't enjoy her life.  She explored her edges, increased her capacity, and lived as big as she could dream.  Moved equally by bliss and pain, she played her heart out one moment at a time.  She was dialed in.  She was courageous. She was turned on.' "
                                 - The Turned On Woman's Manifesto

Thoughts Instead of Studying.

I am sitting here, my mind heavy with knowledge it can't quite absorb and reeling from pressure and stress that accompanies an academic lifestyle.  I click through old pictures, and your face appears, leading me down a new thread of thought.

My how things have changed.

My how we have grown.

There are miles and miles behind me from the person I was when we met - awkward and untamed and fighting blindly just to survive in a world I was unsure of.  There are years, so many more years than I'd realized, between you and these images.  Skinnier, younger, less secure. I forgot about the cowlick you had, right on the top of your head, that made your hair go crazy.  Why do we notice these things?  Or rather, why do I?  After all, I can't speak for what anyone else sees. . .

There is so much I'm not prepared for on this test.  I need to not procrastinate, the night won't get any younger. . .

Both of us smile, frozen in time as megapixels and data.  These pictures exist nowhere else but on our computers, drifting in an endless sea of binary code, our younger selves reduced to less than photostock.  We're a blur, only a simple digital blur. The soft blush color of my cheeks isn't the glow of early teenage years, but the careful combination of zeros and ones and dots until an image forms; the same is true of your disheveled hair and laughing face.

A click and we're gone again.

There are forty more slides still to go.  Why must the powerpoints be so long?  I hate spending my time locked to this screen.

I wonder who we'll be ten years from now.  Will there be a baby on someone's hip?  A new city beneath their feet?  Will we still find a way, somehow, to each other through the impossibilities that life brings to our friendship?  Will you be happy, then?  Will I?  And where will these current selves be - stored digitally thanks to social media, somewhere in the great Other where neither of us can truly erase the file?

Stored as memories shuffled carefully away with our younger selves?

Will this version of me as I am now eventually become nothing more than a digital echo and the vague impression that you once held someone's warm hand against your own cupped palm?

I am so tired.  My eyelids are heavy and my heart feels funny, as it always does when these strange reflective moods come over me.  I don't think I am old enough to think this way.  Am I?

When I am honest I realize I don't miss the old us - not the younger, less secure, more difficult you.  Not the frightened, breakable, naive me.  I am much happier with the confidence we've both managed to find though we both know it is sometimes hollow.  Hollow is good - hollow can be filled.  I think of it less as a shell and more as an outline, where the potential can still be reached.  We now have lines to color in.  And what lines they are.  The line of your shoulder is thicker, broader.  The spread of your stance more confident, taking up more floor when you enter a room.  You've learned to own your space.  Quiet confidence suits you.

I on the other hand am still a smudge: a smudge of emotions and thoughts and ideas and colors, a moving blur like a photograph not properly exposed, that person in the back who didn't quite stay still when the photographer said "three."  My energy and motion have a direction, now, a goal other than "Away.  Run away."  This is growth, though it is not the solidifying you've done - if anything I am blurrier and busier than ever.  But I think my colors are richer, too.

I really have to tear myself away.  There is nothing in these pictures that will help you learn what you need to know, girl.  Stop looking at them as though they'll help.


So many things have changed.  Why am I noticing them now?  How disjointed and jumbled all these thoughts will seem in the morning.  How silly I feel even now thinking them to myself.  I wonder if I will have the courage to hit the little orange "publish" button in the top corner of this snow white page, the courage to commit this image of myself too.  To press it, like a dried flower in the pages of a scrapbook, into the time capsule of myself the internet provides.

I think I will.  After all, it's just binary code and digital dreams, right?

Back to the books I go. . . 

Getting Lucky

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

Today was my first day off in ages and ages and ages.  As usual, it's been a busy semester full of classes, work (I got some extra hours this week!  Woo hoo!), and rehearsals which I love!  However it can sometimes be a little exhausting.  For example, here is my typical Monday:

7:00 am, I drag myself out of bed and into clean clothes, etc.  Grab my bags and books and stumble off to. . .

8:00 am Pedagogy class which goes until

9:30 am at which point I go to job #1 in Advising.  I file, make appointments, take messages, and otherwise hold down the front desk until

10:50 when my voice lesson starts.  Voice ends just in time for me to get to 

11:30 Modern 6

1:00 lunch with my roommate

1:30 twenty minutes at the gym before

1:50 Dramatic Literature, which is only an hour long so I get out by 2:50 giving me exactly enough time to go to

3:00 Physical Therapy for an hour and fifteen minutes, getting me out at 4:15 so by

4:40 I'm in Jazz 6 which ends at 6:10, which is convenient since

6:15 is when Hairspray rehearsal starts, which runs until 10:30

10:45 back in my room to start homework which takes me until 12:30ish to complete and call Boyfriend.

Then it's off to bed by 1ish, so I can get up, rinse, and repeat.  The classes change, the length of time at the gym changes (someday I get in almost an hour!) but thats about it.  It's a busy and fulfilling life, to be sure.  I love it.  Which is why today, on my first day off, I spent it making sure I could continue living almost the exact same way.  I edited my resume and started sending off copies of my headshot, (adjusted) resume, and contact information to local theaters/playhouses/summer stock companies.  I researched different performance venues and internships - all of which is work I should have done ages ago, but couldn't because of this stupid hip injury.  I didn't know when or if I'd be ok enough to rehearse/perform this summer.  If I'm lucky, though, I'll get some performances and some additional work to go along with my day job!

Cross you fingers, blogging world - I'm looking for my lucky break, so I'm trying to be prepared.  How do you spend your days off?

The Inner Child

You know how wise man have often talked about the child inside of all of us?  That happy, adventurous, joyful and free spirit who keeps us youthful?  Creative?  Inspired?  How important it is to let the inner child out?  Well, I've always had a hard time with that idea.  I agree there is an inner child inside of all of us. . .

But in my case - and I think maybe in the case of many other abuse victims - the inner child is not as joyful, as free, as at peace as the grownup version of myself.  I can still picture her, my inner, younger self.  Sometimes - often in the still of the night, or when I am somewhere peaceful like by the water or in a silent stage/rehearsal space - she reappears.  I can close my eyes and see her there, like I'm looking in a mirror.

She is short for her age.  Her hair is long and brown, hanging well below her shoulders.  Her brown eyes are big in her small face.  There is intelligence there, and passion.  But it's already curtained, hidden by little traces of fear.  You can still see the questions, though.  Always, always, always a question.  Who? And Why? And when?


I wish when I touched my inner child, I felt the urge to cartwheel.  Or to dance.  But usually, I just end up feeling sort of sad.

Her nose is too big for her face, just like her hands and feet are too big for her limbs.  She's a thin girl - very thin.  All skin and bone, hands and feet, and brown eyes.  Sometimes she is holding a book. Almost always she's holding a worn, well loved doll.  Even when she was a toddler, the only thing this little girl ever wanted was a story, her dolly, and enough room to dance. 


Sometimes it isn't at all like looking in a mirror.  It's like I've become the little girl again.  Confidently answering questions, talking too fast and too much and never far from a book.  Carefully listening beyond my own chatter, for any sound of instability.  Any hint of a threat.  The sounds of breaking things: plates, knick knacks, fingers, hearts.  They each shatter under different amounts of pressure, each cracking at a different volume.  If you keep your insides very still, you can actually feel the vibrations.  Way down deep in your core, like the echo of a plucked guitar string.  While I've never been very good at keeping still I'm very good at staying still.  I'm always in motion, doing something.  Even as a kid - but my spirit is still.  Calm.  Listening for the vibrations.

Tonight was one of those nights, when all I could see in front of me was the little girl I used to be.

There are already circles under her eyes, even though she's barely even ten years old.  They're faint and thin, delicate lilac rings, more a suggestion of sleeplessness than a statement of it.  If you know what to look for though, you see it.  The telltale badges of someone who imagines worlds past the stars instead of sleeping beneath them. 


I feel myself sliding back into that old self, who loved the worlds books and ballets brought her to as much as she feared the one she lived in. I feel little and nervous again, as I imagine making decisions others might judge me for.  As I think about changing my appearance, embracing the person I'm becoming, so different from who I was, I feel my little self peer around the corner, asking if it's ok.  Ok to be someone new?  Is it. . . safe?

She always wanted a big brother.  Someone tougher and cooler and smarter than her.  To show her the ropes.  To worry when the shouting happened that she might get woken up.  To make fun of her - to notice her. She wants someone talk to, instead of only getting to listen all the time.  As much as she talks, she's a good listener - it's her "hidden talent" like the ones beauty queens have.


When I ask a question now, it's with my in-between voice.  The one that sounds like me, 21 and self-assured, but comes from me, 9 and a half and without any confidence at all.  I ask my big brother questions - oh yes, I have a big brother now.  As soon as I became a teenager - all awkwardness and nervousness and strange ideas - God decided to send me someone who'd adopt me as his little sister, maybe because our strange baggage sort of. . . coordinates.  And now I reach out to him, asking about how it feels to get a tattoo and what I'm afraid of when I think of moving to a big city alone.  And somehow my little voice takes over and I'm talking too about where my fears came from.  He's telling me now to be brave - tattoos hurt and moving is lonely.  But it's worth it to sacrifice for things you love and believe in.  Right?

Right.

And I suddenly wish I could summon my elementary school self here, and answer some of her questions.

Does the shouting ever stop?  Why do some people get best friends and some people no friends?  Did you know ballet terminology is actually a mixture of three different languages (if you don't count English?)


It's ok.  The shouting stops - though the vibrations never do.  You'll always feel them, behind your closed eyes, in between your heartbeats. . . in the pause in other's stories.  Don't worry about friends: I promise there will be good and loyal and true and courageous people in your future.  You'll keep learning ballet terminology for as long as I've seen of your life.  And whenever you're really angry, or truly ready to cry, or bad dreams creep back in, you will recite it in your head - every step you know, every movement you love, lovingly repeated. You get a big brother.  And a big surgery.  And a very kind and sweet man will kiss you, right before you leave for college.

It's ok to cry, little one.  There is a lot of time left for cartwheels. . .

Geek Girl Swag

It's 2:45 am.  On a Monday night, no less - well, actually it's technically a Tuesday Morning.  I have to work tomorrow.  My temperature is currently nestled comfortably at 100 degrees, the same place it's been since Friday night at about 9:30.  I should be sleeping.

Nestled into a big, warm, comfy bed with a bottle of water and a thermometer sharing nightstand space with my nook.  But I'm not.  I'm tired, yes - that very special kind of tired you only get when you are or have been ill.  The thing is, I can't stand the thought of staying totally still anymore.  It's been days now.  Days of the most exercise I'm able to being some light stretching and taking the stairs to and from the kitchen.  No outside, no walking around just to burn off some of my constant excess energy.  No adventures.  No dance or Yoga (and I've been wanting to start yoga for ages now!).

For someone who majors in dance and has been an athlete their whole lives, this is quite the change of pace.  Some of it has been nice, of course - I've actually done some reading.  Of something other than a textbook or script!  I've started playing around with the formatting and image of A Space for Inspiration again (I apologize for it's messy, half-done state).  I even started watching Doctor Who, something I've wanted to do for ages and not had the time.  I also spent a few minutes on Boyfriend's computer, playing a new multiplayer video game called Star Wars: The Old Republic.  The combination of this (totally awesome, by the way) video game and beginning Doctor Who have made me realize I something.

I'm a geek.

No really, I am.  I've said it before, joked that I am a "geek girl," or have "geek girl swag," with one of my friends from school.  I use awkward hashtags like that on Twitter all the time, in fact.  But I really realized it today, just how much of a geek I am.  And not nerdy girl chic, like Zoey Deschanel on the New Girl.  Not sexy geeky, the kind where you know just enough about "lame" topics like Star Wars to be able to contribute to a conversation about them while playing with your cute hipster glasses.  Oh no boys - this girl is all geek.  Observe:

* I will gladly duel you with Light Sabers.  My character on SWTOR is a Miralan Jedi Counselor.

*I first read the Lord of the Rings when I was 11 years old.  From the age of 11 until about 15, one of my best friends (and pen pal!) could write her name in Elvish.  I was basically convinced this was the coolest trick ever, slash the most important lifeskill one could wish for.

*I'm a total and unashamed Potterhead.  I'm in Ravenclaw, in case you were wondering!  I think my Boyfriend might be a Gryffindor though. . .

*In an attempt to recapture some of the magic and escapist joy both The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter brought me as a kid, I went through a phase of reading Dragonlance books.  I was 12 or 13.  If you don't know what those are, it may be because you're a socially well adjusted adult. . .

*I like classic Disney movies, particularly of the Princess variety (and well yes, I know she is the very first Disney Princess I cannot stand Snow White.  Blech!).

*I've begun watching Doctor Who, am an avid fan of both Grimm and Once Upon A Time, and have every intention of adding Sherlock and Game Of Thrones to my geek tv viewing pleasure.

*Comic.  Books.

There are lots of other examples of my geekiness that I could point too. . . but I'm a little worried I may have scared you away by now.  The funny thing is, people are always surprised by this part of me, as though only awkward high schoolers and overweight dudes who work at Newbury Comics are allowed to have moments of super fandom.  It's a silly stereotype, no?  I'm a mature, emotionally stable adult.  I'm neither sun deprived nor Dorritos indulged.  I don't wear primarily black.  I've never dyed my hair a color only found in a crayola crayon box, my ears don't have gauges, and I'm not socially inept.

What other silly stereotypes are there out there, that bother you?  Any in particular that apply to you?  I think I might like to devote an entire post to some of the things I should be, based on stereotypes, and I'd love to hear what mold you don't quite fit in!

Today I Am

. . . anxious.

Excited.

Nervous.

Antsy.

I'm checking my email obsessively, because the casts lists for our spring shows come out.  We're doing Hairspray and Boys Next Door.  I had a really strong audition and I know I work well with the director for Hairspray, so I'm hopeful.  On the other hand, it was a huge audition and lots of people did well.  Plus Craig likes to do unusual, even strange things with his cast lists (and his shows are always bomb because of it) so I'm kind of on pins and needles.

I'm also waiting for a second email, or possibly a phone call.  I may have landed a job dancing over break and am waiting to hear from the choreographer.  Trying to be nice and having very talented friends may just have paid off for me!  Yay for word-of-mouth-jobs.


And I'm going over my ipod and sifting through my itunes, trying to compile good music for the various dance classes at various levels that I'm teaching over break, starting tomorrow.  I feel like a kindergartner all over again every time I go to teach.  Will they like me?  Will they play nice?  Will anyone show up?  Will the parents think I'm too young to know what I'm doing?  Will I have the right music?

I'm deeply feeling my career choice today. . . cast lists and music, waiting and praying.  On one hand I think "the stress related to this career is going to give me a heart attack young and send me to an early grave."  On the other hand, part of me is relishing this.  Right now I'm still in the student-cocoon, safely shielded by family, faculty, and like-minded friends. . . but this is still a taste of the real world.  Sitting in my yoga pants, cutting my music and waiting to find out if I got the gig.  I'm a lucky, lucky, lucky little girl.

So I guess thats what I am today.  A performer.  A working artist.

Scars and Damsels.

I had Tech Lab today.  I suppose those words are probably gibberish to most of my readers, so I'll explain.  I am taking a class about building, designing, and maintaining sets for theatrical performances.  There is a lab portion a few days a week, and today was my lab day.  Because we do a lot of painting and playing with power tools, we're supposed to wear clothes we don't mind wrecking, so I wore a t shirt with the collar cut off.  It's comfortable and fashionless, the perfect thing to splatter with paint and saw dust.  I spent most of the day with it falling a bit off of my shoulder. Off of my left shoulder.  Because I make sure it stays high and over my right side always.

There are scars under there, scars I still don't want anyone seeing.  I know this is foolish of me - they are three small lines, hardly massive damage.  But they represent massive damage on the inside.  And no matter how many times Boyfriend kisses them, or how often I have to see them around the straps of my leotard, I hate them.

As soon as I can, I cover them up.  Thats the funny thing about being a woman, isn't it?  We're asked to be delicate, almost frail - yet we're not allowed to have scars.  We're like porcelain: valuable because of our form and frailty, useless as soon as we chip or crack or break.  How am I supposed to be a damsel in distress if I can't rumple my dress?  Yet I follow the rules and dutifully hide these small markers of my strength behind a careful cloth covering.

After all, no one wants to see a woman with scars.  No matter how small  they maybe, they're generally hiding something bigger on the inside.  Ironically, as I covered my tiny physical marks today, I lay bare - only for a few moments - the longer, deeper, more virulent scars on my heart.  We were in class and discussing how something had made us feel. . . and my hand was up.  And my mouth fell open, and I felt so strange spilling out words, trying to describe a feeling you can't understand unless you've had it.  I focused tightly on the teacher, willing myself not to blink, not to sigh, not to break.  Not to acknowledge any other faces or voices in the room, not the kind eyes or the gentle expressions.  Not the bored person a few chairs over, or the one next to me who already knew some of the story.  Then it was done, and my story half-told hung in the air like the ashy remains of a fire, wafted away on the breeze and only ever half contained.  I blinked, and the spell was broken.  Tight throat and tingling palms, I tried to draw that invisible veil between these scars and this self, but wasn't quicker than a classmate's hand.  He reached out and grabbed mine tightly in his, without a word, and suddenly the tears - which had already made a bid for freedom today - were much closer to the surface. 

I shifted slightly, making sure my three.  tiny.  straight.  tidy. unimportant.  shoulder scars were covered.  The tears were forgotten as I realized my own foolishness.  I could leave heavy words hanging in the air, revealing to people I hardly knew a little dark in the bottom of my heart, but I couldn't let a friend know I had surgery scars?

I am not a sighing damsel, crying out from her ivory tower.  I have paths sliced in my flesh and in my heart that could take a hundred years to heal - and I refuse to fear them anymore.  Next time, perhaps I'll let those tears fall, instead of snatching back my hand.  Perhaps I'll even wear a tank top without a blouse carefully arranged, covering my shoulder.

I Was Rather Excited

Thinking about how I've spent virtually my whole summer in sweats, leggings, or jogging shorts and some form of tank top.  I do, after all work at a Fitness and Fun Camp for children. . .

But soon I'll be headed back to school!  Where I can indulge in jeans, and layering, and varying my hair!  Then I realized I am a dance major.

So my hair will always be in a bun.  And I'll be endlessly wearing some form of leggings or jazzpants, with a sweater.  'Cept when I'm in rehearsal.  I get to wear Frye boots then (for the sword fighting.)

At least the sweater will be a change of pace, right?

Sigh.  That my friends is what we call a "fail."

On A Rainy Sunday

"I want to think again of dangerous and noble things

I want to be light and frolicksome

I want to be improbable

beautiful

and afraid of nothing

As though I had wings."

-Mary Oliver

Mover & Maker

Today, I Am This:

 

(via)

A Dancer.

Like most people I'm many different things in life.  A blogger, for instance.  A sister, daughter, cousin, friend.  An actress.  A would-be cook/baker.  Sometimes, I'm even a poet.  Today though, I am a dancer.

That statement is actually vaguely misleading: I have always been a dancer, before I was even born.  You'd have to ask my mom about it - but that's a separate post.  The point is, I have always had two things I've felt compelled to do - to  move and to make.  More than a "dancer," (a word which gives people one of two images: flat-chested girls in tutus & tiaras, spinning pink & glitter with ribbons tied to their knees, or enhanced-chested girls in hotpants & extensions, also spinning glitter. . .) I am a mover & a maker.

I can't sit still for long: even as I blog, one of my legs is bouncing rhythmically up down to my Pandora station's latest selection.  I have to fidget, to clean, to work in my garden, to get up and stretch, to practice my relevees as I brush my teeth.  To fall into my bed at the end of the day, sore and drained and empty, ready for the night to fill me again with energy as I sleep.

By the same token, I feel a constant tug to create.  When I was little, I loathed board games (in fact I still do).  I far preferred to make up games: the characters, the rules, the locations, all original and new.  I was obsessed with modeling clay and inventing new worlds for my dolls.  I didn't like coloring books: I wanted to draw my own pictures.  I hated the chicken dance, the macarena, the electric side.  I could make up my own dances, thankyouverymuch.  As I got older, the need to make something new became half finished sewing projects, a closet full of beads, more polymer clay, and a deep love of music.  I still preferred making up my own dances. . .

One of my best moments in dance was the pinnacle of moving & making. I was sixteen, and my dance studio was doing purely student choreographed showcase.  Me and the only boy, my friend Russell, teamed up for a Pas De Deux.  He wanted more contemporary.  I wanted more classical.  We butted heads.  We stayed late at the studio, with classes that got out at 9:45 pm already.  We sweat.  He must have lifted me a thousand different ways. . . then I got injured (I know, I know!  Literally the story of my life!)  I had blown out my entire left ribcage.  All the muscles that were supposed to hold it together were some combination of torn or strained (to this day my left ribcage is longer than my right. It was the kind of injury that doesn't heal).  And we worked anyway.  We'd both grit our teeth and try again, with sweat and sometimes tears on our faces.  He trusted me more than anyone ever had before: that I was able to do this.  That I was strong enough, capable enough, that his choreography & mine would have the debut it deserved.

And I quite literally put my (very broken) self in his hands.  That he wouldn't drop me, that it wouldn't hurt too much, that when I jumped, he would be there.  When I had my back to him, we were counting the music the same, so when I turned back 'round, we would match.  I wouldn't fall again. . .

The end result was something I am still proud of - yes, our technique needed work.  Yes, I am a much better dancer now than I was then and he is in fact a professional.  No, it will not be anything I include on audition tapes.  But we moved - Oh, how we moved!  My favorite moment was when I simply an at him (this was, I assure you, more impressive than it sounds.  I run rather fast.  And am rather curvy. . .) and jumped with all my strength into him.  He caught me, pressing me above his head and spinning in a circle as I moved my legs - the effect was that I was running down an invisible staircase as he rotated.

I will never forget curtsying after, him lightly holding my hand in his.  The feel of the lights on the back of my neck as I dipped my head.  The smell of the rosin.  The sound of the applause, thunderous and muffled all at once.

This is what I need, right now.  This, this is who I am today - I am a dancer.  I need to run and leap and trust that someone's hands will be there - or that my own legs will be strong enough to catch me.  I need to pirouette so fast, the world blurs away and I am a stable, solitary point in these rotating heavens.  I need to work until I gasp for sweet, heavy air - not winded from running to nowhere, but from creating.

This is who I am. . .

I am a mover.  I am a maker.