Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet Read Online Free Page A

hard. But her words sank in, and the fact that it took an extra level of work and determination challengedme and ultimately paid off enormously—having to apply myself over and over actually inspired me to stick with ballet. The fact that Ms. Shields did not just automatically give me all the best parts was good for me; I would have assumed that my mild and minimal efforts were enough and ended up just a passable dancer. Instead, starting at ten or eleven, I was driven to prove myself, to gain Ms. Shields’s approval and admiration. My competitive side came out, and I wanted to be the best in the class and get the best parts in our productions. I worked harder.
    I did end up getting featured parts in Ms. Shields’s performances, but she was a generous director and tried hard to give each of us something special to do, thus spreading out the spotlight. And I never took my place for granted. I remember one bad day when I had to miss a weekend rehearsal so that my family could go to my sister’s piano competition, which was out of town. Ms. Shields at first penalized me for that, saying nothing but going forward and starting the new choreography without me, and I thought I was not going to be in her new ballet at all. Great tears were shed. But then she added me to the ballet, creating a late entrance for me, and I was saved.
    From the very beginning, I have loved the excitement of performing, and even with our little shows, I was always sad when a weekend of performances was over. Performing was stressful and anxiety provoking, sure, but it brought so many fun and new elements together. Ironically, to me it was the ultimate pretend game, a total break from reality.
    I still remember sitting on the floor of the ballet studio with the other girls, staring into the mirror for our first stage-makeup lesson. We learned that to look our best onstage, we had to exaggerate the features of our face to make them seem bigger and more beautiful. The bright stage lights and distance from the audience would cause our features to wash out otherwise. With a white waxy substance we covered up our eyebrows, a difficult feat for me with my thick black brows, and then redrew them perfectly, a little higher than they were naturally. This was the way Ms. Shields had done her makeup in her youth; I was to discover later that dancers no longer whited out their eyebrows for stageunless it was for a particular character part. After the eyebrows came the base: with thick cake makeup we made our preteen complexions smooth and even. We gave ourselves pink, blooming cheeks and red glossy lips and drew lines around our eyes to make them appear huge and doll-like. Best of all, we got to wear false eyelashes. We were transformed into more glamorous versions of ourselves. And then we put on our costumes and pointe shoes, further changing ourselves into different creatures entirely. We were ballerinas: perfect, exotic, separate.
    During the fall of 1985, when I was twelve, my father was transferred to Washington, DC. My mother and sister and I had to stay behind in Summerville while we tried to sell our house, but we knew we would eventually be moving as well. Then my father received an award for some outstanding work he had done on a case with NCIS. The award was to be given in Washington, and my mom and I went to watch the award ceremony while my sister stayed with friends. It was my first time on an airplane, and I was thrilled. My family never flew because it was just too expensive. I loved every minute of it, but my mother discovered she did not like flying.
    “Isn’t this wonderful?” I remember exclaiming to my mother when I managed to tear myself away from the airplane window.
    “Uh-huh,” she replied with a strange grimace on her face while she gripped the armrests hard enough to break them. We took the train home.
    The real reason I went to DC that weekend and my sister didn’t was that I was going to audition for the summer intensive program