I finally received a DVD of the last show I performed.  The one that felt really good.  The same one I watched a snippet of a few weeks ago and felt discouraged.

So, I revisited it again yesterday afternoon.  With some distance.  And it wasn’t that bad!  There were some things I noticed that I need to work on (What’s with the sickled foot in arabesque?  This white girl can’t jump!  Why are my shoulders hunched over like I’m going to hurl a fur ball?) but there were also some things that I thought “that ain’t half bad!”  I look more solid than I thought I would.  Energized.  Not so old.  All good things.

As I’m watching it, Mr. B siddles over and checks it out.  He asked me when I started dancing (at the age of four, I answer, which for those that are curious, was almost 34 years ago.  Gulp!).  Then he makes a comment about how I’m still dancing.  Then drops the bomb…”Mommy?  When are you going to do another job?”

Good question, kid.

I suddenly felt the need to passionately come to the defense of my career choice.  To a FIVE YEAR OLD, mind you.  All he asked was a simple question.  Yet, would he ask this same thing of his father?  Or if I was a doctor?  While I realize that my career is seen by most as a Hobby, it has been my livelihood for as long as I can remember.  It is just as much a part of who I am as who my parents are, where I was born, and the color of my eyes.  How can I just give this up?

OR, is it time to “grow up” and get a real job?

After I had my son, a teaching job landed in my lap.  I was looking for an excuse to leave the house a few days a week, so without much warning or effort, I became a dance teacher at a community college.  It had been ten months or so since I’d moved around, and it felt great.  The teaching however, was a soul-sucking experience.  The students were a mixture of former kid dancers, folks looking to move like they do on a certain Fox show, or students looking to fill a fine arts requirement that might also help them lose weight.  Most of them ended up dropping the course before the half-way point, and I very quickly burnt out.  Thankfully, I discovered a modern dance studio five minutes form my house and started taking class on Saturday mornings while my husband watched our toddler.  Finally, I was doing something for ME.  And this led to a job with the company, taking class twice a week and rehearsing for shows that occur twice a year.  When I first started dancing for K, I was grateful to be moving again, craving the immersion in to some creative work that would pull me out of my title of Stay At Home Mom.  But K’s work is so vastly different from the work I did in NYC.  It is physical, technical, and requires a demanding fitness level.  I’m grateful for the work.  I feel stronger than I ever have.  If I had had this much knowledge of my body and its capabilities when I was in NYC, who knows what I would have done.  K had challenged me to do things I never thought I could do, let alone bring awareness to things I should have been doing all along.  (Oh, THAT’s what a straight leg and pointed foot feels like!  THAT’s what it feels like to get my pelvis over my standing leg.  Who knew that could make me feel so powerful?)

Yet, I’m not getting any younger.  The dancers in K’s company are.  I have to remind myself that I bring a certain level of artistry and maturity to K’s choreography that the  younger dancers do not.  However, it is also hard to look at these young people and not feel just a smidge jealous.  They have their whole lives ahead of them.  They could do ANYTHING with their lives right now.  And I feel like I’m in the twilight of my performance career.  And I don’t feel like I’ve done much to speak of.  Shit.  I’ve spent 34 years devoting my life to dance, and I feel like I gave it a half-ass try.  In some ways, I feel as if I’m mourning the loss of a career.  If I quit dancing now, then what?  I’m not equipped to do much else.  If I just slip out the back door of the dance world, no one would notice.

I had no intention of making this thing a Woe Is Me type of thing.  How depressing, right?  However, you can’t help but love the speed that typing gives to fleeting and disjointed thoughts.  It is much more satisfying then a handwritten journal.  But perhaps writing by hand also allows for some sense of thought before jotting down words.  This comes like manual and mental vomit.  At any rate, here it is.  My space.  To do with as I please.  Take it or leave it.

If you had asked me 30 years ago what I’d be doing as I approached 40, I don’t know if I would have said being a professional modern dancer.  Although I was dancing then, it seemed like a fun hobby, not really a lifestyle or career choice.  I never studied at hard-core studios or experienced the demands of learning at conservatory.  I luckily never had to endure the horrors you hear from ballet dancers about weight issues, nasty feet, or derogatory teachers.  Dancing as a youth was a fun way of moving around, and I loved it.  Was I the best at it?  Not even close.  But I felt like it counteracted all of the cerebral learning of school, but didn’t seem as rugged as soccer.  Let’s face it; I was not one bit athletic.  I threw like a girl.  But I also danced like one, so dancing it was. 

Fast forward to a week before college where I had to declare a major, and dance was the only thing I could think of.  I happened to be going to a school that offered a good dance program, so I thought I’d try my first year as a dance major and then change it when I found something more appropriate for a career.  Yet, nothing ever fulfilled me quite like the world of dance.  I don’t think you could classify the classes I took as a youngster as serious training.  So when I got to college, it was a shock.  Here I was, young, pudgy, and full of myself.  I thought I knew how to dance.  How naïve.  College was an amazing eye opening experience to the world of dance.  I discovered modern dance, became exhilarated by the thrill of the problem-solving puzzle of choreography, and became drunk on the kinesthetic experience of watching professional dancers move their bodies in ways mine had not yet learned but ached to. 

After college, I moved to New York City like many other dancers. The city drew me in with its energy, diversity and cultural oasis.  But then my boyfriend dumped me, I got injured, and decided graduate school was a logical choice.  Oh Grad School, I loved ye.  Three years of intense focus towards an art form I had dedicated my life to.  Grad School was the chance to figure out who I was as a dancer and what roads I wanted to trip down.  It provided opportunities to learn new skills, and teased the keep-your-fingers-crossed chance that you’d get to land a job.  That last one?  Yeah, that so didn’t happen.  Without going in to too much detail, the dance world and I have had a tumultuous relationship, full of jealousy, disappointment and betrayal.  It’s difficult to feel like you work just as hard as the next guy, yet the Next Guy is the same guy that gets all of the work.  Don’t get me wrong; I had a satisfying stint as a modern dancer in New York.  While the work I did wasn’t earth shattering and the choreographers I worked with weren’t the name-dropping kind, I am supremely proud of that work.  I will never forget that time, the good and the bad.  But I knew my shortcomings.  I wasn’t the dancer that the It Choreographers wanted to hire.  I didn’t have that certain “thing” about me that they were drawn to.  I didn’t get noticed at auditions.  And I’m sure I emanated that awful air of desperation people shirk from.  I think I was a decent dancer, sure.  And if I’d stayed for longer, who knows.  But I also know that my spirit had been broken, and I don’t think I had much fight left in me.  I was tired of feeling like I was too short, too fat, too unwilling to kiss someone’s ass to get a job. I found out I was pregnant with my first baby two days before my husband found out he got a job that would transfer him to Denver.  And it felt like a blessing.  It felt like relief.  I didn’t have to make the decision to end my career in New York.  It was made for me.

It’s late, and the “alarm clocks” go off early around here, so I’ll finish this up soon.