What's Love Got to Do With It?

My free creative writing class, Your Portland, is happening on Saturday, February 11, 10:15 a.m. at Taborspace!

In this encouraging group, we'll look at a variety of writings and then use prompts to begin telling our own Portland stories through poetry or creative prose. Feel free to message me for details.

In the meantime, here's one of my Portland stories -- a creative essay that was originally published by Mount Hope.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Imagine you’ve fallen in love – not with a person, but a thing; not with an object, but an activity. A seed must have been planted some time ago. Maybe it lay in the wisp of a memory from your childhood friend’s recital, in the froth of the white tutu that skimmed her legs. Or maybe it was inside the jewelry box with the pink figurine that began twirling as soon as you opened the lid. Whatever the reason, the desire to dance suddenly blooms inside you now like a riotous plant, and at the age of thirty-seven, you take your first ballet class. In that hour, your muscles burn, your t-shirt and gym shorts are soaked with sweat, and you don’t know a tendu from a grand jeté, but you’re hooked anyway.

After that, you go to ballet class every week. You go when you’re tired, when you’re coming down with a cold, and when you should be at home working. You’re even reluctant to attend your grandmother’s 95th birthday party because it means you’ll miss ballet. Secretly, you think such devotion will make you an exceptional dancer—the kind that lifts the audience with her as she leaps into the air—but that doesn’t happen. It could be your age since most dancers start training when they’re four or five. But to be honest, you were never all that coordinated, not to mention that you have the flexibility of a fence post, and there must be something wrong with your sense of rhythm, because whenever agroup of people start clapping to a song, you’re always a little off. In fact, you can’t think of a single quality that makes you suited for dancing, other than the passion that fuels your persistence.

Besides these physical challenges, ballet is, for you, the ultimate brain teaser. Even after one year of classes becomes three, then five, then eight, there are new combinations to learn every week. Each sequence of steps feels like a high school calculus problem you can’t solve without serious help. As much as you want to believe you’re graceful and accomplished and quick, that you’re smiling as you sweep across the floor, that your body as light as tulle, all it takes is one glance in the mirror to see that your mouth is a tight knot of tension and that you’re lurching forward on the wrong foot. In this sense, your frustration with ballet has brought out your least-attractive qualities. You’ve left more than one class with your face burning with embarrassment, and with your head a snarl of snarky thoughts, jealous of other students who have more aptitude.

Still, you love ballet. You love the soft pink slippers that get all worn and dirty around the toes, the long arms and graceful hands, the intensity of a room filled with dancers determined to master a new step. You love the metal barres with their peeling white paint and the vocabulary of rhyming French words—tombé, pas de bourrée—and the music that beckons each dancer to rise to its challenge, to leap beyond the familiar sphere of home, family and work into a world where sweat and strain and stubbornness can mingle with light and air and grace.

And then there’s performing.

As much as you love class, the spring recital is magic. On stage, in the lights. Costumes, clapping, and the camaraderie of waiting in the wings with the other dancers, who all encourage and compliment one another. Every year your studio presents a collection of pieces performed by different classes. Along with the younger students, who with their smooth faces and slender limbs look like real dancers, the adults also get their time in the spotlight.

As a beginning ballerina, your roles are all character parts, which involve a lot of posing and mugging between relatively simple steps. The first year you’re Raggedy Andy, complete with baggy-blue overalls, striped tights and a red-yarn wig. Another time you’re a harem girl, sporting voluminous hot-pink pants reminiscent of I Dream of Jeannie. In these get-ups, the audience isn’t likely to notice if your legs aren’t completely stretched, or your toes aren’t perfectly pointed, and as you take your bows, you feel the buzz that comes from making people laugh.

The year you turn forty-five is different though. Your class is doing a serious piece set to Mendelssohn’s beautiful “Venetian Gondola.” The dance doesn’t call for posing or exaggerated gestures. It’s just you and the other dancers in leotards, tights and short, sheer dresses performing pretty steps. Fast, difficult, pretty steps that require some expertise. If you make a wrong move, there’ll be no cartoonish costume to cover it.

To compensate for your lack of talent, you’re determined to do everything in your power to make sure you’re ready for the show. You begin by leaving little notes listing the sequence of steps all over your house—upstairs by the telephone, the table by your bed, the bulletin board above your desk. You even make sketches, reminding yourself of the position of your feet, the angle of your head, and which arm to extend. Mostly, though, you practice. Pirouettes (turns performed while balancing on one leg) have always been your downfall, and sure enough, you have to do one at the beginning of this dance. Luckily, you work at home, so you can jump up from your desk at any time and pirouette in your narrow kitchen, again and again.

One evening, you’re practicing at home before a rehearsal, and it isn’t going well. You tell yourself to give it a rest, but you can’t—you’ve decided you have to get in one good turn before you leave for the studio. Of course the more you try, the more tired and sloppy you get, until your arms and legs begin to resemble the appendages of a drunken puppet. After the twentieth desperate try, you finally make yourself stop, realizing that this frantic approach isn’t improving your technique. Any dancer will tell you that in order to execute a difficult move, you have to believe that you have the skill to nail it, and your repeated failures this evening are doing some damage to your psyche. Completely frazzled, you’re driving to the studio an hour later when, unbidden, a picture of one of your fellow dancers pops into your head. Nicola is pregnant with her first baby, and suddenly you can imagine her holding her son. With this image comes a wave of happiness and, strangely enough, love. You’ve made many friends through ballet, but you don’t know her as well. Tall and thin and athletic, she has long, thick, dark hair, and a dignified, almost regal, bearing. While she seems like a nice person, the two of you never talk much beyond the occasional comment on the rain or the difficulty of the dance.

Still, here you are, feeling this strong, unmistakable affection for her as if she is a dear friend.

And just like that, you know how to prepare for the performance. From that point on, you need to stop trying so hard, to stop focusing on yourself so much and just enjoy the music and the movement and the other people in the dance. Ballet teachers are always telling their students to remember to breathe, and that’s what you have to do—to breathe and look around the room, to see who you’re dancing with, and to appreciate them. To take pleasure in Meghan’s graceful lines, Clare’s smile, Birgit’s strength and Rehl’s courtliness. To stop concentrating on your inadequacies and just enjoy chatting with the other dancers as you all walk to your cars after a late rehearsal. Ballet, after all, is as much about love as muscle—the love of reaching for what looks like an impossible goal and the incomparable pleasure of moving in sync with other people.

Now you’re forty-nine. No matter how hard you try, you may never be flexible enough to do the splits, or skilled enough to execute a perfect pirouette. But love is something that comes naturally, the thing that can take us all to the place where Mendelssohn went when he wrote his music, the thing that leaves us all awestruck, like a new mother holding her infant. When you watch the video of the “Venetian Gondola” piece now, you see that love on your face. You didn’t turn into Anna Pavlova the night of the performance, but you weren’t just stumbling through a series of steps, either – you were dancing.