Dancing in the Light (11 page)

“The salesgirl said no one had come in, she’d seen me cover my purse with my jacket, so it must still be under there. Like a crazy woman, I flapped my jacket up and down as though I was beating dust out of a rug. ‘My purse is not here,’ I said ‘Can’t you see that?’

“I ran out of the store. There was hardly anyone on the street. I went back into the store, expecting that the salesgirl had somehow found it. Instead,
she was on the phone to the Beverly Hills police, begging them to come over and deal with this crazy movie star.

“ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t care about the money or the credit cards or my passport or anything like that. I care about my spiritual tapes that were in there.’

“She looked at me. ‘Your spiritual tapes?’ she asked more politely than was necessary.

“ ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘My tapes from my guides and teachers on the spiritual plane. They are so important to me.’

“I could feel her thinking that she should have called the boobyhatch instead of the police.

“ ‘Well,’ she said carefully, ‘maybe you could consult your spiritual guides to find out what happened to your purse?’ ”

Mother laughed. “She made me laugh, too,” I said, “but she had a point. Well, I met with the police and filled out the reports and all that. But I had this eerie feeling that it really hadn’t been a robbery after all. Yet I couldn’t imagine what it really was.”

“So, then?” Mother said.

“Two days after Thanksgiving, Kevin Ryerson was in town. I called him for a channeling session, thinking I could ask McPherson what had happened. I didn’t tell Kevin anything about it. He went into trance and McPherson came through. The first sentence out of his mouth was ‘Did you detect the fine hand of my pickpocket capacity the other day?’

“Then it hit me. Of course, it was McPherson.”

“McPherson?” said Mother. “Oh my! However did he do it?”

“Well, I asked him just that, and he said he’d miscalculated: he hadn’t meant to dematerialize the bag completely—just to move it behind the salesgirl’s counter.”

“He could have made a lot of trouble for her,”
Mother said. I laughed because that really hadn’t occurred to me.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “I had quite a fight with him about it. In fact, I yelled, ‘What the hell do you mean, you
miscalculated?
’

“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t realized how much you had actually progressed in your own mediumistic light frequencies. My light frequency mingled with yours and the combination of the two caused the bag to dematerialize rather than simply to move.’ ”

Mother leaned forward as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“I couldn’t believe it either,” I told her. “I asked him if he was telling me my purse with all its contents was hanging around somewhere up there on the spiritual plane.”

Mother looked confused. I saw I’d better get this over with.

“Well, he said that would be against cosmic law. But since he was responsible for the mistake of dematerialization, it was up to him to find someone who could karmically profit from it. He said I’d get it all back except for the tapes.”

“The tapes?” said Mother.

“Yes,” I said, “it seems Tom gave the tapes to someone who needed them more than I did.”

“Well, what happened with all the other stuff?” Mother said.

“Oh, it all came back, just as Tom had said it would. Including my prescription eyeglasses, which I had been missing.”

“How?”

“In a manila envelope, left at the door. No name or return address or anything. The point of the whole thing though, really, was that I had become too dependent on the tapes—they wanted to show me I didn’t need them anymore.”

“Oh, my goodness, Shirl,” said Mother. “And this really happened?”

“It certainly did, every bit of it.”

“Well, what do you make of it?” she asked, longing for a “logical” explanation.

“I really don’t know,” I answered, “but until something better explains it, I just have to believe what McPherson said.”

“Oh, my,” said Mother, “I don’t know whether I’d be frightened or not.”

“Well,” I said, “I figure, unless something hurts me, there’s no reason to be scared. You’re not frightened of your ‘friends,’ are you?”

“Oh, no,” she said, “on the contrary. They make me very happy and I love to laugh with them. They’re really nice and I feel they are my friends.”

“Well, then.”

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “But I don’t know how many friends I’d have left in the neighborhood if I told them about my ‘other friends.’ ”

“Yes,” I said, “I know the feeling. But I think you’d be surprised how many other people have ‘friends’ they don’t talk about.”

Mother nodded, sucked in another breath, and rolled her eyes.

Just then Daddy walked back into the room. Mother put her fingers to her lips and said, “Sh-h-h,” as if this were our secret.

“Well, Monkey,” said Daddy, “a cab’s waiting. I think you’d better go.”

I picked up all my stuff, kissed them both goodbye, winked at Mother, and told Daddy to stay with her. I said I’d call them when I got back to New York, so they wouldn’t worry that I had missed my show.

I left the hospital room and closed the door gently. I waited outside for a moment. Then I heard Mother say in a playful voice, “Ira, are you going to take the rest of this chocolate cake home and hide it so Bird Brain won’t eat it?”

“Ummm,” he said, “maybe I should.”

Then, before I walked away, Mother said, “I’m so glad she’s taking a cab so you can stay a little longer and talk.”

Chapter 5

O
n the crowded shuttle back to New York, I thought how parental-child roles are reversed when nature runs its inevitable course. The parents become the children and vice versa. They bring us up lovingly, tolerating our moods and mischief. The circle meets itself when we find ourselves becoming their protectors. I loved them more than I could ever express and was realizing more and more how their values had molded me.

I thought of what an integral part they had played in the development of my professional attitudes as a child. I had just accepted that they were always there, supporting me with their love and care. It was not something I appreciated really. It just was. But looking back, I realize that they were the ones who had steered me, not only into my acting career as such, but toward the patterns that that career had assumed—that is, live performing. I had always sensed that this was what they had wanted for themselves. So, in effect, I was doing it for them as well as for myself.

I was born with extremely weak ankles which didn’t properly support my weight. So at the age of three my parents searched out and found a ballet school with a fine reputation in Richmond, Virginia. They hoped that ballet would act as therapy for strengthening my ankles. Not only did the therapy
work but right from the start I adored the physical expression of dance. It became indispensable to me.

The school was named for its principal teacher, Julia Mildred Harper. I remember Mother being impressed with how Harper taught her students to express themselves with their hands. Mother’s hands had always been one of the most expressive outlets for her, and she identified with that outlet for me. Through one’s hands came feelings, Mother would say. You can express joy, sorrow, terror, and fun through your hands. I listened to her and even today I can discern another person’s character as much through their hands as any other way.

I was not very assertive in school or in dancing class. But Mother continually encouraged me to step up more—to go to the front of the line, to express a new idea for a game or a step. But if I didn’t feel I was ready, I didn’t want to say or do anything. It frustrated Mother a great deal. I don’t think it bothered Daddy very much. Maybe Mother saw herself in me and didn’t want me to make her mistake of being too cautious.

I went to dancing school every day. Even though I needed the expression of dance I hung at the back of the classroom because I had a medium-sized birthmark behind my left armpit. I felt it was so ugly, I didn’t want anybody else to see it. That birthmark haunted me for years. Today, I have to think twice to remember which arm it graces.

My first performance was singing and tap-dancing to “An Apple for the Teacher.” I wore a green cardboard four-leaf clover on my head and I dropped the apple. It was my first laugh. I dropped the apple on purpose every time after that.

As I progressed in school, I regarded my studies as simply what was required; the dancing my parents had begun for me was my life.

I found schoolwork boring. I found the books I
chose
to read an adventure. I loved books about scientists and explorers and philosophers. School, somehow,
managed to make these same human beings seem dull. And I loved my telescope. I would gaze from my bedroom window for hours or lie on the steamy summer grass well into the night wondering what could be going on with the stars that twinkled a message I was sure I would decode someday.

Many mornings I would wake up convinced that I had had a particularly advanced and sophisticated dream relating to medicine or to some other civilization that had existed on earth, but I could never remember the dream well enough to write it down.

So dancing and music were my outlets. In the ballet, whenever I heard Russian music, it would bring me to tears because somehow I felt I understood Russian music in my heart. It reminded me pf a familiar feeling I couldn’t quite remember. But I never mentioned my feelings to anyone because I didn’t understand them.

When I was twelve we moved to Arlington, Virginia, and Mom and Dad enrolled me in one of the best ballet schools in the country, The Washington School of the Ballet in Washington, D.C., right across the Potomac River from where we lived. Lisa Gardiner and Mary Day were my teachers.

Every day after school I took the bus to Georgetown, transferred to a streetcar, and danced for five or six hours, returning to Arlington on the bus at night, doing my homework by the light above my seat as I was jostled home in the dark. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but the habit of this extremely demanding schedule was building a work pattern I hold to to this day. Then it was because I wanted to do it. Now I don’t think I could do and be what I am without it.

As I progressed in my dancing, I became very good at character work. Again, it was the Russian influence. My torso assumed the proper posture during a Russian mazurka as though I had been born to do it. I might have had red hair and freckles and
looked like the map of Ireland, but I
felt
Russian. Whenever I saw the Russian alphabet, I felt I knew how to read it, but I just couldn’t remember how. When my Russian Jewish girlfriends took me home with them after dancing class, I
knew
the food I was eating, even when it was for the first time.

I was confused by how much I responded to anything Russian. I knew I knew nothing about it—yet I knew so much.

I sat starry-eyed when Lisa Gardiner related her days with the Ballet Russe, dancing with Anna Pavlova. Russians were so wildly passionate, allowing their emotions free rein, claiming that control stifled life.

I wanted to be wildly passionate, but as a middle-class WASP American, my upbringing dictated otherwise. Nevertheless, I identified with the Russian soul. I couldn’t understand why. I asked my mother and she said it was because I was talented. It was one of those marvelous nonanswers that parents can give and it served very well to make me wonder what talent really was.

Since I was trained in the art of dance, I grew up knowing something about how that process develops. For me, talent never had anything to do with the intellectual processes. It sprang almost entirely from feeling, expressed through the support system of discipline. My interpretation had to be on the mark and identifiable to another human being. If no one understood what I was trying to convey with my movement, then my feeling wasn’t communicating.

The combination of Lisa Gardiner and Mary Day was a dynamic source of disciplined inspiration for me. Miss Gardiner (it was as though “Miss” were her first name) was a soft-spoken, intellectually continental woman of high sophistication. It was rumored around the dancing school that she had been married once for one night. No one was able to uncover who her husband had been. It was out of
the question to ask Miss Gardiner directly. No one ever knew how old she was either.
That
was definitely unapproachable territory also. But she was deeply kind and wise. She had impeccably erect posture as she sat proudly in her high-backed chair smoking her cigarette from a long silver holder. Her fingernails were polished with a shimmering pink color and sloped as they extended from her fingers. She let the smoke from her cigarette filter through her nose until it curled in the air above her.

Sometimes after class we sat and chatted. She talked about touring and the adventures of the old days in Russia. She talked of the importance of human experience in relation to movement. “So-and-so is not yet a consummate dancer because she hasn’t lived enough. She needs to suffer in order to attain wisdom. Such wisdom will then be evident in her movement.” I listened with rapt attention. She made inspirational sense to me. I heard her with different ears than I heard anyone else. I didn’t want to disappoint her. I felt she understood me and was specifically involved with my progress. I was “special” to her. She didn’t exactly disapprove of my boyfriends or my other interests in life, but made it clear that I had better fish to fry, namely dancing. When one of my boyfriends came to collect me for a date, she was polite and gracious, but upon saying good-bye would take a long drag on her filtered cigarette and more slowly than usual let the smoke spiral out of her nose as though counteracting a bad smell. With subtle disdain, she would wave me into the night as though secretly understanding that I would wise up when I was finished with my adolescent years. It was at those times that I was maddened with curiosity about the real story of her one-night marriage.

Mary Day was her opposite. Miss Day (Miss was her first name too) was a direct, down-to-earth, instructional pile driver of a teacher. She had black flashing eyes which she orchestrated to flash on cue under carefully arched eyebrows. She was about five
feet six with size four feet which moved like greased lightning when she demonstrated a “combination” which she wished us to execute. Her voice rang with command, and when she didn’t like what she saw, she made no attempt to be sensitive in expressing her judgment. She walked with a proud stride, her feet turning out ducklike in opposite directions, her arms churning defiantly at her sides. Her movements were assertive and rapid, giving the impression that she wished to waste no time in her ambition to structure the best ballet school east of the Mississippi and south of New York.