Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (5 page)

I found a place. I stood up tall, gazed straight ahead, and, for the first time, lay my hand on the barre.

Chapter 2

I QUIT.

That’s what I muttered to myself as I walked out of that first class at the Boys and Girls Club, determined that it would also be my last. I’d spent an hour feeling like a broken marionette, twisting my torso, stretching my arms, uncertain all the while of what I was doing.

Was this even dance? Standing in a line with a dozen girls, spending an hour practicing how to flex your toes, hold your arms, bend your knees? This wasn’t anything like the stomps and jumps I loved on the drill team.

I scurried past the gym on my way to other activities the next day, the day after, and the day after that. But Cindy wasn’t giving up. About a week after I’d decided I had no interest in continuing, she spotted me.

“Misty!” she called, “can you come here for a second?”

Trapped, I reluctantly followed her to the front of her class. This was about as bad as it could get for nervous old me. I’d
felt overwhelmed in that first class; it was too much information coming too fast, and I was way behind the other students. I hated feeling unprepared and confused. And now to have all eyes fixed on me when I didn’t know what I was doing? I was scared to death.

But Cindy proceeded to gently stretch and mold my body into various positions, using me as an example for the other kids. She lifted my leg to my ear, tugged and flexed my feet. Whatever pose she conjured, I was able to hold. Cindy said that in all her years of dancing, in all her years of teaching, she had never seen anyone quite like me.

I’m not sure I believed her. But her praise piqued my curiosity, and I sheepishly joined the rest of the students at the barre, deciding to give her classes another try.

Cynthia Bradley could be very persuasive.

You knew she was a free spirit from the first time you met her. She wore her flaming red hair in a short, sleek bob; and her big, glittering earrings were so heavy they pulled at her lobes. It almost made me wonder how her thin, long frame didn’t topple over from their weight.

She would tell me later that from the time she was a little girl and heard “King of the Road” on her parents’ record player, she knew that she wanted to be onstage, singing and dancing in front of an audience much larger than the family members who watched her sing along with Roger Miller in the living room. She studied ballet as a child and got a chance to dance professionally when she was seventeen, performing with the Virginia Ballet Company and Louisville Ballet, among others. But she suffered an injury soon after and had to give up her career before it really had the chance to blossom.

So she switched from dance to music. She renamed herself “Cindy Vodo” and started a punk band called the Wigs that became a little bit of a big deal in the San Pedro punk scene. They had hits like “Stiff Me” that got a lot of radio play in the 1980s. But Cindy still relied on ballet to pay the rent. She started a school in Palos Verdes, an upscale pocket of Southern California not far from San Pedro, so she could teach ballet on the side. She eventually even married one of her dance students, Patrick Bradley, who, I would later learn, was as steady and serene as Cindy was flighty and dramatic.

The Wigs wound up settling in San Pedro because it was close to the heart of the L.A. music business, and also near Laguna Niguel, where most of the members worked their day jobs. Cindy, likewise, moved her teaching there, starting the San Pedro Ballet School with Patrick.

Cindy straddled the lines between elegance and eccentricity, self-absorption and altruism. But Cindy would also make me—a girl with knees that curved backward even when I stood straight, my size 7 feet that were still too large for my stick-figure frame—feel like the most beautiful and loved little ballerina in the world. I’d never met anyone like her.

Those first afternoons in her class at the Boys and Girls Club, I would walk from school and take my place among a dozen or so other budding dancers. They stretched and bowed, their brows creased in concentration. But Cindy, staring attentively, seemed to focus solely on me.

The class was very basic. We learned only the most fundamental steps of ballet.

First position:
heels together, toes pointed in opposite directions.

Second position:
the same, but with space wide enough to slip two feet between your heels.

Third position:
the heel of one foot meeting the arch of the other.

Fourth position:
one foot turned out in front of the other, with about a foot of space in between.

Fifth position:
your feet turned out but crossed in front of each other, parallel like an equal sign.

Ballet teachers usually create combinations, mixing and matching the steps and positions of ballet technique for their students to execute, but Cindy kept it simple.

She would lead, and I tentatively strayed from the barre to follow. I stood on my tiptoes and held out my arms as though I was cradling a giant balloon. My arms were rounded, floating, strong enough not to drop my imaginary sphere but soft enough not to make it pop. Then I spun around, lifting one foot and placing it down into fifth position, again and again until I had made my way halfway across the gym—my first
pirouettes.

One afternoon, I lifted my arms above my head and leaped, my right leg stretched straight in front, my left leg extended backward. It was like the splits I would do in the backyard or during drill-team practice, only in the air. My first
grand jeté.

I would do many more. And in those moments, when I was soaring, getting stronger, going higher, I felt exhilarated.

Cindy was impressed, whatever I did.

“It’s just amazing that you can already do all these things,” she’d murmur, after I’d done an
arabesque
or she’d bent me this way and that.

My body yielded to her every suggestion. It was as if I’d been doing ballet all my life, and my limbs instinctively remembered what my conscious mind had somehow forgotten. I didn’t question it, but I didn’t take it for granted, either. Just like with my schoolwork, my drill-team choreography, and anything else I set out to do, my overwhelming need to please—to be perfect—was there in ballet class, too.

So were my insecurities. Despite my prowess, ballet class still felt like being thrown into the deep end of the pool when I’d only just become brave enough to stick my face in the water. Walking into the gym each day, I continued to feel like an outsider. Instead of the leotard and tights that were de rigueur, I was still wearing the baggy clothes I put on for drill-team practice each day. And as I looked at my dance mates, it became clear that, by ballet standards, I was ancient.

Most ballerinas start to dance when they are sipping juice boxes in preschool. I was thirteen years old. Self-doubt taunted me.

“You’re too old. You’re behind. You’ll never catch up.”

But Cindy disagreed. She’d found what she was looking for.

Cindy’s stint at the Boys and Girls Club was always meant to be temporary. Her studio, the San Pedro Dance Center, was in another corner of the community that was far more affluent and much less diverse than mine. But her desire to share the magic and discipline of dance with those who otherwise might not be exposed to it brought her to South Cabrillo Avenue. She and Mike Lansing, the head of our Boys and Girls Club, were friends, and together they had the idea of turning the club into a sort of feeder program, or scouting base.
She’d come to teach the basics of ballet to underprivileged children, then pick out those who were the most talented and give them the chance for further study at her school to hone their talents. Cindy chose me, along with a couple of other promising students.

“You need more intense training and the chance to be with strong dancers who can push you,” she told me after I’d spent one forty-five-minute class practicing the same basic positions and
pliés.
“You’ll get that at my school, and we should start as soon as possible.”

I listened politely, but in my heart I didn’t feel it. Why in the world would I want to trek across town to study ballet? How would I get there?

I knew I had talent and enjoyed dancing, but I still got a thrill from drill team. I was so excited finally to be following in the footsteps of my big sister, Erica, and Mommy’s, too, since she’d once been a Kansas City Chiefs cheerleader. Drill team—
that
was my dream.

Seeing that she was clearly getting nowhere with me, Cindy tried next to enlist my mother, sending home notes expressing how excited she would be to have me as her student. But she chose the wrong messenger. I’d leave the notes that raved about my talent and potential smushed in the back of my Pee Chee folder, or toss them, grease-stained, into the trash, along with my sandwich wrapper and the other remnants of my lunch.

Of course I didn’t tell Cindy that her notes were barely surviving my trek home. Instead, I made up excuses—that my mother was busy, or still thinking about it, or not really sure. But Cindy kept pressing, promising me a full scholarship that would pay for my training as well as my attire. I’d have that
leotard at last, and she’d even give me a ride from school to her studio each afternoon.

Now I knew I had to tell Mommy. It was like getting an offer for a job you didn’t really want but realizing, begrudgingly, that the perks and benefits were probably too good to turn down. I told Cindy that maybe she and my mother should talk and reluctantly gave her our home phone number.

Cindy called that evening. I wasn’t sure what Mommy would say. Maybe the twenty-five-minute drive from school each day would turn her off to the idea, I thought. I
hoped.
But right away, Mommy said studying with Cindy could be good for me. Mommy didn’t see my nerves or ambivalence, only the opportunity.

“You know, when you were a little girl, you loved ballet,” she told me, smiling after she’d gotten off the phone.

“I did?” I asked incredulously, having no memory of even knowing what ballet was before I started taking classes in the Boys and Girls Club gym.

“Yes,” my mother said. “I bought you a tutu when you were four or five to wear for Halloween. You didn’t want to take it off. You wanted to wear it to school and you’d put it on every afternoon when you got home. You even slept in it. It got so raggedy I finally had to sneak and throw that thing away.”

I still didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Anyway,” Mommy said finally, “Miss Bradley seems to think you’ve got some potential. Let’s give it a try and see how it goes.”

And so it began. Sometimes I would hitch a ride across town with Erica, who was now seventeen, and her boyfriend, Jeff, slipping into the backseat of his 1989 white Suzuki
Samurai for the trip to Cindy’s ritzy neighborhood. But most days I would ride with Cindy, who would be waiting in front of the school, watching for my tiny frame and big feet to emerge from the crowd.

If I didn’t yet feel like a ballerina, I now at least looked like one, thanks to the black leotard, pink tights, and pink slippers my scholarship afforded. Five days a week I’d take my place among students who were much more advanced than those I’d danced beside at the Boys and Girls Club—and I’d try my best to keep up.

Unlike the club gym where we danced on wood, Cindy’s studio was the real thing, though, like its founder, it had its quirks.

It was in a shopping center with a glass front that allowed you to gaze right into the small front studio where the youngest students took tap dance. Then there was the back studio, where the ballet company rehearsed. It resembled a box with mirrors—compact and spare. We faced gray walls as we glided across a sprung floor covered in marley. A few tiny dressing rooms and a bathroom were tucked in the corner. And while most ballet classes have an actual pianist providing the musical background, there was no piano at the San Pedro Dance Center, just a portable sound system and a pile of CDs and tapes.

I would get to know every groove of that space over the next three years, spending nearly every day that I wasn’t performing, or in a program far away, there, in that studio.

My classmates were mostly white, but there were a few other children of color.

Catalina, who to this day remains one of my best friends,
was Latina, round, loud, and full of light. She would gild her uniform of black and pink with tiny, bright flowers braided into her hair. I was older, but no one would have guessed that because I was so small, barely topping seventy pounds and standing merely a whisper over four feet. Catalina immediately assumed the role of big sister.

“Do you need any help, little girl?” she asked me during my first week at the school, when I was straightening out my leotard in the dressing room.

“No, I’m fine,” I answered, giving her a side glance.
Little girl?
“How old are you?” I asked her.

“Ten,” she replied.

“Well,” I said a bit haughtily, “I’m thirteen.” Her almond eyes were disbelieving. But from that day forward, we were rarely ever apart.

Then there was Jason Haley, an African American boy to whom I became very close. Tall, dark, and elegant, Jason was in all my classes at the center and would often be my dance partner. He, too, was a latecomer to ballet, one of Cindy’s scholarship students, and a member of the Boys and Girls Club. We had all that in common and much more.

Ballet was a respite in otherwise turbulent lives for the both of us.

Jason had bounced between homes as a child, with his father gone and his mother grappling with poverty. By the time we met, he was living with an aunt. He was gifted and graceful, but raw. You never knew if he would show up for a performance, and he rarely made it to ballet class on time. Eventually, he would drift away from the studio.

But for a while it was we three brown kids, and our
presence reflected Cindy’s character and vision. She was different from most people in the ballet world, who felt Giselle and Odette were best performed by dovelike sprites, lissome and ivory-skinned. Cindy believed that ballet was richer when it embraced diverse shapes and colors. There would be times in my career when I would struggle to remember that, but I would eventually come back to that conviction, that the stage on which I performed was brighter for having me, even if some in the audience or dancing beside me didn’t always agree.