Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (9 page)

I didn’t know it at first, but when Cindy offered me the scholarship to attend her school, she had already had a discussion with her friend Elizabeth, and Elizabeth and her husband, Richard, had agreed to help pay for my supplies. That was no small undertaking. Pointe shoes cost eighty dollars a pair, and I ran through them the way a basketball player exhausts his sneakers. I was also still growing, so there was the constant need for new tights and leotards. Elizabeth and Richard would help me financially for many more years. That’s how much they believed in and cared for me.

Elizabeth became one of my many mentors, and by the time I was in high school, she and her husband had declared themselves my honorary godparents. She observed my classes at Cindy’s school and never missed any of my performances. I would often spend the night at her home, and she remained in my life long after Cindy and I were forced to part. To this day, I still see Elizabeth and Richard, my godparents, often.

I ALWAYS SAY THERE
are no shortcuts in ballet, no way to skip steps. That was certainly my truth. You had to know how to do a
plié
—bending your knees over your toes gracefully—and a
passé
—passing your foot above and behind your knee,
then back again—before you could whip your leg around in a
fouetté.

So I started from the bottom at the San Pedro Dance Center, with the babies (as I dubbed the youngest students), though I was so small that most onlookers wouldn’t have been able to tell that I was nearly fourteen and years older than my classmates.

In that most basic of classes, we would hold on to the barre with both hands as we practiced
pliés
and went over the most elemental ballet positions. First, second, third, fourth, fifth.

Then it was on to pointe class, where we’d do the same steps we’d practiced at the barre, but elevated to the tips of our toes. I was taking three classes a day, each more advanced than the one before. There were maybe twenty students in each group—most of them girls, most of them white. The classes moved so quickly that half the time I didn’t know what the steps with their complex French names and odd spellings were called.

But Cindy threw me into those more advanced classes from the start because she believed I could immediately pick up what was going on around me. I just needed to watch the ballet instructor, or the videos he or she would play, or the other students.

I remember when I began learning how to do those
fouetté
turns. I was always so eager for that class, so excited to try that complicated move again and again, figuring out how to make it better, how to make it work. Cindy taught me how to do it by holding on to the barre, breaking it down into little steps.

“Now you
plié
,” she’d explain. “Now swing your leg to the side. Then bring it into
passé.
”

I’d repeat those steps every day for an hour, holding on to the barre until I was finally able to let go and make those turns in the center of the room. The day that I was finally able to do it—
plié! relevé! passé!
—was exhilarating.

Then, the next day, it was back to basics, where I would polish what I had learned in the more advanced classes, making sure that every step, every
port de bras
was as pristine as it could be. Learning to dance with a partner, a
pas de deux,
was a class unto itself.

Sometimes Patrick taught the class, but my usual instructor, and my first partner, was Charles Maple. He had been a soloist with ABT.

I was so small and fearless that I became the student he would dance with to teach all the others.

“Hold your body and don’t move,” he’d say, as he lifted me over his head with one arm. I could be as still as a statue or as flexible as a rag doll—whatever he needed me to be—as he tossed, lifted, and twirled me around. I would end the class giddy and out of breath.

I wasn’t really aware of how quickly I was learning. But I began to hear a word over and over again—from Cindy, from Charles, from Elizabeth—that would follow me, define me.

Prodigy.

Initially, I didn’t understand that word’s magnitude, how it meant that the instinctive space from which I started would be the standard many expected me to maintain. All I knew then, at the beginning, was that dancing was fun, natural. And my constant quest to please pushed me to keep getting better.

All these years later, my technique is very secure, clean, and strong. Yet I still go to ballet classes daily. Dancers understand.
It’s because, while we know we’ll never achieve perfection, we have to keep trying. Dancers have to keep studying, practicing, and striving until the day they retire.

It’s what makes ballet so beautiful, that razor’s edge of timing and technique that is the difference between leaping and landing perfectly, or collapsing to the floor.

Human frailty prevents perfection. Your body is forever giving in to fatigue or injury. Something is always a little off. And as your body ages, as the sprains and stresses of life become indelible pieces of your being, your dance technique must change as well. As Misty the woman has grown, so has Misty the ballerina, adjusting to new realities and sudden limitations.

But if you’ve never walked in a pair of pointe shoes, it’s hard to understand.

“You’re still taking ballet class?” a childhood friend once asked me incredulously.

The question used to make me weary. But no more.

“Yes,” I answered. “I’ll be taking ballet classes forever.”

BALLET SUFFUSED MY NEW
home life as well. I discovered American Ballet Theatre as I was sitting in front of the television in Cindy and Patrick’s family room.

Other than music videos, I had never seen professional dancing of any kind—let alone ballet. But at Cindy’s it was pretty much all we watched. Gone were the Sunday afternoon football games that had dominated my family life. At the Bradleys, I would sit in front of the TV for hours watching
videotaped performances by ABT. I was mesmerized, the same way I had been when I discovered gymnastics. Only it wasn’t Nadia Comaneci on the screen. It was Gelsey Kirkland, Natalia Makarova, Rudolf Nureyev, and Paloma Herrera.

ABT was founded in 1940. Based in New York, it quickly became known as one of the finest classical ballet companies in the world. Cindy and Patrick knew that. And they saw it as my destiny.

Mikhail Baryshnikov became ABT’s artistic director in 1980. But just a few years earlier, he was a performer, at Wolf Trap. It was a tour de force. He and Gelsey Kirkland, the famed ballerina of the 1960s and 1970s and one of George Balanchine’s muses, danced the
pas de deux
from
Don Quixote
, and I watched the videotape of their performance perhaps a hundred times. It was then that I decided that I wanted to be Kitri.

In
Don Quixote,
Kitri was the innkeeper’s daughter, sensual and full of fire, refusing to marry the wealthy nobleman and wanting instead to be with Basilio, the barber. She communicates her sass and spunk with every move, gently turning her torso while tipping one shoulder—an
épaulement
—all the while seductively opening, closing, and waving her beautiful fan.

With a simple flick of the wrist, or the childish stomping of her feet when she is being forced to marry someone she doesn’t want, she oozes attitude. The ballet is full of quick, explosive footwork, as well as fierce, large jumps. But the choreography is only part of it. The dancer must take on Kitri’s personality, must
become
her, to convey the tale successfully.

I don’t know why I saw myself in Kitri. I just felt a connection.

Gelsey Kirkland made me fall in love with Kitri, and it was through Kitri that I discovered Paloma.

Paloma Herrera was one of the youngest stars in the history of ABT. Born in Buenos Aires, she was fifteen when she joined its corps de ballet, seventeen when she was promoted to soloist, and nineteen when she became a principal dancer. She became my idol, and I followed her the way other teenagers obsessed over Winona Ryder’s next movie or Madonna’s newest love affair. The first time I ever saw
Don Quixote
performed live at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, Paloma was the star.

She had just been promoted to principal and was playing Kitri to Angel Corella’s Basilio. At that time, the two of them were the hottest thing in ballet. They were both young, beautiful, and Latin—and ideal for those roles. Cindy and I went to see them together, and I remember sitting in my seat stunned, starstruck.

I followed Paloma’s career for years, collecting articles about her in
Dance
and
Pointe
magazines, as well as the
New York Times.
The luxury watch company Movado was also a sponsor of ABT, and Paloma’s visage graced their ads.

I was desperate to follow Paloma’s path. I, too, had to join a major dance company as soon as I could, and I resolved that by the time other girls were picking out their dresses for senior prom, I would be a principal dancer taking the lead in
Romeo and Juliet
or
La Bayadère.

Of course, that made no sense. I had come to ballet too late to be a soloist or principal before I exited my teens. What Paloma had done was rare even for ballerinas like her, those who had danced their entire lives.

Four years later, when I was seventeen and had joined ABT, I would meet Paloma. We would share a stage and become good friends. But long before we were peers, she was everything to me.

WHILE BALLET WAS THE
center of my life with Cindy, it was only one part. The rigors of ballet, classes, rehearsals, and a growing number of performances were cushioned by the warm rituals of family life.

This was new for me. I’d experienced structure when I lived with Robert, but that had been accompanied by violence and fear. The routines at the Bradleys left me feeling protected and loved.

I don’t know if Cindy and Patrick were exactly wealthy. But based on what I had been exposed to, they definitely seemed well-off financially, and stable. When I did my homework, it was against a backdrop of stillness and quiet. I even had a family pet for the first time, a little black poodle named Misha that Cindy had named after Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Not long after I moved in with them, Cindy, Patrick, Wolfie, and I went to a photo studio and had family portraits taken. The pictures of us—me in a black leotard, and Wolfie in a pint-size Danskin—were perched all over the house. We had become a family.

When I met Cindy’s parents, Catherine and Irving, they told me to call them “Bubby” and “Papa,” just like Wolfie did. We spent so much time in each other’s home that, when Bubby and Papa eventually bought a house around the corner, Wolfie and I each had our own room there.

I also began to learn the rites and traditions of Judaism, Cindy’s faith.

Growing up, there had been many Sundays when Harold would drive to Robert’s, scoop up my brothers, sisters, and me, and take us to church. But I was Christian primarily in an “it’s Easter, it’s Christmas, let’s go to service” kind of way.