When Kristie was five or six, she took tap dancing lessons along with hula and gymnastics. Her mother took an adult class the next hour. Kristie sat waiting for her coloring pictures or reading a book, but what she was really interested in was the more complex tap routine the ladies were working on.
out back down step step,
out back down step step,
step a slaap step
hop back, hop back, step, step
slaap step step, hop, step,
hop slaap, step step hop,
hop slaap, step step hop,
hop, out back down slaap
step step hop,
jump and pose.
She learned their routine and was asked to perform it with them. She stole the show. She loved it! This began a lifelong love of dance. She was never built like a dancer. She had junk in the trunk and a fully developed bust line. She was born a singer, but she got a religious feeling from dance.
She took ballet in junior high and high school from a teacher who was known in the community for her Russian technique. God! She was hard on her students! She kept them locked in a deep second position for 15 minutes at a time. Their thighs were shaking with muscle tremors and sweat was pouring over their eyes.
The instructor walked around the room with her baton and tapped each girl pointedly on the area she wished to correct. They all had great respect for her, but Kristie knew she would never make the cut. She wasn’t cut out to be a dancer. Still she persisted. She lies on the floor lifting each leg up second by second one inth at a time. Concentration. Focus. This training hurt.
In college she began taking dance classes of all types. In show dancing and movement for the actor everything was so broad. Keep that smile on your face. Present! Present! Life is a cabaret!
Jazz was a great class. Lots of combinations and routines. Fun! African-Haitian isolations all to the beat of a live conga drum. All fun and got her into better shape. Dancing is extreme aerobics. She can still hear the drums in her head:
Point and plie,
bump and bump,
contractions, head rolls,
shoulder rolls, monkey nipples,
side to side, and front to back,
contractions, contractions…
forward and back and forward and back.
hips: bump, bump, bump, bump!
feet and legs and leaps and running.
Her true love was modern. She would get to class about a half an hour early, do 100 crunches, stretch, and be totally warmed up before one of the goddesses came in to teach the class.
Two of them she loved unequivocally and one of them she alternately tolerated and admired anyway. One of them was an outright bitch and one of them she would have been lovers with… but the dance itself was her religion.
In a beautiful hardwood studio with the redwoods all around them visible through the windows. Early morning fog rising from the ground. Their temple. The temple of the dance. She had two years there with the most excellent teachers. Her body became strong. She was in her prime.
She longs to relive the feeling she had then, but thirty years later is a long way from her youth and she can’t do triple pirouettes anymore. Down in the splits and up in a back bend is just not possible now. But she is great in the pool! She can still dance in the water!
Late at night in the darkness with some quiet new age music playing, she dances alone for her sleeping husband and her dog. She blesses them as she moves in her best Isadora Duncan impression. Long live The Dance.
