JUST AN ORANGE

There are days when I long to bring it all back. To live in tights and bare feet, to move and work my body in odd ways until my muscles ache. To feel the euphoric sense of open space waiting to be molded and designed by shapes that consist of arms and torsos and legs. To be in a room with people I hardly know, and yet to feel that we have been in that room together our entire lives. The whole of our existence is the wooden floor pressing against our toes, the reflection of bodies in the large mirrors on the wall, as we pull and stretch out our fingertips beyond their natural extension.

Energy grows and builds with each exercise as our bodies push outward what comes from inside. Even simple plie-releves are laced with tension and release. It is the whole body that breathes and not just the lungs. Motion and momentum gather as we cross from one end of the room, to the other. I take a deep breath. The music pulses and sways, and my body follows suit.

Dance is my passion. Some of my earliest memories involve dance. I had my first lesson when I was three years-old. It was held in a large gymnasium. I was frustrated because we were learning to skip and I could not do it. I could only gallop. My young legs could not grasp the concept of pulling up only one knee at a time as I hopped, before landing and lifting up the other. I went home and practiced in our living room, one moment being elated because I thought I had achieved the skip only to realize I had fallen back into the up-up of the gallop.

I continued to take gymnastic and ballet lesson up until high school where I tried out for and made the modern dance company. I fell in love with modern dance. I loved the freedom of movement that we were allowed and the emotion that could be portrayed. I loved the camaraderie that took place at rehearsals that went from 2:30 pm to midnight the week before a concert. I loved the rush of feeling completely alive as I moved through the space having an experience that, at the same time, felt totally surreal.

I don’t dance now. I did study it; I was a dance major. Was. Do I still have the right to claim dance as my passion when obviously it didn’t win out amongst a myriad of options I had to choose from? The closest I get to dance now is the occasional concert. For awhile, living close to where I went to school, I would sneak into a dance studio at my university instead of taking my evening jog around the track. And then I didn’t even do that anymore. It has been twelve years since I was a dancer. Twelve years! I stop to look back–I can’t believe I’ve actually gone that long without a regular technique class, without rehearsals and performances. How could I have filled up that time so easily? There were entire days, weeks even, when I lived in a leotard.

I left school after my sophomore year for a time. I was not in a place where I had the opportunity to dance. As the days went by I remember watching my dancer’s body slowly seeping through the cracks. My alignment and posture, the complete flexibility, my technical feats were becoming things of the past. By the time I returned to school I knew that what I wanted to accomplish as a dancer would never work with what I wanted to accomplish as a person. My flaw was there. Maybe it was wrong to differentiate between the dancer and myself. If I never could have seen myself without dance, I probably wouldn’t have ever been without it. It can be disturbing to look back and see your passion left on the cutting board, or in my case on the black marley floor. But I guess there are times when we have to give up a dream for other dreams that need to become our own.

A few years after returning to school while walking across campus I heard a beat, music. It was familiar. I looked to where the sound was drifting from to see human forms moving simultaneous–rows of bodies pushing across the space. They were dancers in street clothes and a middle-aged black man with no hair was leading and clapping them across the grass through the shards of late morning sunlight that was passing through the leaves of the surrounding trees.

I fell enchanted by the motion and the rhythm. They penetrated into my body, piercing and reminding me that I should be out there, that I could be. I felt a longing and a homesickness as I watched, as I wanted to join in, to move with them, more that anything. But as I stood there, lost in their movements I realized that a part of me was out there with them. It was an odd sensation of participation in an event that required a body, even though my body wasn’t there. I knew then that although I may never take another technique class, I may never again feel that thrill of standing on stage before an audience of hundreds, that I will always be one who moves to music, whose heart is syncopated by the drum beat, whose senses get lost in a whirl of muscle twisting and stretching and pulling grace our from the pockets of the air. I will always be a dancer.

There is a piece of music that we played in my junior high band. I don’t know what the name of it is, but if the triumphant opening measures ever come to my mind I find myself sitting in a hard plastic chair, with a battered black music stand in front of me, flute raised to my lips, arms raised to the sides of my body holding the flute. Our teacher taps on his stand with the baton, he raises his arms and his lips form around numbers he does not say, only mouths: and one, and two, and …Suddenly the entire room is filled with the rich sound of so many instruments playing their different part. I play, then rest, my flute on my lap, counting the beats in my head, nodding to my sheet music. I play again. The band has been working hard on this piece.

We are young; around fourteen. But in that moment we are something more, and it’s thrilling. Transcending the awkward beginnings of adolescence, we experience in this band room a synergy: a power greater than the sum of its parts. Somehow we achieve what we are constantly searching for in the locker-lined halls of our school. We experience the euphoria of belonging, in the most exquisite way.

It’s a belonging that goes beyond clothes, hairstyles and one’s love of NKOTB. The room is populated with more uncool than cool. The social rules, the invisible walls that keep us wary of one another and apart — the dirty jeans and unkempt T’s of the boys, the curled snarl of over-hairsprayed bangs of the girls; the designer jeans, the right way to curl your bangs — they fall away. For a few moments the uncomfortable banter we coolly play at during lunch break, accompanied by the cruel whispers and asides that haunt the hallways of every junior high, are non-existent.

We are carried away as we follow the notes, a measure at a time. We’re too young to understand all of this; to understand the beauty of everyone knowing their part and unabashedly playing it. We only recognize this thrill of creating music. And for the time being, that seems to be enough.

I am a Semi-Colon

You are elegant, understated, and subtle in your communication. You’re very smart (and you know it), but you don’t often showcase your brilliance. Instead, you carefully construct your arguments, ideas, and theories until they are bulletproof. You see your words as an expression of yourself, and you are careful not to waste them. Your friends see you as enlightened, logical, and shrewd. (But what you’re saying often goes right over their heads.)You excel in: The Arts You get along best with: The Colon

What Punctuation Mark Are You?

This Lovely Quiz found at Toddled Dredge

Should I mention that even before I looked at this quiz I suspected this is the mark I would be all along? Hee. I really do have an affection for the semi-colon.

Just an Orange, simply put, is sort of a blog about, well, a lot of things. I loved my Humanities 202 class in college. Maybe this is my way of revisiting it. But more than that, I just enjoy that kind of stuff. Also my brain could use the exercise of thinking about it.

This blog has been in the works for some time. Almost since the inception of Bells on Their Toes over a year and a half ago, the idea of having a place to write about things that were a little more separate from my life was intriguing and tempting. But also a little bit time consuming and tiring. Which is why it’s taken awhile to get the ball rolling. Now that my youngest is nearing nine months and my sleep to awake ratio has improved considerably, I’ve decided to take the plunge.

So what will this be exactly? Well, poetry maybe the easiest way to sum it up. Not just the kind of poetry that uses words, but poetry that requires stone, or brush strokes, or musical notes, or brain waves from both right and left hemispheres, or simply a person. But make no mistake. Plenty of word poetry. I love words. And words may be what I know best.

I fully submit to the title of Amateur (definitely a capital “A”) when it comes to these things. In other words, I reserve the right to not completely understand what I’m talking about.

My humble credentials are as follows: I have a genetic history of such things; my dad is a writer and a poet, my mother is an artist, as is my dad’s mother and her father. I grew up reading book after book under my covers in bed at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I write (you can see that). I dabble a bit with drawing and painting for fun. When I was young my dad would play records of classical music for me as I fell asleep. The music of Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin would float, or more accurately, roll down the hall from the living room and into my bedroom. (This was before my reading days.) On Saturdays I would dance in our living room to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Copeland’s Rodeo.

I continued reading (Gone With the Wind in three days). I took some piano lessons and later played the flute in my jr. high band. I majored for a while in Modern Dance in college, but switched to English, with a minor in Psych, figuring that words and analysis might last longer than the youthful body. But I miss dancing. Swan Lake is my favorite ballet. I love Martha Graham’s technique for modern dance. I got to see her company perform once. Oh heaven.

I have lived for a time in France and spent a few days in Italy loving every minute I had to explore the art and architecture around me. I followed that architectural adventure by living north of NYC for a few years, where the houses of Scarsdale etc., spoiled me forever as far as what a neighborhood should look like. Too bad, those houses are out of my price range!

I’m married to a film teacher, who also bakes bread and cake. He’s quite versatile. He’s also good for carrying on a philosophical discussion or two. He is brilliant. I am not. But sometimes I like to pretend.

So there you go. And here I go. Welcome to Just an Orange. Care for a slice?