In many ways, whatever discipline and imagination I possess I owe at least in part to nine years of dancing lessons.
My first teacher had danced in George M. Cohan musicals but moved to New Hampshire and taught Saturday mornings in the local Masonic hall. I learned the basic ballet vocabulary: the five positions, plus entrechet, plie, arabesque, barre. I read a comic book biography of Anna Pavlova. The first photograph of me as a dancer came from a recital at the New Hampshire Highway Hotel (now the location of an L.L. Bean outlet). In that black and white photograph, I am the only one doing the bow correctly. With my banana curls and leotard, I am looking into the camera. If who I am now has any connection to her, that girl with the curls, it is that she is trying to focus and do the bow right, as she has been taught, and more importantly, as she knows--appreciates--it should be done.
When the former George M. Cohan dancer stopped teaching, I carried my ballet slippers and tap shoes in a hatbox to lessons a half hour away. Miss Sally was a local girl who had trained in Boston and New York and who had her own thriving dance studio, heavily pink, high on the third floor above a bowling alley. In a photo from one of those recitals in the Palace Theatre, I am on the end of a chorus line; you can even see the edge of the photographer's backdrop. I have gone from banana curls to pin curls; I am no doubt wearing my mother's red lipstick. I had not yet moved to tap shoes with higher heels (which I never did like). We all have bare legs, tap shoes and sequins. I am the only one not looking at the camera, but I am smiling. In a second photo, a solo, I am standing by myself, in a dance pose, and I look happy there, too.
Dancing school was about standing in a line and watching the teacher, watching myself in the mirror. And it was about listening. Together and separate. With the music. (And to some extent it was about muscle memory.)
And it was about practice--imitation and practice. Many days after school, I danced away to the music on the record player in the basement, my tap shoes tapping on the cement floor until the grey paint started to peel. I practiced the routines--usually one new step every week--and I made up my own little dances. I loved to dance. I just loved it. With my tap shoes--even with no audience--I made a joyful noise.
How else but to learn except by imitation and practice, by approximation leading to ability--and maybe to perfection?
I loved dancing school, and I stopped the lessons only when I found I needed more time to study once I got to high school. Memorizing Latin declensions and conjugations replaced dance; in those days, if you wanted to go to a college of any kind, you were expected to have studied two foreign languages. (French started the next year.) I didn't know it when I registered for the College Prep curriculum, but foreign languages required practice and discipline. So after I got out of school at 2.30, I went home, sat at my desk, and I memorized and memorized. I spoke out loud to myself. I made flash cards and wrote out the vocabulary again and again. I did the homework and practiced some more. Mimicry-memorization, pattern drill. Over and over.
About the same time, I stopped going to Sunday school even intermittently. Consider the context: in 1955 and in the state of rock walls and Live Free or Die, my parents bought a colonial four bedroom house, one big and solid with a hedge around the front and eventually a stockade fence around the back. From there I had gone to dancing school. The house was down the street from the local pre-Vatican II grammar school and church, St. John Le Baptiste. In pairs, nuns in full regalia (which the burqa has reminded me of many times, to be honest) strolled down the street. Some of the children in the neighborhood told me that since I was not a member of The One True Church that I was bound to go to hell where, depending on the day, either I would burn forever or I would be eaten by the hell hounds.
The majority language was Canadian French. I spoke no local French, and although I attended Sunday school at the Congregational Church one town over, I was never baptized. Instead, religious training was basic and simple, and although my family did not say grace before meals, we did when we had company who did. (That says something, I think.) We did not believe in religious bureaucracy (communicating with God could be direct) or in original sin. I learned The Golden Rule and "In Christ There is No East or West" right before the Doxology. I learned to light one candle from another. It was all very New Testament; my mother fashioned the old curtains from the den into costumes for the Three Wise Men for the Christmas pageant. Thanksgiving was a celebration outdone only by Christmas, the most memorable one when I was given a box of Nancy Drew books. I was something of a reader before I read Nancy Drew, but I certainly became one after that Christmas.
When the time came for me to go to college, my parents said I could join a sorority if I wanted to but that it might not be wise for me to make friends based on how much money they had or how they dressed. When my parents were asked, much later, why they had moved us to where they had, my father said they had wanted to give us the best of both worlds: the real world and the world beyond it. My father had a white collar job and a company car. One of my friend's father was a foreman in a Thom McCann shoe factory, and others had jobs in construction and at the post office. The mothers never worked until the children were in high school (or later) when they got jobs in retail or offices. One of the mothers gave perms in her kitchen; she gave me my first Tonette perm. (My mother's mother had said I would always need curls.)
What I learned in and out of dancing school and Sunday school stayed with me. I had no intention of joining a sorority, and I did not even audition (which is what rushing sounded like). But I did eventually find two homes of a sort: in writing (and other) classes, and more visibly, with a group of friends in International House. I had friends from Massachusetts and New Jersey and also from Tibet, India, Thailand, Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil, Japan. I arrived at the University of New Hampshire having studied both Latin (two years) and French (three years) and had high enough scores on my French SAT that I was exempt from the foreign language requirement, but I took a year of German anyway. (And later, in a wonderful old-timey traditional Ph.D. program, I took two years of Spanish in addition to my French to satisfy the foreign language requirement.)
I studied these languages with the same discipline that I had practiced my dance routines, but I am getting ahead of myself. (And it is worth noting that foreign language teaching at the time was far more grammar- and conversation-based than it was culture-based. There were certainly no eclairs or baguettes in French class, for instance. No videos. Not even any tapes, now that I think about it. And blessedly, no working in small groups.)
In college, my friends were all over the political spectrum. Most leaned more left than right, but one friend, a devout (and I do mean devout) Republican in International House and during the time of the Vietnam War, asked when people disagreed with him, "What would it take for you to change your mind?", a question I now think of as wise beyond our years--a question that asked us to think about our thinking.
In college I learned about the music of the spheres, of metaphors and similes, of scientific classification. Sumer, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. The literature: the required Shakespeare and Chaucer and survey courses. Addison and Steele, Donne, Twain, Dickens, Frost. Emily. Yeats. Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Dante. (Even though he would disagree, I think a little sloth could do a lot of people some good.) Of Kant's argument that moral rules are those which we would will on everyone. Plato and Aristotle, the Epicureans and Stoics, Utilitarianism and and Empiricism. Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra was the first book I read in college, for a Sunday night Introduction to Philosophy class, one subtitled "In Search of Authenticity". The first night of class, the professor played a bootleg copy (on reel-to-reel tape) of the then-new Broadway play Hair, because, he said, "I had to." As part of the physical education requirement, I took folk dance, but most of the dancing I did was of its time, dancing with friends on Saturday nights to Iron Butterfly's "In a Gadda Da Vida."
Yes, it was the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, but that is not my point. And in those way pre-Google days, if I didn't understand what Nietzsche wrote, I read it again. And again. I wrote in my books. I took notes. Later I bought the vinyl of the soundtrack of Hair.
And the writing classes: once a week workshops where the main assignment was to submit X number of pages per semester. (I remember it as either 35 or 50 pages. Typed.). There were no assignments but short readings--and the faculty encouraged wide and relevant reading on our own. So I found myself reading E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel, a fictional retelling of the trial of the Rosenbergs from the point of view of their son. I browsed the New Books section of the library. I read as I wanted and we developed our own projects. And we were treated more as writers than as students even though we certainly were students.
These days my house is what somebody recently called "one of those small houses," but it is big enough, and it is a place where I still practice watching and listening.When I am home, I am one of those neighbors looking out the front window with no embarrassment at the police car down the street. When I go for a walk, I mosey so I can look around. (What's the rush?) I have been known to dance with the vacuum cleaner, and I used to try to dance with Doodle the cat until he protested. I have decided that, at best, the things of this world call us to love it: the fur on my cat's nose, a baby's fingernails, clothes on a clothesline. Tropic heat and winter cold that never let me forget where I am. Laughter. Music.
I can't not watch and listen and dance as I can, even though I wear no sequins--these days I own no sequins. But I do still own a lot of books. (I even own some old Nancy Drew books.) These days my hair is straightish, pretty much. I belong to no country club, and I would be content at a diner. Most Sundays I don't go to church. Do I believe in God? I do and I don't. (I think there is some truth to the observation that any kid who has taken a math test wants to believe in the power of prayer.)
We are what we do. And what we do is determined by the context we work to create--how we put things together. The connectives matter: because this, then that. Although. Despite. But. And.
How we put it all together. Each of us, one by one.
Let's go back to my beginning here as I go toward the ending: I do not know if I am going to be lunch meat for the hell hounds or not, but I do know that in this world I am decidedly a cat person. As for the people who predicted my future in hell...well, although they may someday be proven correct, right now I think of them as children who had been taught an Old School (and singularly unchristian, all things considered) perspective. Even only on their better days, can they even begin to imagine themselves as big readers, as dancers, as part of a kaleidoscope, as a teensy part of a secular, informed world of ideas? As fully and immediately in the world? As at least sometimes independent?I don't know, but I hope they can. If they want to.
No point in going back or backwards. The essayist Edward Hoagland once said something along the lines of a good day happens when nobody we know dies. I agree. Touch wood, today is one of those days.
And so in broad daylight on this weekday morning, I connect the songs on my iPhone to the small Bluetooth speaker. I tap my fingers, I tap my toes. To the music I make my way to the kitchen sink, to the laptop, to the door--to the things of my world, and to do the things of this--my--world. The muscles remember. (Well, some do.) Doodle has run upstairs, but at this moment, I inhabit a happy sound, an authentic and joyful world, in my very own small house--a world that is as real and as important to me as the sound of a little girl's tap shoes on a cement floor once were.
Copyright Sandra Engel
November 2016
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