Imperfectly Perfect

Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It’s perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist. ─ Jane Smiley

A friend of mine likes to say, “First drafts are always yucky”. Of course, he uses a word other than yucky, but I’m trying to keep  my language a little more PG rated these days (or maybe just this hour...minute...whatever). His point though is that when starting a project it’s not so important what you write, only that you write it. I feel the same way about dancing.

I don’t often post videos of my dancing. I loathe watching myself. When I do the inner demons pull up their Barcaloungers and popcorn and whisper in my ear - “You’re too old”, “you look like a giant stork”, “You’re not a pro, you’ll never be, why bother, you just look foolish” , “look at you, your toes don’t point, your turnout’s bad, you’re just flailing about”.

I was not born dancing, I did not start when I was three, I started only about three years ago. I took a dance class here and there growing up, but I was never good at it so I put my energy into the places I was - singing and acting. When I look at where I was when I started and where I am now, there is vast improvement. I am still in my first draft dancewise. I’m not where I was, but I’m not where I’m going to be either.

So, if I distract the inner demons with something shiny to shut them up and watch this video again this is what I see... 

*A woman who is using decades of training in acting and music to add to what she’s learned about dance to give a performance that appears confident and assured. There is no stumbling around wondering what comes next, she is moving from moment to moment with certainty (except when she’s supposed to appear uncertain....again....acting chops)

*A woman who has worked hard to learn a new skill. Someone who has invested in herself and understands that to get to the good stuff sometimes you have to risk looking foolish. 

*A woman with determination, unwilling to let the opinions of other people stop her. 

*A woman who battles her demons and fears every time she walks into the dance studio, but stubbornly refuses to allow them to rule her. 

* A woman who keeps trying daily to perfect herself on her own terms. 

And so I post my dance video. This is my first draft. Better than some, not as good as others, but entirely mine. 

Essentially Me

I went to Facebook last week and posed what I thought was a simple question - who are your top three essential female songwriters? Turns out it wasn’t quite so simple. At last count I had over one hundred comments and even now several days later people continue are still opining. There were names going back to the very beginning of musical time, names from musical theatre, jazz, pop, country, rock and even punk. It also sparked a vigorous debate or two. Most of the names were familiar to me, but one or two sent me scuttling off to learn more. It was exhilarating!

One name seemed to be the common denominator on the list- Joni Mitchell. She was mentioned far more than any other writer. There’s no mystery there. Her voice as a writer is distinct- no one sounds like her- in her use of language, her vocabulary she is sui generis. Her emotional reach is astounding, every word transmits itself straight from her soul to the listener’s heart. 

 A few years ago my friend Laurel, suggested Ms Mitchell’s Night Ride Home to me. It is the type of song I’m not known for doing, an unabashashedly joyful moment in romantic time. I loved it. Michele Brourman and I put it with Anne Caldwell and Jerome Kern’s Once in a Blue Moon. Going in to the studio to record it with Michele and Stephan Oberhoff was one of the most wonderful experiences I’ve ever had. It is a piece I will happily sing every chance I get.

Hitting the High Points...

Photo by Penguinmoon Studios

This summer has been one of constant motion - I joined the board of Pioneer Productions, produced (and had a cameo appearance in) a musical and hit two very big milestones. One was inevitable and the other came through more than two years of blood,sweat and blisters.

The first biggie was my birthday. Whether it was divisible by five, ten or three hundred twelve I will leave you to guess. I’m not ashamed of my age but I also don’t feel the need to advertise it. I have officially entered my IDGAF Years. You have been warned.

The other was that I moved from Bronze level to Silver in my dancing. In my studio you start out at Bronze one and work your way through four levels until you reach the Silver level. Basically the Bronze syllabus is what most colleges use in their ballroom dance majors so finishing it is the equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree. It took two and a half years and a whole lot of toil but I did it and I’m proud of it. 

I had no idea when I started it but studying dance has been the best decision I could have made. It has made an impact on almost every other aspect of my life. In an odd way almost everything that has happened in my career in the last couple of years can be traced back to this decision. 

Dancing did not make me a different performer/person but through it I have become more myself than I have ever been. I am finally at home in my own skin and that has given me confidence both physically and psychically. The skills I already had when I started, the ability to create a character, to perform, to engage an audience, to tell a story have only grown stronger. Added to that are new ways of expressing myself and different ways to explore and understand music. Also, because ballroom is an art that is dependent upon working with another person it has enhanced my ability to communicate with a partner.

I have always been great with words. Words have been my salvation throughout my entire life. Dance has enhanced my nonverbal communication. I can take the stage without saying a word and that is a powerful tool to own.

It took me a while to come around to seeing it this way, but Dance has given me the gift of being a beginner again. You can never fully master an art unless you allow yourself the time and space to be bad at it. It’s not just how you conquer your craft but what teaches you empathy and patience. Knowing this makes me a stronger performer and a better teacher of performers. (This will really come in handy when I teach my Solo performance workshop in October. A plethora of shameless plugs coming soon.)

Finally, there’s the wardrobe. It hasn’t really changed that, it’s just given me even more opportunities to break out the sequins, fringe and corsets. This is the most excellent thing of all! 

So In Love

A little Friday romance for you. This is the video from the choreographer’s showcase I did last weekend. The singer, of course, is me, and the dancers are Janette Dishuk & Chris Zang. The choreography is by Olivia Galgano.

Dance Diary Sturm Und Samba

The first time I took a West Coast Swing class I went home and cried. The next day I went into the studio and my instructor said, “we’re going to do a West Coast Swing solo...” I worked really hard and did it, now it’s my favorite dance. This will not happen with Samba. If a praying mantis and a bunny had a baby that danced that’s my samba. It’s never made me cry, but more than a few Brazillilans have when they see me do it. Yesterday an instructor said to me, “I see something in your samba I have never seen before,” he did not explain what this meant. I love the music, I love watching other people dance it, I love the costumes, it is just not my dance. By now I have done enough samba to know my loathing will never turn to love. And yet...

I still do it. Yes, it’s part of my program I’m forced to do it no matter my feelings on the matter. But also, not liking something is no reason not to do it. Well, it is but in this case there are reasons to do it anyway. Samba has a very distinct rhythm and timing, and anything that gives a musician a different way of using those things is a very good thing. Samba is also one of the more energetic dances so I’m burning lots of calories thus justifying the occasional baked goods binge. 

Mostly though, I’m stubborn. I don’t like to be bad at anything, even something I hate. This might be my best/worst thing. Best because I think that getting through life requires tenacity and a refusal to accept circumstances which are not to my liking. Worst because it causes me to hold on to some things longer than I should. 

I’ll be holding on to samba a little longer. I suspect it still has some things to teach me. 

On Worthiness

There are days when I struggle with the idea of being worthy. I was not raised by artists, my family didn’t know anyone who made their living from art and so I was a bit of an outlier. “It’s a nice dream, but not many people make it, what makes you think you’re talented enough to do it?”  I’m not blaming them, the world is a scary place and the last thing you want is to see your child struggle. You want them to be safe in an unsafe world. They were voicing the same ideas that many people have about pursuing a career in the arts. “Who are you to  think YOU are enough to do this”?

Even now I get comments from “well meaning” friends and complete strangers - “Well, it must be nice to.....” or “aren’t you lucky...” Luck has nothing to do with it. I’ve worked and I’ve sacrificed to be able to do the things that I do. It’s taken me the better part of three decades not just to be good at what I do, but to look another human in the eye and admit it . It is false humility to brush off compliments and pretend that the things I am able to do came about through any means other than sheer toil.

Truthfully, I wish I had learned this year’s ago, but maybe I wasn’t ready yet. My career path hasn’t looked like anyone else’s and most likely never will. There have been times when I’ve made it harder on myself than it needed to be, and times when I allowed someone else’s opinions to divert me. For a long time I refused to use the word artist in reference to myself because I thought it wasn’t up to me to declare myself one. It turns out I had it backwards. 

I am an artist, and I am worthy of a career in art. This is my declaration. I have put in the time and the effort to become one, and no one can take that away from me unless I let them. And that ain’t gonna happen.

My Life as a Broadway Musical

A few weeks ago on twitter the writer Nicole Cliffe asked her followers to imagine explaining their lives to their therapist in one song from a Broadway musical. I chose  I Put a Little More Mascara On from La Cage Aux Folles. In case you aren’t familiar with this particular tune (and why aren’t you?) it’s about seeing life through the lens of your self created fabulousness. I recognize that to some people this is the ultimate in shallowness. How unfemininist of me to believe that a little lipstick and mascara can change my life. And yet...

I have to start this story with my mother. Mom was born with a very rare disease of the connective tissue called Marfan’s Syndrome (both Jonathan Larson and Abraham Lincoln had the same condition), it caused her a number of issues throughout her life, early onset glaucoma and osteoporosis, malformation of certain bones, and heart problems. She died, as many Marfan’s patients do, of an aneurysm at age fifty-nine. From the moment she was born she was the object of curious doctors who often treated her more as an object that a human being. She loathed, more than anything else being seen by the world as a “sick person.” 

In my entire life with my mother she NEVER left the house without being perfectly made up and immaculately dressed. This was not vanity, this was survival. She could not control what other people thought of her, she couldn’t control what was happening in her own body, but she could control this. She could choose the face she presented to the world. It was her rebellion against a world that could not look past the disease to see a brilliant, witty woman, who had endless compassion and empathy for everyone she met. 

I think maybe this is one of the most important things my mother taught me. I would rather my life be seen as musical comedy than Shakespearean tragedy. In musical comedy you know the plucky heroine may be faced with serious and seemingly insurmountable obstacles but she will triumph in the end and  along the way there will be sequins, great songs and at least one fabulous dance number. Unlike in Shakespeare where the costumes are lovely but by the end of act III not a soul is left standing. 

The actress Ann Miller said “I’ve tried to live my life like an 8 x 10 glossy”. There will be those who read this and think I’m talking about fakery, about not being “authentic”, and I would have to disagree. There is nothing wrong with wanting to chose what you put out into the world. Putting your best face forward is not a denial that life is hard, but a celebration of what makes life wonderful. There is joy in becoming who you are and sharing that with the world. In the words of La Cage’s Zaza 'Cause when I feel glamorous, elegant, beautiful, The world that I'm looking at's beautiful too!

A Little Song, A Little Dance

Sometimes I have an idea that I know in my heart is going to absolutely brilliant or fail utterly. Too often I let my fear get the better of me and bury those ideas under the more mundane things I have to do until they reappear to torment me late at night when sleep won’t come. A few months ago I had such an idea. I tried to ignore it but it pestered me endlessly. I decided to take it to my most trusted artistic advisors. Surely, they would tell me that I was out of my mind and I could move on to the next saner project. No quite... They all LOVED it and insisted this was absolutely the right next move for me. 

The idea was this - Take about a dozen or so of my very favorite songs and stories and combine it with some of the things I’ve been doing with dance. Have I mentioned that I am not a natural dancer? I’ve worked hard on it, I have seriously invested in doing it, but could I do it well enough to combine it seamlessly with what I already do? Most importantly, would it be “Me”? As it turns out the answer was absolutely yes. In fact, in some ways, it is the most Me I have ever felt on-stage.

I started with three tunes I had long fantasized about adding dance to. The first was Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love. Several years ago Rick Jensen (who was musical director for this show) put together a stunning Russian Play of an arrangement of this for me, and It became the title of the show and the starting point for choosing all the other songs.  Next came Gretchen Peters’ The Matador , a gorgeous metaphor for life with an artist. I always have at least one Gretchen Peters song in every set. She’s a consummate musical story teller. With The Matador I had a vision of telling this story with a mix of Paso Doble and Argentine Tango. Finally, there was Stephen Sondheim’s Can That Boy Foxtrot. It was a bit of a joke because my distaste for the Foxtrot is a well known fact in the dance studio. But also, it’s just a great song, sexy sassy and funny and who doesn’t want to be that?

With more than a little trepidation I presented the idea to Costi, my Romanian Ballroom Champion dance teacher. Surely, here was the person who was going to agree with me that I was absolutely insane to try this. Instead he took my rehearsal tracks with only the slightest raised eyebrow and came back with three gorgeously choreographed pieces that managed to combine the elements of my personality and the things I do best as a dancer. When he first showed me what he had come up with for Dance Me to the End of Love I actually jumped up and down and clapped my hands it was so exciting. And if you know me at all you know I am not a jumper up and downer.

The other songs in the set came together surprisingly easily. I just picked the things I loved to sing the very most. Songs by friends like Michele  Brourman, Amanda McBroom, Rick and Lina Koutrakos shared a set with tunes by more distant icons like June Carter Cash, Cole Porter, Joni Mitchell, and  Leonard Cohen. There wasn’t a song in the bunch that I hadn’t fallen in love with. Every time I sang I felt like I was rediscovering old friends. I’m always amazed how over time a song will continue to grow and change and take on deeper meaning. 

In the week leading up to the show I alternated between excited anticipation and dread that I was going to make an ass of myself. I expected that I would spend the entire set tense because the idea of dancing in a show was so scary to me. The great surprise was once I actually walked out onto the stage I never felt more relaxed during a performance. Things flowed even better than they had in my mind, and the dance numbers seemed like they had always been there, even when I missed a step or two (hey, it woudn’t be me if I hadn’t).

It helped that I was blessed with  brilliant collaborators in Rick, Costi, and my creative sounding board Sally Mayes. I was also fortunate in having a warm and enthusiastic audience whom I could feel with me every step of the way. I had done my homework now I got to forget about it and have fun. And I did! I also realized that studying dance has affected  more than those moments when I am actually dancing. It’s changed everything from the way I stand at the microphone to the way I walk across the stage. It’s helped me become at home in a body that I’ve often viewed as an enemy. 

My one thought when all was said and done was “when can I do this again”? And I will. Keep watching this space!