Every Step You Take

by Jock Soto

  At first Ulrik and I tried to keep our relationship secret, not only because he was supposedly still involved with another man but also because of my tender age. I don’t think we did a very good job of being discreet, because at a certain point word came down from higher-ups at SAB that Ulrik should break it off with me—or else. I believe there was a suggestion that my parents might have to be contacted if we didn’t stop seeing each other. This was a devastating turn of events for me, and when Ulrik bowed to the authorities and broke up with me—by telephone—I started bawling like a two-year-old. I felt it was the end of my world, and I was inconsolable.

  I returned to Edward Villella’s town house after the summer session in Saratoga in a tumultuous state of mind, and when I discovered that the boy who had sublet from me had left everything in tatters—trash everywhere and my bed a gritty horror—I had a kind of meltdown. Sobbing and swearing, fueled by the raging hormones of a brokenhearted teenage boy, I packed all of my belongings in a huge old rusty metal trunk that was my only luggage, called my fellow dancer and new friend Lisa Jackson to ask if I could come stay with her for a while, and moved out.

  My intention had been to nurse my broken heart in anonymous and unknown surroundings, but as it turned out, my love crisis—like so many teenage love tragedies—was short-lived. Ulrik and I soon decided to ignore the authorities and get back together. August is often a nonworking (and unpaid) month for the NYCB, and Ulrik, Julia, John Bass, and Julia’s parents had all made plans to head to the island of Hydra in Greece, where they had rented a house. When Ulrik suggested that I join him there later that month, I was thrilled. My first trip to Europe, on a mission to be with my beloved.

  I don’t believe I consulted anyone about this trip. When I received the first tax refund of my life, for $980, I simply cashed it and bought myself a round-trip ticket to Athens—which left me $20 to live on for the rest of the month. I cringe when I remember my arrival in Athens on that first European trip of my life. I had dressed for my travels in cowboy boots and khaki pants and a bright orange shirt with gold stripes and a leather vest, and I was lugging THE TRUNK—the rusted metal monstrosity, crammed with my life’s possessions. Ulrik had come over from the island to meet me at the Athens airport, and he took one look at me and collapsed into laughter. “Is this your suitcase?” he asked. He looked tanned and breezy in his perfect-for-the-Mediterranean khaki shorts and sandals.

  That whole trip was so exotic and surreal for me—I felt as if my already incredible expanding universe got supersized in those two weeks. We traveled to Hydra by hydrofoil, and when we reached the island Ulrik explained to me that there were no cars there. “We will need a donkey,” he said, eyeing my trunk. But all the donkeys and all the donkey boys were taking their afternoon siesta—so Ulrik and I each grabbed one end of the trunk, and in the blazing midafternoon heat we wrestled that bastard up the steep stone steps that crosshatch Hydra’s seaside cliffs, all the way to the next little fishing village, where our house was perched high above the blue Aegean.

  The magic of my first visit to that Greek island is something that will never leave me. The physical drama of the land itself and the way the light raked across it, the sounds of the donkeys and roosters and dogs, the way the smell of the salty sea mixed with that of the pungent dry hills—all of these thrilled me. I had experienced the desert of Arizona, the streets of New York, and the suburbs of Los Angeles, but Hydra gave me my first real taste of the varieties of experience the planet can offer. The trip expanded my understanding of beauty, and my appetite for new places and experiences. The people we met, an eclectic mix of artists and wanderers from all parts of the world, seemed equally exotic. We made friends with the painter Brice Marden and his wife, Helene, who had a house on the island, and with an eccentric beachcomber named Von Furstenburg. At night we partied until the sun came up, and on our 6 a.m. walks home we dove off the ancient seawalls into the salty sea. When Heather Watts arrived by hydrofoil one afternoon, the glamour quotient of our little group—and the testosterone levels of all the heterosexual men on the island—bumped up several notches. Everything felt dreamlike and magical—as if I had landed in a Mediterranean version of the Nutcracker with my very own Prince. When Julia and I had to head back to New York before the others, I stepped onto the hydrofoil that would take me to Athens and took one last look at Ulrik—tanned and wearing only his shorts, smoking a cigarette, and waving good-bye from the dock—and fell sobbing into Julia’s arms.

  By the late fall of my first season with the NYCB, Ulrik and I had moved into a two-bedroom floor-through in Chelsea with Julia, who, over the course of the summer, had become my dear friend as well (and remains so to this day). As a new company member, I was dancing nonstop, I was madly in love, and I even seemed to be establishing a kind of surrogate family in New York through my various connections within the dance world. There was a comforting sense of domesticity to my evenings at home with Ulrik and Julia, when we all cooked and ate together. Julia often invited us to join her at her parents’ house for dinners and other exotic soirees, affording me glimpses into a world and a way of life I never knew existed. The Gruens lived (and still live) in a vast apartment that is filled with books and antiques and is redolent of that shabby-chic aura that seems to settle around lives of unpretentious intelligence and elegance. Evenings at the Gruens’ were always exciting in the purest sense because you never knew who would show up or where the evening would go. On many occasions we would all dress up in black tie, just for the hell of it, and the evening would take on the festive feel of a bygone era. After dinner there would often be piano playing and singing, and always plenty of “chaaam-pers” and art-world anecdotes courtesy of Julia’s writer-photographer father, John. The Gruens will always have a special place in my heart, and I sometimes wish I could go back and sit at the Gruens’ dinner table once more and discover what on earth I was thinking. The world I had landed in was a far cry from the house in Paradise Valley, Arizona, that I had left behind.

  The company and conversation at these soirees dazzled me, but I was not about to jump into the fray myself—the chance that I would say something astoundingly stupid was just too great. Often I would retire to the kitchen to watch Julia’s mother, the accomplished artist Jane Wilson, prepare our elaborate meals, helping her whenever I could. Watching Jane work in the kitchen or set a table taught me so much about entertaining with elegance and style. Those sessions were also when I first discovered how much I loved to cook. Jane was a wonderful and inventive chef, and the beautiful roasts and elegant desserts she turned out seemed nothing less than a miracle to me. I began experimenting more and more with cooking at home—with erratic results. I remember the first meal I made for Ulrik, Julia, and John Bass—a dense, rock-hard, way-overcooked meat loaf that slipped off the serving platter when I tripped on the rug and then went bouncing like a small bowling ball across the floor. Everybody politely stifled their laughter, and we all choked down the runaway entrée after I maneuvered it back onto its platter. I had another disaster on New Year’s Eve, when I decided to make my first Caesar salad. In my eagerness to have everything ready on time, I made the salad and dressed it that afternoon—and it sat until midnight, at which point it was a soggy, inedible pile of green mush.

  Probably my most painful cooking episode was one that also taught me an important lesson about culinary hubris. In a fit of confidence I decided to contribute to the bounty at the Gruen household by bringing a homemade tiramisu to one of our gatherings. I didn’t know what mascarpone was at the time, and when there was none at the grocery store I substituted another exotic-sounding cheese—Gorgonzola—figuring it would do just fine. I transported my masterpiece in a pan with foil over it, and I should have realized from the sloshing and spillage in the taxi on the way over that something was wrong. The smell alone was unbearable, and as I climbed the stairs to the Gruens’ apartment I began to panic. What had I been thinking? Maybe nobody would notice—or, better yet, maybe nobody had ever
had tiramisu.

  Wait a minute—hadn’t John Gruen lived in Italy? I was humiliated as I presented my sloppy, swampy-smelling creation, and angry with myself for daring to impose such a pathetic failure on others. I made a secret vow that night that I would be more careful about such experiments in the future, and particularly careful about sharing them with others. For a long time after the debacle of the Terrible Tiramisu I made a point of restricting my public offerings to my two proven strengths to date: dancing and silence.

  Amends for a Terrible Tiramisu

  IT WAS SEVERAL years after the disastrous night of the Gorgonzola tiramisu before I could get back on the tiramisu wagon. I am happy to say that I now have a very simple, very fast, and very good tiramisu recipe that I execute with consistent success for all kinds of occasions. Also, happily, my friendship with all the Gruens has survived my culinary blunder. When Julia turned fifty, Luis and I went to her birthday party, hosted by Mimi Thompson and her husband, James Rosenquist, at their loft in TriBeCa. Julia’s parents, Jane Wilson and John Gruen, in their eighties now but still going strong, were both there. Jane looked ravishing in a long dress, her eyes highlighted by that black eyeliner that was so stylish in the sixties and seventies. Jane is still painting, better than ever, and John has published yet another book—Callas Kissed Me… Lenny Too.

  On that evening celebrating Julia’s fiftieth, I was struck by how lucky I am to still share evenings with a grande dame like Jane and an artist like John and a dear friend like Jules. Family comes in many shapes and guises, and as I have said before, the Gruens will always have a special place in my heart as part of my New York family. May John’s stories never stop coming; after all, he did kiss Callas—and Lenny too! And may all the Gruens forgive me for that evening when I stumbled into their lovely apartment carrying the terrible-smelling tiramisu.

  Easy Peasy Tiramisu

  ______

  SERVES 8

  1½ cups very good brewed coffee, cooled

  4 tablespoons rum

  ½ cup sugar

  1 pound mascarpone cheese

  2 teaspoons vanilla

  24 ladyfingers

  Very good dark chocolate

  Unsweetened cocoa powder (for dusting on top)

  Add the rum to the cooled coffee and set aside.

  In a large bowl, with a handheld mixer, beat the sugar, mascarpone, and vanilla until creamy.

  Place the ladyfingers on the bottom of a 3-quart dish and pour your spiked coffee over the ladyfingers. Spread your mascarpone mixture over the ladyfingers and shave a good amount of chocolate over the top of whole thing. Then dust with cocoa powder.

  Chill in the fridge for at least two hours so everything gets settled.

  See? Easy peasy!

  CHAPTER NINE

  ______

  So You Think You Can Dance?

  To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful. This is power, it is glory on earth, and it is yours for the taking.

  —AGNES DE MILLE

  My mother and I used to call each other whenever Dancing with the Stars was on during its first season. We would discuss the contestants and giggle and talk about everything and nothing at all. Recently I was sitting at home having dinner alone while I watched So You Think You Can Dance? and it made me miss her so much. What was even sadder was that I was brought to tears at least four times by the silly show. Even though it was not ballet, the passion I felt for the dancers as they performed was unimaginable.

  I try to share my passion for dance with my students at the School of American Ballet. Dancing is not something that earns one millions, I tell them, and a dancer should never take advantage of or exploit his or her art. Whenever I see someone perform halfheartedly it makes me sad and embarrassed—imagine not having greater respect for the creative work you are representing, and for your audience, when every person in it has paid good money and put aside precious time, hoping to experience the transformative power of art.

  Dancing is something that takes pure dedication and an unshakable belief in what you are doing—if you do not believe the story you are dancing, there is no way your audience is going to believe it. Achieving this takes so much more than you might think. As a dancer, every step you take must mean something. There can be no neutral gestures and no empty moments. When a dancer performs, he or she must do his or her best to bring beauty and intelligence and meaning to every moment in time. Every performance offers the possibility of new stories with new meanings, and as a dancer you can never exhaust these possibilities—you can always do something differently.

  The infinite creative potential of dance has always thrilled me, and from a very early age the place where music and movement intersect has seemed a nearly mappable territory to me—a magical junction that offers precise and reliable entry to a separate realm where I can act with confidence and freedom. I discovered my first “dance doorway” to another realm when I was a toddler performing the hoop dance with my mother, and I have been searching for and exploring similar access points ever since. But in the days when I was a teenage rookie with the NYCB, I was using dance for more than artistic expression—I was using it as an emergency-escape route from the messy turmoil of my teenage insecurities and confusion. I leaped into the worlds that the marriage of music and movement created as a refuge from real life. Exploring the endless possibilities within a scripted ballet filled me with a heady sense of freedom and competence, and when a passage went well I could sense myself brushing up against something profound and mysterious and spiritual that was otherwise inaccessible to me. It was a thrilling, almost religious, sensation, and addictive in its own way.

  I knew that there were other dancers who were technically better than I and physically more perfectly aligned. But I was a very natural dancer—things came easily and quickly to me, and when I danced well all the confidence I lacked in everyday life would come rushing through me with an explosive physical sensation that I can only compare to what I imagine flowers must feel when they bloom. I was ready to try anything anyone asked of me and I was willing to put in as many hours as necessary to get it right. After a while my intensity and focus paid off, and I was thrilled when, even as a first-year member of the corps, I began to get cast in a few solo and even lead roles.

  Some of these early first roles—such as the pas de trois in Peter Martins’s new ballet Capriccio Italien and another pas de trois in Jacques d’Amboise’s Irish Fantasy—came to me through the normal casting process, and I was able to hone my performance through the standard method of countless rehearsals. Other opportunities came to me as the result of the double-edged nature of one of the ballet world’s most dread demons: injury. Injury is a constant threat to all dancers, of course—but an injury to an established principal can turn into a lucky break for some lesser mortal who then gets to dance a role he would never otherwise have been cast in. Although these out-of-the-blue “lucky breaks” could be thrilling if they came your way, they were almost always extremely challenging and stressful, too. One of the most painful memories of my entire career came during my first year with the company, when Balanchine chose me as the last-minute emergency substitute to dance the “Gigue” solo in his ballet Mozartiana, after both Victor Castelli and Christopher d’Amboise were injured. When Rosemary Dunleavy explained to me that I had to learn the solo that afternoon and perform it that night, I just gulped. I was terrified, but I kept quiet and did as I was told, trying my best to tap into my talent for absorbing the steps in a few short hours.

  When the moment of truth came that night, I ran out onstage in my costume and stood there, a little boy with long hair, smiling out at the audience—and then I completely blanked. I freaked out. I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. The conductor looked at me expectantly, and began. But I didn’t move. I was completely alone onstage for the first time in my life, staring back at six thousand eyeballs. I felt like I was in a football stadium with everybody waiting for me to sing the nationa
l anthem. When the music kept going, I finally started kind of wiggling and hopping—and eventually I made my way to some semblance of what I had learned that afternoon. I was supposed to head offstage very slowly when I finally finished, turning and bowing to four ballerinas who had just made their entrance. It was so incredibly painful, and the moment I was finally offstage, I ran into the hallway and collapsed in a heap, convulsed with sobs and hyperventilating. Everyone around me kept telling me not to worry, nobody noticed, nobody noticed. But I knew this was not possible. And I felt completely humiliated. So much for what Kisselgoff had called my “magnificent stage presence.” (If I ever want to really punish myself, I could probably go to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and dig up a film of that awful moment—and of many others as well. So far I haven’t wanted to.) I went on to dance the “Gigue” solo of Mozartiana successfully many times in my career after that disastrous first attempt, but for dancers it is always the failures that come back again and again, in vivid Kodachrome detail.