Dance While You Can

by Shirley Maclaine

  He was such a sensitive, fragile man, using his humor to bluster his way through any given situation, cracking jokes to cover his own uncertainties—and yet the first to notice someone else’s discomfort. But he would tie the tails of a dog and cat together just to see them fight.

  I continued to walk. There was the drugstore where I used to slurp a cherry Coke while waiting for my boyfriend to walk me home. No one was on the street now. A blanket of snow silenced the air, muffling the cries of children somewhere in the distance.

  My father had just died, and children were laughing. The tears froze on my cheeks. I could see him climbing from his old Lincoln Continental, dapper in his plaid sports jacket and tan slacks, his hat placed squarely on his head like a Russian general secretary.

  He’d sidle up to the school fence to observe how I was running or jumping. If I was engaged in “love talk” with my boyfriend, I’d hear about it later at the dinner table.

  “I can understand screaming in the halls,” he’d say, “screaming until someone paid attention. I can’t understand holding hands and necking.”

  That was about the gist of it too. Desperate frustration was familiar to him. Peaceful love was beyond his comprehension.

  I trudged in the snow down to the creek, which had been the scene of adolescent excursions into lovemaking for me and many of my friends. Where were they all now? Did the death of Ira O. Beaty mean anything to anybody else? How could a man like that, with so much rich and important talent for contradiction, be ignored?

  I thought of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. “Attention must be paid.” If no one else paid any attention to him, I would bring him to life in the pages of my books and in the conversations of my life. He would not go unnoticed regardless of his reluctance for recognition. He was half the reason I was who I was. It was because of him that I needed to tear away the shackles of my own insecurities and grow up. He might have initiated those insecurities, but I was going to break the pattern.

  He had given me a gift—a catalyst for insight. And I was going to unwrap it and hold it up to my own light for examination. It would never go back in a drawer. I would use it and savor it and hopefully understand the spirit in which it was given until I was more clear of my own contradictions.

  I walked for an hour or two, feeling my father with every breath I took. Attention would be paid. I’d see to that. I didn’t know then how far I’d go.

  When I returned to the house, Mother and I had dinner. We didn’t speak of Daddy. We spoke of trivial things. Underlying our meal was the understanding that I had to leave. I had miles to go and promises to keep.

  I went to my room to pack. I looked over the bed to where my father’s picture hung. It was gone. When I looked behind the bed it was on the floor, having fallen off the wall somehow. Perhaps he was removing himself from the house so we could get on with our lives.

  “I will always be sitting next to your green chair,” he told Mother. “Just when you think you’re the loneliest for me, look over to the rocking chair. I’ll be there watching you, listening to you, loving you.”

  Mother had gently laughed so that she wouldn’t sob. “Your Daddy can be so touching and sweet,” she said later.

  He had wanted her to come and lie down in bed next to him. “I know,” she said. “He’s been trying to get me to do that for years. It’s nothing new.” She went on, “You can bet when he starts that lovey-dovey stuff that he has something up his sleeve, and I’m just not going to fall for it.”

  I retrieved the picture from the floor and put it back on the wall, knowing Warren wanted it there. It had fallen down once before, and Warren feared someone had taken it.

  I stood, looking at the rest of the room. This was the bed I had slept in for most of my childhood; my recurring dream had started in this bed. I had brushed my hair one hundred strokes per night at this dressing table and had opened the closet many times resolving to clean it out and throw the past away. Somehow I had never been able to do it. It now hung with clothes Mother kept. Some I had given her from Hong Kong, from Paris, “from all the great capitals of the world,” she told her friends. Others I remembered her wearing when she was forty.

  I squeezed the pineapple knobs of the four-poster mahogany bed. A mound of snow fell from a tree outside the open window. Oh, how my need for open windows had disrupted our family. I couldn’t breathe in the claustrophobia of a room with tightly shut windows. In my bedroom, regardless of weather, I was allowed to have them open—in the heat of summer and in freezing winter.

  I breathed deeply and looked around, not knowing when I’d be coming back but certain that when I did, I’d be overwhelmed by entering the home my father would never be a part of again.

  Slowly I left my room and walked through the living room. I passed the Wedgwood bowls, crystal glasses, and the George Mason wedding breakfast table. These were items deeply treasured by Mother—by Daddy too. But suddenly, for me, their worth and meaning had been put in proper perspective.

  Gypsy, Mother’s red-haired cat, scampered across the carpet. “I don’t want a cat, Shirl,” she had said. “If I learn to love it, what would I do without it?” Maybe it was true that every time we love we die a little.

  I gave her the cat anyway, and it was now going to be her solace. She had a couple to take care of her; but in the long lonely hours of the night without Daddy, Gypsy would curl up against her cheek and remind her that she was loved and needed.

  I went to Mother’s green chair. She sat alone, as though waiting for her execution. My departure was going to be painful for her, and I didn’t know how to begin to make it any easier. She looked up at me. Her eyes were a milky-gray color as she looked deep into mine. Then her face twisted in anguish, and she reached up and clutched at me with her fingers.

  “I don’t want you to go,” she sobbed. I kneeled down and gently put my arms around her. Mother held me tightly for a moment, and then she pulled away and looked at her watch.

  “I don’t want you to miss your plane either,” she said. “You must go and do your work.” Tears still flooded her eyes, but she straightened herself up.

  “I love you, Mother,” I said. “I love you more than I can say.”

  “I know,” she answered. “I’m sorry I was cranky with you the night the wind blew the trees so hard. I’m sorry.”

  I tried to hug her again, but she wouldn’t even lift her arms in return. I felt her detach herself. She would handle this the only way she knew how.

  I slowly stood up and walked to the door. Just as I was about to leave the room, I turned around; perhaps I should stay another day. But she waved good-bye as though I had already disappeared into thin air.

  I had cried silently all the way to the airport.

  The ice-and-gold days of recovery and remembering in Washington were over. I returned to Los Angeles a few days before opening in San Francisco to take voice lessons and to work with Mary and Damita Jo. My body had lost a lot of strength and I was concerned about my stamina, but my knee seemed to be progressing nicely.

  I was in my apartment in Malibu doing my exercises before Mary and Damita arrived, feeling good about my progress and doing a few pliés to warm up. I went into demi-plié and made a slight turn to the left, a barely perceptible turn. My knee went out again—and something tore in the back of my knee. I buckled to the floor, the pain excruciating. I couldn’t believe what I’d done, and began to curse out loud and talk to myself.

  Just then the doorbell rang. It was the two girls. Thank God they immediately realized what had happened. I popped the kneecap back into place, and in a mad rush they raided the icebox freezer and applied the lifesaving chunks of frozen water to my knee again.

  Now I only had three days to heal. Damita explained that she had had her own knee injury for years now. It was something she was very much aware of all the time and now, it seemed, I would have to become aware of mine for a long time to come, maybe the rest of my dancing life.

  She went on to e
xplain that during rehearsals she had to rechoreograph in her mind everything that Alan gave us to do, in order to imperceptibly alter the position of every step so that she could accomplish it without pain and to prevent her kneecap from popping out. She said neither Alan nor the rest of the dancers ever knew or noticed that she had such a problem. I certainly didn’t. She then began to show me how I would have to take the show from the top, and with every single movement of the body I would need to reposition myself so that I too would be safe.

  The next day we went into a rehearsal hall, and for three days we analyzed every move, every step, and every position so that I could work around the kneecap injury. It was like learning the show all over again.

  Some of the singing numbers were more treacherous than the dancing, because the movements were seductively subtle. I had never realized the intricacies involved with body movement in such a refined way. I had been free about it before, so attention wasn’t necessary. As I worked, I had to concentrate on every shift from one leg to the other, every slight turn of balance; and, of course, every harsh and athletic move. But the danger points were the subtle ones.

  I relearned the show from a handicapped point of view. It was an experience that was to be ongoing.

  I went to Dr. Leroy Perry, a sports chiropractor, scientist, and inventor who runs the International Sportsmedicine Institute in Los Angeles. We talked about my training program with Mary. We tried to figure out what was going wrong. He treated me with ultrasound and ionized electricity, which he administered to many of the injured Olympic and professional athletes he takes care of.

  My biggest fear now was fear itself. I didn’t know how I’d react to performance energy, the bright lights that affect your sense of horizon and balance, and the quickness that always accelerates when you have to mentally be a few beats ahead of the music and the audience. The need to be careful would slow me down, make me tentative, cause me to hold back, and possibly make me look like I couldn’t dance at all.

  Perry bandaged my leg using a figure-eight East German technique, which insured that the kneecap would stay in place. I knew I would be favoring the right leg, so I needed to build up the strength in my left one with weights and exercises.

  Then Dr. Perry and I tried to figure out why I really went down. We concentrated on my shoes. A dancer who is strong, as I was, should be able to correct an imbalance in mid-movement. I had not been able to do that. Perry wasn’t satisfied that it was an accident. He said there is always an explanation for what happens, and he was determined to find it.

  He examined the orthotics that I wore in my shoes when I danced. They seemed fine, yet perhaps I had corrected my body alignment enough with my exercises, therefore possibly did not need the orthotics. Perry wondered if perhaps I was overcorrected now. That was a possible explanation.

  He called Dr. Arnold Ross, sports podiatrist, to reevaluate the orthotics. The corrections were made. Dr. Perry felt that as a dancer I was nothing more than a high performance athlete, and all body movements—posture and muscle development (biomechanics, as he calls it)—had to be analyzed and corrected as soon as possible to ensure a safe yet maximum performance. He understood I was an athlete and that I could become my own worst enemy by overcompensating.

  He treated me for three days in between rechoreographing, and then I went to San Francisco. I knew I would have fun there, where I had many friends, and the people usually liked my shows.

  We loaded in the equipment, and I went on the stage to try the floor early. I walked every inch of it, adjusting once again to the extension out over the orchestra pit. I remembered this Orpheum Theater from six years before. After about a week, the extension begins to sink. For us dancers, it was like dancing on the Burma Road. As I examined it, I scrutinized it from the Seattle stage point of view. Had my heel really gotten caught in the crevice of the extension as I believed?

  Some of the dancers began to arrive. I hadn’t seen anyone since Seattle. They were worried about me, saw my bandage, and said they’d be there to back me up regardless of what happened.

  Gypsies are really in their element when there is a crisis. They have a crisis mentality. They had also had a long rest and were longing to move again. After much discussion, they and I determined that I had been dancing too far upstage for my heel to have gotten caught. It was something else.

  We redid some of the harder, more athletic steps so that the visual effect wasn’t disturbed but they were also not so difficult to execute.

  I had forgotten some of the lyrics; but when I got out of my own way, my lips seemed to form the right words involuntarily. There was muscle memory in the lips, as well as the legs and feet.

  We ran down the show and that night we did a preview. It went fine. I tried to conceal my bandage but knew I’d have to dance on it for a few weeks. The TV news cameras panned down to the bandage, naturally, and that was the story.

  The next night we opened. It was wonderful. I favored the knee, but I don’t think anyone noticed. The reviews were good and I was set to have a fabulous run, having learned a lot in the meantime.

  Then it happened again. Only this time it wasn’t my right knee. In the middle of a number, I turned my left ankle and sprained it! The pain shot through my foot so I couldn’t finish the number the way it was choreographed. I sort of stood in the middle of the dancers and waved my arms around. They covered for me.

  After the show, I couldn’t walk. I tried to put weight on it, but I absolutely couldn’t. I only had two legs. Which one was I going to favor now?

  I called Dr. Perry. He was appalled. “Something’s not right about all this,” he said. “There is some reason these things are happening; send me a pair of your shoes again.”

  I sent a pair by Federal Express immediately. He went over them again with the orthotics doctor. Then he called the shoemaker. To the eye they looked fine, but Perry wasn’t satisfied. He related the conversation with the shoemaker to me:

  “Listen,” he said, “is there anything about her shoes that’s different from what you’ve always done for her?”

  “Only the sole,” answered the shoemaker.

  “The sole?” asked Perry. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought they looked too clunky when we lowered the heel, so I beveled the sole to make them more cosmetically beautiful.”

  “You beveled the sole?”

  “Yes,” said the shoemaker. “It looks beautiful, don’t you think?”

  Perry hesitated. “A beveled sole? That means she rocks back and forth, side to side, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said the shoemaker.

  “Well, how much less control of the floor does she have as a result of the bevel?”

  “About seventy percent less, but as the shoe breaks in she will have more contact,” he answered.

  Perry exploded. “You’re telling me she’s out there dancing with only thirty percent control of the floor under her?”

  “Well, yes,” said the shoemaker. “Does that matter?”

  “Matter?” said Perry. “She’s out there dancing on ice skates. It’s the same equivalent. She only has the center of the sole to rely upon. No wonder she’s injuring herself. Her feet are continually looking for one hundred percent control of the floor. You can’t do what she does without one hundred percent control of the floor under you!!”

  “Oh,” said the shoemaker. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  So now we had it. Perry instructed him to put a wedge on the bottom of each shoe to even out the balance. I could feel the difference immediately. One of the benefits of working with Dr. Perry is that he relates to me from a doctor/coaching point of view and demands that his athletes have efficient biomechanics of good posture. Correcting the shoes would enable me to perform more efficiently. The problem now was that I had to wear an ankle brace and a knee brace. I looked like a veteran from the Long March.

  I went into a series of exercises for my left ankle, knee, and back. Dancers can’
t exercise or stretch too much—we must stay in maximum shape, yet maintain flexibility. My San Francisco run seemed to consist of exercising both sides of my body during the day. I used the Perry-Band, an elastic band exercise system used by athletes around the world, to keep my muscles strong; and another Perry product, the Orthopod, a forward inversion exercise device to keep my hamstrings, buttocks, and back stretched out while keeping my inner thighs and abdomen strong so that I could look captivatingly balanced every night. I always keep the Orthopod outside my dressing room door to remind me to stretch.

  I had given myself the final lesson. Ankles were not only about flexibility and support. They enabled one to stand on the toes, lift the head high, and take command of looking up and over life. When one’s footing was sure, that was possible. When one had only thirty percent surefootedness, it wasn’t.

  I had not been one hundred percent sure of myself and my show. I had been thirty percent sure of it. I had gone down while attempting to “turn” it around. In that act, I had learned what I had been reflecting from the very beginning, that I had drawn all of this to myself to mirror my own insecurity. Perhaps my insecurity had come from not totally committing to the belief in myself. Would I ever overcome the conditioning my father had instilled in me? He might have died peacefully, having become love, but his face and twisted insecurities had been etched on my consciousness forever.

  After San Francisco I gratefully returned to my home in the Pacific Northwest. Needing time to reflect again, I took careful walks in the fields around the house; not that I could yet climb the mountains or visit my beloved river, but peace lived in that place and some of it would seep into me. I wondered how much more the beavers had expanded the pond below. Which trees had succumbed to the latest cleansing windstorm? Had mischievous teenage boys burned campfires, endangering the wildlife?

  I could feel the weather change. There had been less and less rain every summer for the last seven years. I remembered the scientists at the Davos Conference on Economics the previous year warning the CEOs of the world of the global warming already in effect. They predicted that within ten years the temperate zones around the planet would resemble desert climates and the northern latitudes would be temperate.