writer, editor, teacher
For months my daughter has been taking ballet and tap at the local recreation center, and she recently came to the requisite end-of-year performance. My kid is only four, so her part was minimal—a few short, absurd appearances, flanked by all the other little giggling girls in her class. The real show started and ended with the older girls. I knew I wasn’t in store for something professional, but I still didn’t expect what was coming.
Read more at Motherwell!
Paul Taylor, a legend of the dance world, was the first dance I ever saw, at age 4, at Jacob’s Pillow. I fell in love right there.
He died yesterday, at age 88, and will be so deeply missed.
Over ten years ago I wrote an homage to my favorite piece of his, “Esplanade,” for Dance Magazine. The dance still makes me weep.
To see this marvelous piece of choreography, click here. Do yourself a favor and watch all five parts.
xox
It’s summer, August maybe, and our family’s boxy purple Peugeot is parked at a rest stop gas station. My father pumps gas in his leather sandals. My 13-year-old sister, Rachel, slumps in the backseat, listening to her Walkman with her hood up over her ears. My mother, in a billowy fuchsia sundress, stands next to the passenger’s side of the car with the door open, one sandaled foot propped up on the runner, one palm resting on the top of the car, waiting. Her gray hair is cut very short. Her oval glasses take over much of her face.
I’m five, and have gotten out of the car to dance around on the cement for a few minutes, my white Tretorns, striped T-shirt, and shorts glistening in the sun. I skip over little puddles of oil between the cars, making a game out of not getting my feet wet.
There are several adults clustered around the pumps, filling their cars. I hop over to one of them, look up and say, “My Mommy had babies that died.” Then over to another: “My Mommy had babies that died.”
My mother did, indeed, have babies that died; so did my father, of course. I guess my sister did, too — baby-siblings. But these babies — a boy, a stillbirth at 23 weeks, and a girl a year later, at 24 weeks, both big enough to swell my mother’s belly but small enough to fit in the palm of my father’s hand — died seven and eight years earlier, respectively. I came next; I was the one who made it.
Read more at Modern Loss.
xox
When the two stragglers let the door clatter shut behind them, I turn the lights in the restaurant’s dining room all the way up and zip over to the stereo. For the past few months, we’ve been blasting the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” while closing. We all sing You may ask yourself, my God, what have I done? while manning brooms and mops and rags, none of us aware that we are singing of our own lives. At the chorus, we give in, drop what we’re doing and dance: Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down…
Keep reading by clicking here.
Thanks, Longreads, for publishing this!
xo
Happy Spring, all! I’m delighted to share three new pieces.
I wrote about my inability to make decisions on my own for Lenny.
I wrote about how much I love my own Mama for Mother’s Day for Land’s End Journal.
And! I wrote about getting up at the crack of dawn to have some time for myself (for crying out loud!). (It will shock no one to learn that since I published this, my kid’s been waking up much earlier. #Momfail.) This one was for Healthline.
xoxoxox
I had the delightful experience of talking with the folks over at the new podcast, Restoration Row, about chronic pain, identity, mental health, and recovery. How does pain change us? And is that okay?
(Yes, yes, it is.)
Click over here to listen to the podcast. (Interview begins around 14:00.) To hear my Lenny Letter piece read aloud (beautifully–that accent!), don’t skip ahead!
xo
We converged on New York City from every corner of the globe: from college dance departments in Ohio and Michigan and Minnesota, and conservatories in Florida and California and North Carolina; from Athens and Stockholm and Tel Aviv, and tiny towns in Brazil and Ecuador and Italy, all of us sweeping into Manhattan, that sliver of an island, from the outer boroughs for morning class. In our bags: cut-off sweatpants and bottles of water, tape to bandage split and bleeding toes, matches to soften the tape, apples and bags of tamari almonds from the Park Slope Food Coop, sports bras and tubes of mascara, gum, cigarettes, wallets full of cash from late nights working in bars and restaurants, paperbacks and copies of New York Magazine, and iPods for long subway rides. The bags weighed 10, 15 pounds.
My piece about dance, injury, chronic pain and identity is up on Longreads! Click here to read on.
Every morning for the last six years, I’ve woken up in an apartment that isn’t my own. I roll out of a bed I didn’t purchase, pour coffee into whatever mug I find in the kitchen, and stare out on to walls adorned with art that makes me cringe.
Before I met my husband, I found this kind of life absolutely unthinkable.
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I wrote about marrying a nomad for Hunker! Click here to read it.
Last Friday, I hid out in my daughter’s preschool classroom. It truly seemed like the only sane thing to do. Friday is Shabbat, a morning when the Rabbi—a young woman in her thirties my daughter adores—sings and prays and tells stories and dances around the room with the kids, and families are always welcome. When I saw a new friend, one with whom I’ve spent the better part of the last few months in candid, worried conversations about the state of the world, walk in with her husband—it was their son’s day to have their family participate in Shabbat—we both began to cry. She’d been listening to the inauguration speech on her way to school and was beside herself. (I haven’t and won’t listen to any of it.)
The kids begin each Friday the same way, sitting around in a circle on the brown carpet, singing: “We’re so glad that Shabbat is here,” and they genuinely are—every week, when I remind my daughter that it’s Shabbat, she screeches, practically jumps out of her skin. “Will the Rabbi be there?” (Yes, yes, she is almost always there.) There is something profoundly reassuring about the ritual; something so powerful about the act of simply acknowledging your gratitude—that you made it through the week, that you are surrounding by friends and family, and that you have the gift of slowing down and feeling that gratitude. That we are meant to eat and drink and share in our humanity together. That we know, no matter what, we will gather. (Sometimes I think, what else is there, really?)
A few parents were there, clearly shielding themselves from the outside world. One woman had been at the parents’ board meeting I went to on November 9th; a gathering we all sobbed our way through, a picture of Hillary staring back at us from the pre-printed agenda for the morning. Before I knew her name, I knew she had gotten a pedicure with a white H and an arrow through it. I stared at her toes all through that meeting, wondering how long the meticulous artwork had taken, when she’d have the courage to take it off her body; whether she’d just let it slowly chip off over time. For weeks she kept it on and finally said to me, “I haven’t had the heart to do anything about it.” I didn’t blame her. Our Hillary sticker is still on our fridge, a pin on my tote bag. I wear my T-shirts to bed. Today, we sat across the circle from each other and I couldn’t bear to make eye contact with her—the one time I did, I could see her eyes brimming with tears as our kids sang joyfully on our laps. I buried my own face in my kid’s hair.
I’ve stayed for Shabbat before, but they have a new ritual, perhaps because the children are now old enough to really participate. After the rabbi has left—after the singing and praying and gallivanting around the room is over, after the “Torahs” have been put away—they sit back down in their circle. One child distributes change from the Tzedakah box—one coin per child—and slowly they pass the box around. (Tzedakah officially means justice or righteousness, but is usually translated as charity.) As a group, they sing “Tzedekah, Tzedakah, we should always give,” followed by: “Danny gives Tzedakah, Tzedakah, Tzedakah, Danny gives Tzedakah for…” and each child, in slow succession, finishes the sentence: “I give for people who don’t have shoes, food, homes, medicine.” (One: “I give Tzedakah for people who don’t have pools!”) They all spoke with so much confidence and faith. The child whose family is participating brings other items to donate—food and toys. The kids know why. I feel so grateful that this is built into my daughter’s education. That my child is learning that, as a citizen of the world, as one who can give, this is simply what one does.
Is it naive (and cliché?) of me to think that children are much, much wiser than us? Having been through the Viennese childcare system, which is highly subsidised and free or cheap to all, I’ve spent the last little while obsessing about our early childhood education problem in this country—and the belief that if we offered free, comprehensive, masterful preschool teaching, we wouldn’t end up with monsters in charge of the country and the world. (I’m not delusional, and I know there are, as my grandmother used to say, people who are “piece goods damaged,” but not that many.)
What these kids are learning—to be kind, compassionate, to listen, to share, to speak out, to love—is more vital than anything they learn subsequently. It is foundational, and something that we are now learning in the most horrifying way, cannot be taken for granted (and cannot be learned so late in life?). And as my mother learned while writing her books about children with challenging behavior, you need to intervene with these “problematic” kids at two or three years old. By the time they are being sent to the principal’s office or kicked out of school or sent to jail, it is too late. It starts this early. And yet: how can we make it affordable for everyone?
Anyway, I digress. This moment is forcing us all to think a little bigger, isn’t it? To see all we’ve been lucky enough to take for granted, and the things we can do to make this world what we know it can be for our kids, for ourselves, for people across the way, for the planet itself. I keep coming back to my Rabbi’s (!) TED talk, in which she references an old Jewish piece of wisdom that reminds us of an important truth (I’m paraphrasing here, so forgive me; one of you real Jews can correct me): That each of us is both an infinitesimal spec in the universe, and an almighty powerful force. We are all both. We must be both, we must acknowledge both: Our irrelevance and our relevance. Our humility and our power. Our interconnectedness and our individuality.
Onward.
xo
***Women’s Rights poster by Mary Lundquist.
