What I Wanted To Be...

I always wanted to be a dancer. Not that I knew what it meant at seven or eight. I only knew that the Sugar Plum Faeries were the most beautiful, graceful, and light-on-their-feet beings I’d ever seen. My mother and her best friend Kay took me to see the Nutcracker. Maybe there were others in our party, I don’t recall. I only remember the dim lighting at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, the sparkle of the dancers’ costumes, the wonderful music lifting me out of my seat, and the smell of pine and fresh mown (or trampled) grass. I was seven years old.

Kay gave me A Child's Book of Ballet, which I still have - minus the cover, for my birthday. That summer, Mom signed me up for lessons. My friend from across the street, Angelika and I were taken to a studio somewhere under the big Eagle Rock in the town of that name. Sometimes, I was afraid that rock would roll right over the studio and squash us flat. 

There was a recital. Angelika and I practiced together and danced our hearts out. My father  built a ballet bar where we plié-ed and relevé-ed, did our port de bras, and ronds de jambes à terre for warm-ups before doing chaîné turns across the patio. So serious were we!  

When I was twelve, Ann Barlon was my teacher for modern dance, much closer to home. Angelika had moved away to Running Springs by then, and Ann’s classes were at the Saint Athanasius Episcopal church directly across from Echo Park Lake every Saturday morning. We put on concerts twice a year in Elysian Park. There, the Devil’s grass prickled our bottoms as we sat bare-legged on it. Very different from the wooden floor at Saint Athanasius which was polished smooth by feet passing over and scouring the boards for eons. Maybe we can thank the Devil’s grass for giving us strong gluteus and hip muscles. Ms. Barlon’s choreography was filled with hip lifts - meaning we came to standing by thrusting our hips skyward and the rest of the body followed. Those pokey blades propelled us up!

In between the Eagle Rock Ballet School and Ann Barlon’s Modern Dance Classes, my father introduced me to Carmelita Maracci, danceur extraordinaire, who was signed by impresario Sol Hurok for a five year contract. Unheard of! During one of her performances in the 1940s, Carmelita broke her ankle. When Hurok insisted that she dance on it anyway, she terminated the contract. 

Fiery and feisty, she taught Cynthia Gregory, Juliette Prowse, Julie Newmar, and many other dancers at Perry’s Dance Studio near the corner of Highland and Franklin, just up from Hollywood Boulevard. Perry’s was on the second floor of a commercial building and, just like the song in A Chorus Line, we dancers went “up a steep and very narrow staircase…” to a place that “wasn’t paradise, but it was home.” Peggy Henderson was the matronly assistant from Scotland who spoke with a broad brogue… “Now, Laidyes…” and gave us sound effects with her mouth: schwttttt, schwttttt, as we did our battement tendu at the barre. She taught the youngest students warm-ups and barre work before Carmelita got hold of us for floor work.

All of us young dancers were afraid of Carmelita. She was exacting and eager for her dancers to represent her well. She was a perfectionist whose harsh voice and severe features could crack open the waterworks of many young ones, sending them into teary exits from Studio A.

Perhaps because my father had selected her as “the best” in Los Angeles, I hung in there with the twice weekly lessons, until my father left to live in Hermosa Beach. That’s when I studied with Ann Barlon - age twelve to fifteen. After my father’s death in 1965, I returned to Carmelita’s classes, which had moved to La Brea Boulevard, and eventually onto Catalina Street between downtown and Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile.” At sixteen, I could drive myself to classes, and I took six a week, sometimes riding my bike from classes at Los Angeles City College to the dance studio and then all the way back to Echo Park at night. Anorexia was not part of the lexicon in the 1960s, but had it been, I probably would have been diagnosed with it. Even though I ate constantly, I burned off every scrap. Scrawny. Drawn. Wiry. Determined to live my dream of being a ballerina, I was driven to be the best I could. Carmelita said I had good legs. She offered me a scholarship. That was a blessing, as I was working just a few hours a day as a switchboard operator at a non-profit, and it was barely enough income for food, rent, books and class fees. My mom and step-dad were OK paying tuition my first year of college at Cal State LA, but not when I professed wanting to become a dancer. LACC cost just six dollars a unit. I continued my education there in the foreign language department, worked as a tutor, and studied dance mostly at night.

My boyfriend at the time was not a big fan of ballet. More precisely, he was not a big fan of me being gone to study ballet so many nights a week. Looking back, I’m not proud of letting his opinion matter so much. His will, that I be more available, and my feet developing arthritis in the ball joint of my big toes led me away from Carmelita and the whole idea of becoming a dancer. 

Before I hung up my dance-shoes altogether, I put in a couple of years at a Classical Spanish Dance studio with a teacher named José Fernandez. I went with the young mom for whose kids I babysat weekends. Ruth and I would drive together over to Falcon Studios on Hollywood Boulevard every week. He taught us castanets, zapateado, and how to keep our backs straight and chests high. He told us that women in Spain who learned this classical style wore corsets with whale-bone stays that were sharpened to a point - pointing up. If they let down for even an instant, their breasts would be pierced. I don’t know if the story was true. I do know that it inspired Ruth and me to keep our chests very high - even though both of us were board flat in the chestal department. She encouraged me by saying, “When you need breasts, Melinda, you’ll grow them. I nursed Amy and Sarah with no problems at all, then they just went flat again.” It was from Ruth and her artist husband Bob Gore that I bought my very-own first car - a 1954 too-fine, four-door, two tone Chevy Bellair. What a glorious yellow and green tank it was. It got me where I wanted to go… to school, to work, to dance class, and to Gypsy Gerry’s… until I finally learned that no one has the right to tell me what to do with my life. It took a long slow (five year) dance to figure that out.

When both my daughters studied Modern Dance with Karen Fox in Studio City, my friend Wendy, who had been a dance major at UCLA, and I hung out in the teen class (sipping our Geritol) and loving the live music and chance to be creative and immersed in what we both love so much.

I’m glad I got to dance as much as I did. Sometimes I still put on my toe shoes or Spanish Dance Shoes and conjure old steps and pieces I choreographed. Perhaps it’s good for getting my synapses to syn. 

Last December, I treated the seven year old Grandest Daughter and her mama to 

The Nutcracker presented by San Francisco Ballet. Perhaps she’ll remember the sparkle of the dancers’ costumes, the curtain going up, and the music lifting her out of her seat. She has asked for ballet lessons this summer. That is the job of a grandmother, isn't it?