“Carmelita?”
Josie’s eyebrows hit her hairline. She leaned forward, hands gripping the chair arms.
“You knew Carmelita?” I leaned forward too. “Carmelita Maracci?”
“Yes!”
“At Perry’s Dance Studio, on Highland in Los Angeles?” I asked, gobsmacked.
“No.”
“On La Brea at Smaltzoff’s”
“No, It must've been after that.”
“Sixth and Catalina in the Wilshire Corridor?” I queried. At the back of my mind was the question I wouldn’t ask, ‘Do you think we were there at the same time?’ I didn’t want to risk conflict of interest, because she’s a really good therapist for me and I’ve been seeing her for the last several months. I don’t want to jeopardize that relationship.
“Don’t remember the name of the street.” she said.
“Well, El mundo es un pañuelo. I said. “The world is a handkerchief.”
Like the bond that forms among soldiers in trenches, those of us who studied with this iconic, fiery, world renowned dancer of the 1940s and ‘50s understood the draw of being under Carmelita’s tutelage and the guts it took to stick around and duck her flack and barbs. ‘Brittle with occasional ice shards,’ the weather report in Ms. Maracci’s vicinity. I've met a few veterans of Carmelita's classes. She taught in LA from the late fifties through mid 1970s.
During the last years I studied with her, my gluttony for punishment put me in her presence six days a week: Three classes en pointe, Saturday ballet choreography, and two classes of zapateado, at that last studio both Josie and I had known her to rent.
My father had pronounced Carmelita the BEST of the best and took me to Perry’s upstairs Studio when I was nine. Mercifully, Peggy Henderson, a Scotts woman with broad brogue and twinkly eyes beneath her curly gray mop led the barre portion. “Na-ow, Lye-deez,” she’d intone and make ‘schwwttt, schwwtt’ sounds as we did our battement tendu from first position. When Carmelita made her blustery entrance through the double doors of Studio A for the floor portion, we pre-adolescents huddled together like baby chicks in a gale.
My Aunt Serena came to watch one day. She had a leg that wouldn’t bend, so she propped it on her other foot as far out of the way of our chaînés turns as she possibly could.
When Carmelita demonstrated for us the precise coordination of arms, head-snap, and feet, she continued very fast to the corner across the room, hairpins flying. She very nearly bumped into Serena’s outstretched legs. “Madame!” Carmelita’s voice rattled the windows. “You could have killed me!” I gasped and covered my scarlet face.
My father went to live elsewhere shortly after introducing me to dance. I loved dancing so mom continued to drive me to Perry’s another year or so. Then I switched to Ann Barlon’s modern dance classes across the street from Echo Park Lake on Saturday mornings. Much easier for mom. I liked it fine too. I just loved to dance.
My father died when I was sixteen. In some gesture of warped loyalty to him and because by then I could drive myself, I returned to study with Carmelita. I was still enthralled with the idea of making dance a career. These were rigorous classes. In high-school I remember wringing out my leotard and tights after class, before changing and popping them into my dance bag and heading home. Under no circumstances were we to wear our dance clothes out of the studio. Carmelita’s rules of modesty and decorum were admirable and, I learned later, appropriate for maintaining health. Sitting on a cold cement bus bench wearing wet dance togs after another teacher's jazz class made me a feverish to the point of delirium from a kidney infection at age 20.
Sadly, Perry’s was sold to developers. On that area of Highland now stands the Dolby Theater where the Academy Awards presentations are held. I followed Carmelita to Smaltzoff’s in West Hollywood. There she offered me a scholarship for “those legs.” She said, “They should be seen dancing on-stage.” I was timid and intimidated, but her gesture gave me a heart-swelling ego-boost.
It was at the studio after Smaltzoff's (where I assume both Josie and I knew her to rent last) that Carmelita leaned into my previous studies of Classical Spanish Dance at Falcon Studios, with José Fernandez. I became her dance translator. I'd been studying with José for three years. Because of an arthritic spine, Carmelita would hobble over to the barre and show me one time only the pattern she wanted me to chunk down and teach the class. No pressure there. Hah!
It was at that studio in the Wilshire District where Julie Newmar and a few other stars danced with us. They may have sensed this treasure would not be teaching much longer. Julie held onto the top of the upright piano for barre work because the actual barre was much to close to the ground for her six-foot-four-inch frame. She was one of about nine dancers who all went north to San Francisco to march in moratoria against the War in Vietnam. Clad all in black with dramatic black and purple garlands of fabric flowers over our shoulders linking us together, we were a somber sight. Julie’s wonderful height kept us from losing one another at the end of the marches. If we got separated, we just looked up and met by Julie - as if she were a clock tower. We dancers traveled north for three such protests against the war from 1966 to 1968.
Eventually, my feet showed me the way out from under Carmelita’s spell. Painful arthritis in the ball joints of both feet told me: No more. I was twenty-two.
