The Sugarless Plum: A Memoir (3 page)

To understand why it was so difficult for me to tell Rosemary that I would have to miss not just one performance but the last two weeks of the season, you have to first understand how central ballet had become to my life.

By this point all I wanted was to be at the theater and dancing all the time. Even though I hadn't been one of those little girls who dreams of becoming a ballerina, there was a confluence of circumstances leading me, without my even being aware of it, in that direction. I had been exposed to dance at a very early age, and my mother, who had also been a dancer, had found me a truly inspiring teacher. Dancing was, quite literally, in my blood.

The first dancer in the family was my mother's mother, my grandma Gloria. As a little girl, it had been Gloria's job to take her younger sister, Priscilla, to ballet class, wait until the lesson was over and take her back home. Priscilla had been stricken with polio, and her doctor thought that ballet lessons would be good therapy for her legs. But Priscilla refused to get up, much less
dance. Day after day, as the instructor tried to coax Priscilla to participate, my grandmother sat on the sidelines moving her feet to the music. Finally, the increasingly frustrated teacher noticed her sitting there and said, “You look like you would like to dance,” which was all the encouragement Gloria needed. She got up and kicked her leg above her head. “You're the dancer!” the teacher exclaimed, and so a career was born.

By the time she was twelve, Grandma had performed her solo routine of high kicks and acrobatics for President Coolidge. At thirteen, she was under contract with the William Morris Agency. Five years after that, she was performing with a touring company. Jack Levand, a handsome high school senior, was working at night as an usher in the theater. One night he watched her performance and fell madly in love. He pursued Gloria for a year, following her around the country, and when they were both nineteen, they eloped. Grandma continued performing in vaudeville and Broadway shows until Jack finished college at Ohio State University and they started a family. But even then she couldn't give up the stage, so she created an act she could perform with her two young daughters. My mother, Ellen, was just three years old when she began to appear onstage with her older sister, Arlene, and their mother.

In due course my mother was accepted at the renowned Juilliard School of Music in New York City, where she majored in modern dance. But she was convinced that she would never dance professionally, both because she lacked the confidence and drive it would take to compete and because—even though
she had been dancing her entire life—she had started her formal training so late. While she was at Juilliard she read an article about George Balanchine's fourth wife, Tanaquil Le Clercq, whom he had discovered when she was just twelve. When Tanaquil was fifteen, Balanchine asked her to dance with him in a piece he had choreographed for a March of Dimes benefit. In the ballet Balanchine danced the part of the evil Polio and she danced the part of his young victim who ultimately recovers. In a terrible twist of fate, Tanaquil—who had by then become one of Balanchine's great ballerinas and his wife—was stricken with polio at the age of twenty-seven. Balanchine believed that she, too, would recover just as her character had in the ballet. Sadly, however, the real Tanaquil was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

My mother was so moved by this story that she decided to become a physical therapist. But dance continued to be part of her life, and she continued to perform and teach traditional folk dancing, just as my grandmother continued to choreograph and dance.

 

My own introduction to dance occurred, of all places, in Thailand. I was born in 1965, the second of four children my mother was to have in the space of five years. My parents named me after my father's mother, Celia, whose Hebrew name was Tsiporah, which means “little bird.”

Michele, my older sister, was the leader as well as the most mischievous, and the one who could always make us laugh. Gary, who came after me, and my younger sister, Romy, were generally good kids. I was good, too, but I was the most difficult and demand
ing of the four. With less than two years between my birth and my brother's, Mom didn't have as much time as she would have liked to spend with me. Perhaps that's the reason why I was such a needy child. I always seemed to have more energy than I knew what to do with, and my emotions often flew out of control, as if I'd been plugged into some kind of electrical socket. I might be calm one minute and crying uncontrollably or having a temper tantrum the next.

My moods were a family affair, and the family joke was that, as the only Gemini, I had a split personality. I can still remember our visits to my mother's parents. My grandpa Jack would open the door and everyone else would run inside while he quickly shut the door, leaving me outside by myself. Then, from behind the closed door, he would call out in a cheery voice, “Are you the good Zippora or (changing his tone to one full of doom and gloom) the bad Zippora?”

No matter how happy I'd been on the ride over, the pressure of having to be good—and the assumption that I wouldn't be—always set me off. “I'm the bad Zippora,” I'd yell out, running to the shelter of the kumquat trees lining my grandparents' front yard. Talking silently to those trees, I imagined how one of those kumquats would feel if someone bit into its sour fruit, mistaking it for a sweet, juicy orange or tangerine, and then spit it out in disgust as soon as they tasted its astringent flavor. That was how I generally felt—misunderstood. And then, once I'd calmed down, I'd wander inside to join the rest of the group and the whole incident would be forgotten—as if it had never happened.

Although I adored my grandpa Jack, his old-school way of dealing with my emotional volatility wasn't what I needed. Over the years I came to understand that he was simply trying to motivate me to behave better in the only way he knew how, but the kind of kid I was simply didn't respond well to that kind of treatment. I did much better when left to my own devices to reach my own conclusions. My mother understood this, and even though she didn't always have time for me, she always gave me the freedom to be exactly who I was.

 

Eventually, it was through dance that I found something I really liked about myself and, in addition, a way to release my excess energy and the discipline to direct that energy into something positive. But all that was still in the future. In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, my father, a cardiologist, was drafted and assigned to Fort Carson in Colorado. A year later he volunteered to go to Thailand, so, when I was five, the entire family moved to Bangkok.

Even at that age I was keenly aware of how different this place was from our home in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. I remember turning on the bathroom faucet and waiting while black water streamed out for several minutes before turning clear. I remember watching my mother rinse all our vegetables in Clorox before preparing them. I remember the mosquito netting around our beds, canoe trips with my family down the Chao Phraya River, and watching the Thai people wash their clothes in that dirty water, where they also swam and bathed, and which they also drank.

What I remember most, however, is the magic of Thailand—the glorious colors, the costumes, the music, the scents and, most of all, the dance.

My mother, Michele, and I took Thai dance lessons. Most of the movements involved the head and arms, with our knees bending here and there and maybe a step or two in either direction. I loved watching my mom as she flexed her wrists and tilted her head. Her movements were subtle and simple, but she looked beautiful as she did them, and I got to see and know her in a way I never had before.

Our teacher was a lovely, dark-haired woman with a beautiful, sweet smile, and when it was Michele's and my turn to dance, she motioned us to the center of the floor with long brass fingernails that curved outward and ended in sharp, pointed tips. She didn't speak a word of English but silently demonstrated the movements she wanted us to perform.

I remember trying to time my movements with hers, all the while staring at those fingernails. More than anything, I wanted a set just like them. My mom said I was too young to wear them during our lessons, but she did buy a set for Michele and me to share on special occasions.

There were many evenings when we put on a talent show in the living room of our apartment on the army base. On those occasions I got to wear the brass fingernails, and Michele and I wore the beautiful Thai silk dresses our mother had tailor-made for us. I loved the way I felt in my Thai costume and those fingernails, being able to remember the intricate sequences, turning
my head in just the right way at the exact moment my hands moved in one pattern and my legs in another. I was just as mesmerized doing those movements as I had been watching them. Although I didn't know it at the time, I was beginning to experience the transformative power of dance.

After a year and a half in Thailand, my father's tour of duty was over, and we returned to California. My mother asked Michele and me if we wanted to take ballet lessons, and since Michele said yes, I did, too, without thinking much about it. I just wanted to do whatever she did. At the time, if you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd have said a veterinarian or a teacher of handicapped children. My idols back then were Dr. Doolittle and Helen Keller. I didn't even know that ballet was something you could do to earn a living. The one ballet I had ever seen was a “story” ballet on television, and I wasn't impressed. The dancers looked like zombies wearing too much makeup and pained expressions on their faces; their exaggerated gestures and facial expressions made no sense to me, and the performance itself was static. They were doing very little dancing, and I didn't understand why anyone would want to stand on the tips of their toes like that. The whole thing struck me as just plain stupid.

Nevertheless, if Michele was going to take lessons, I would, too.
We were in the youngest class, which included girls aged seven to nine, and at seven, I was one of the youngest. There were barres attached to the walls of the studio, which were lined with full-length mirrors. Holding on to the barre with one hand, we practiced standing with our legs and feet pointed to either side, which seemed utterly unnatural to me. Learning all those positions and steps with funny-sounding French names like plié,
tendu, dégagé, rond de jambe,
pirouette,
sauté
and grand jeté was difficult and boring. I would rather have been outside playing with my friends or spending time with my animals, but as long as I was there I wanted to do those steps at least as well as Michele.

I stuck it out for almost two years before I finally begged my mother to let me quit. I was so persistent about it that she finally agreed, providing I finish the year for which she'd already paid.

Between work and taking care of four kids, as well as a menagerie of animals that included three dogs, more cats than we could count on our fingers, turtles, sea horses and my ant farm, Mom had her hands full and was often late picking us up from class. While I was waiting, I got in the habit of going over to the window that opened into the main studio and watching the older girls take class from the school's primary teacher and co-owner of the studio, Sheila Rozann, who taught students starting in their third year and through the highest level. I'd never seen anyone exude as much energy as Sheila did, showing her students with her own body what she wanted them to do. What the advanced students were doing in that class seemed utterly different from what I'd seen on television and what I'd been strug
gling with as a beginner. It wasn't about emoting or telling a story; it was all about pure movement and energy.

Even though the sweat was pouring off their bodies, when they danced they looked like magical spirits, and I was entranced. Something wonderful was happening in that classroom, and I wanted to know what it was. Since I knew that the following year, when I'd move to the third level, Sheila would be my teacher, I decided that I wasn't going to quit after all.

 

As a young girl, Sheila had dreamed of becoming a ballerina, and everything about her body said that she should have succeeded. She was five seven, with a thin torso and long legs. She held her chest up and her shoulders back, and she walked with her feet turned out. There was just one problem: Sheila had flat feet with no instep, and without an arch she would never stand gracefully
en pointe.
She could have been a character dancer and was even offered a contract by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, but to Sheila that wasn't “ballet.”

Instead, she opened her own ballet school, where her teaching style was inspired by photographs of her favorite ballerinas, every one of whom turned out to have danced for George Balanchine's company, the New York City Ballet.

Just five years after she opened the school, Balanchine found her. At that time he was bringing his company to Los Angeles once a year to dance at the Greek Theatre, and they always hired local students to dance children's roles in their productions. Sheila always sent students to audition, and when one group of
girls returned for a second year, it seems that Janet Reed, Balanchine's ballet mistress at the time, was so impressed with their progress that she asked them where they studied. Janet took Sheila to lunch and mentioned that she was going to tell Balanchine about her. Not long after that, Sheila got a call saying that Mr. Balanchine himself would be coming to the school to watch her teach. What he saw impressed him so much that he gave her a private lesson right on the spot, demonstrating how he liked his dancers to hold their arms and fingers and showing her how to do a proper
tendu.
But then he said, “You know I can't use you because you have no feet.” Sheila, of course, had never even thought that he thought she was auditioning for the City Ballet, but she was thrilled when he gave her an open invitation to attend his seminars and to watch classes at the School of American Ballet (SAB), which he had founded with Lincoln Kirstein, a brilliant, iconoclastic patron of the arts, as a feeder school for their company. To Balanchine, training was of crucial importance, and he modeled his ballet school on the storied Imperial School of Ballet he had attended in Russia, where standards were so high that they were regarded as equal to those of Russia's military and naval academies. That was the start of a forty-year relationship between Sheila and SAB.

 

Dance in Sheila's class was all about the energy that went into each step, the line of the leg, embodying the music and letting it all flow through you. Still, the technical aspects of ballet did not come easily for me. I couldn't help comparing myself to
Michele, who was two years older, and surpassed me both in strength and flexibility. Movements I was still struggling to master seemed to come easily to her. In a port de bras forward, for example, your legs are kept straight and in a turned-out position while you hold on to the barre with one hand and touch the floor with the other. Michele could put her whole hand on the floor and touch her head to her kneecaps, while I couldn't touch the floor at all. I wanted to do what she could do, but more than that, I wanted to know what it felt like to do it.

Finally, I asked my mother for help, and she showed me a ham-string stretch that she used with her physical therapy patients. I practiced that stretch over and over until, after several months, it happened—I could touch the floor with straight legs. I was only ten years old at the time, but that was probably the beginning of the determination and work ethic that would serve me well not only in my dancing career but also in the management of my illness. I had learned a profound lesson: if I focused hard on accomplishing something and worked diligently, I would eventually be able to do it well. I was learning how to transform my body into an instrument. No matter my mood, when I entered that studio I could channel my troublesome surges of energy in an entirely different way.

Most important of all, when I got my head out of the way and let the music flow through my body, I felt something bigger, grander, purer and more meaningful than anything I had ever experienced at any other time in my life.