“Up a steep and very narrow stairway”

A thought occurred recently. (And before you ask, no, it didn’t hurt. Geez.) A quick recap for anyone in the audience who has just joined in:

1. I did a LOT of dancing (specifically ballet) when I was younger.
2. I have recently returned to it as a form of exercise which I find to be much more enriching and enjoyable than going to a nasty, smelly gym.

For a few summers during college I worked with a large community/small regional (depending upon which set of paperwork you were doing) theatre in a town about forty minutes away from my hometown. The first year with them I did shows, and the following two summers I was the dance/choreography intern for their musical theatre summer program for kiddos, and the all-purpose intern for their...what I suppose we can call ‘devised theatre’ program. The morning kids did playwriting and show creation, the afternoon kids were the triple threats.(A theatrical ‘triple threat’, if you’re not already aware, is someone who can sing, dance, and act. It sounds much more, well, threatening than it is.) What I’m getting at here is that I did a lot of teaching of the 8-16 set (6-16 for the morning kiddos). I had never really thought I’d be much of a teacher since I have the patience of a gnat, but it turns out that I’m actually reasonably decent at it--and by ‘reasonably decent’ I mean that they learned what I needed them to learn and seemed to have a fairly enjoyable time doing it. What’s more, I enjoyed it.

Back to the thought.

If we put all of this together in an approximation of a cohesive idea, this is how it goes: Elizabeth used to dance + Elizabeth used to teach dance + Elizabeth is back to dancing = Elizabeth could, therefore, sign herself up to do substitute teaching at the dance studio. Pretty straightforward, right? That’s what I thought.

Obviously it’s not quite that straightforward--the thing about teaching dance is that when you’re out of practice (like I am right now), your brain isn’t great at coming up with combinations on the fly and that means that you have to do a decent amount of prep work if you want to teach an actual class and not just vaguely direct what will rather expeditiously devolve into a circus. So there’s lesson planning to be done, yes. There’s also the need to put together a decent playlist, because unless you’re absolutely spoiled and have a real live accompanist, dance class is always BYOMusic.

Okay. Not insurmountable, just some perfectly reasonable homework. Which I am doing. At my own pace. Don’t rush me!

Now here’s the deeper portion of this whole thing--this didn’t come (directly) from a place of “Oh. Here is a thing I know how to do and could maybe make a few extra bucks on the side if I did it on the regular.” That enters into it, of course, but there was more to it than that. You see, I have done a thing that becomes increasingly difficult as you get older: I have made A Friend! (Never mind that I’m old enough to be her mother.) (Also never mind that she’s technically also my tap teacher after the abrupt and unexpected departure of the last one we had.) (The point is that she’s hilarious and ridiculous and willing to put up with my shenanigans so we do stupid shit like go on adventures to the fancy health food store, where I hug jackfruits and bemoan the distinct lack of guavas and she gets excited about raw mixed nuts and any vegetable with a purple varietal.)

WELCOME TO MY LIFE, PEOPLE, I AM STRANGE.

That wasn’t the point. This was the point: Purple Varietal and I were discussing the current situation with the ballet program at the dance studio and of course, in my infinite wisdom, I had several thousand suggestions for how to improve upon it, and then P.V. comes out with, “You should sub!”

And I thought, “Yes. Yes, I should.”

There was a sentimental clincher on this one, though. You see, back in the day ::adjusts dentures, glasses, and ear trumpet:: when I put in those summers with the theatre kiddos there was one young lady who, bless her heart, was...unabashedly herself. I was watching from the outside, so I could see her struggle to be true to herself and her interests while at the same time trying to fit in with the other kiddos who politely tolerated her but clearly thought she was sixteen kinds of weird--props to them, though, they were never mean about it. (At least, that I noticed. Kids can kind of be assholes when no one is watching, though, so they might have been really stealthy jerks. Who knows?) Anyway, this particular girl wasn’t ever one who I thought would take too much of anything I taught ‘with her’, so to speak. It wasn’t that she didn’t pay attention or wasn’t any good at it, she was fine in both of those respects, I just never thought that my teaching would stick with her in any particularly meaningful way.

I was wrong with a capital ‘R’.

One afternoon in my first year of teaching with the program, we had a little downtime for some reason, so I cobbled together a sort of Fosse-esque routine and taught it just to keep the kiddiewinks occupied until the next thing came along. I’m pretty sure we only did it that one afternoon and that was the end of it. The next year, at some random time, and for some random reason, that sweet, singular little girl danced my throwaway combination full out for the other kids. I didn’t even remember teaching it until that moment.

I might have cried. Shut up.

It was this weird moment of “Holy cats, these kids actually remember the things I teach them. They are getting something out of this--something out of me.”

The weight of the responsibility of that revelation could have felled me like a ton of bricks right there on the floor of the community college dining hall/rehearsal space.

It could have, but it didn’t.

It felt fucking amazing.

And that is why, my good people, I am very seriously entertaining this whole “get back into teaching” thing. Sometimes when you don’t think you really do much that matters and then a memory like that surfaces you remember that once upon a time some sweet little goober remembered something you taught her not because she had to, but just...because...and that’s probably one of the biggest ego-boosters in existence. And also, apparently I might be, like, good at that whole teaching thing or something?