Comics People are Good People

As you may or may not know, I dig that whole comic book thing. Most people know Marvel and DC--the ‘Big Two’--and all their superhero-centric story lines, but there is a whole world of comics and graphic novels that are really very far removed from Superman & Co. Personally, I’m partial to Image Comics because of their creator-owned business model and the vastly different comics they publish. But even Image is a large player in the game--there are plenty of smaller publishers putting out quality books all the time, you just don’t hear about it unless you’re attuned to the comics grapevine. I came to comics later in life, but once I was in, I was in. It’s kind of like the mafia, except without the horse heads and mail-order fish and cement shoes. It’s not just about books, though--it’s the people behind them.

Comics pros are infinitely more accessible than, say, your favorite film star. They go to conventions and trade shows and give talks and answer questions and have tables in the exhibitor halls where you can meander by and pick up a print or ask them about their most recent arc in a series. They will engage with you on social media. Comics Twitter is freaking hilarious, BTW. Gail Simone (probably best known for her run of Birds of Prey with DC and Deadpool/Agent X with Marvel) is a delight. Yesterday (2/24) her entire feed was different variations of a song about bananas. Today it’s that picture of the squalling porg from Star Wars and captions making it look like the porg is singing well-known songs at the top of its voice. About a month ago she got hundreds of fast-food chains to weigh in on Marvel vs. DC. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that she is a professional comic writer who could look down her nose at everyone and refuse to engage but instead, in this instance in particular, she incites people to random acts of silliness. My first ever interaction with her was when the news broke that she was going to be writing the character Domino for Marvel. I tweeted:

Me: “OMG, Gail Simone is writing Domino!”
Co-Workers: ::cricket noises::
Me. “...You’re all dead to me.”

She liked it, retweeted it, and followed me, and I don’t remember what happened after that because I passed out. (I didn’t really.)

I’ve had interactions with other comics people who have been just as lovely (if not as cuckoo bananapants), but the general niceness isn’t limited to the creators. Comics retailers, fandom artists and craftspersons, and collectors/merch vendors are, for the most part, also delightful. The staff at my local comic shop are lovely people. There are a couple of dealers I contact regularly-ish because they have a knack for finding what I’m looking for and they are consummate gentlemen. (Trust me, I wouldn’t have anything to do with them if they were sleazeballs. Ain’t nobody got time for that.) Thus far, I haven’t met a single person in comics in any capacity who was less than cordial. Yes, okay, there have been a few cold types, but no one has been a raging dickhead.

You see, the thing about being a raging dickhead in comics is that word gets around. FAST. It’s a larger community than you think, but it’s also very, very close-knit. You snub someone, you slag someone off, you purposefully pass on false information, and no one wants to work with you. Obviously these things are applicable to most industries, but in comics it seems to be deep-rooted, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing--it weeds out the real jerkoffs and lets the decent sorts get on with things.

In the spirit of this, when I was at a small local con a few weeks ago I did my level best to bolster the confidence of a younger member of the comics community. I had finished what I was there to do--buy a giant stack of Blackhawk comics from one of my regular comics retailers--and I was having a wander to see if there was anything else that caught my eye, either for me or for some very early Christmas shopping. (Hey, it pays to be prepared!) There was a young lady, probably somewhere around 13 years old, who had a table where she was selling her artwork. She had samples out and her kit with her, and after I passed her a couple of times I realized that most of us were doing just that--passing her by.

So I stopped.

I looked at what she had laid out, but none of it was related to any particular show or book or film to which I had any particular attachment, so I asked if she took requests.

“Um, I guess?”

“Could you draw my pet rats?”

“Um…”

“I have pictures.”

“That would help.”

So I showed her pictures and while she was scrolling through I noticed that one of her display works was the Powerpuff Girls (for whom my ratties are named).

“They’re named after the Powerpuff Girls. Do you think you could draw them as the Powerpuff Girls?”

“I can try?”

That was good enough for me. I left her for a while and browsed, and eventually made my way back. We chatted as she finished up, and I asked her how much I owed her for her delightful creation. She thought for a minute, clearly unsure how much to ask, then settled on $20.

I gave her $25.

Her whole little face lit up.

For all I know, I was the only person who paid her any mind that day. She may not have sold anything beyond my little commission. But I couldn’t let her sit there unnoticed the whole day, so I did what I could to give her a little ego boost and keep her going.

And besides, the picture is SUPER CUTE.

Part 3 of 3 — “God save my little broken body!”: These people are nuts

For the last two weeks you’ve been reading about my foray back into the dance world as an older, wiser, and far more broken human being than really should be attempting a 120° arabesque.

Over the years, I have had a number of different instructors--some for prolonged periods, some for a few classes--and most of them were reasonably sane. There were a few I’d classify under “raging bitch”, but thankfully my study with them was brief. There are two stand-outs for me insofar as teachers who had a profound effect on my dancing (and my life) because of their own patented brands of lunacy, and there was one who was...well, she was class*, pure and simple. Let’s start with her.

Gloria Mohr was born in New York City in 1932. Her list of credits is too long to repeat here, but the biggest as far as I was concerned was her 10-year stint with the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine. When I studied with her she was in her early seventies. She was a miniscule woman (she made me feel like a Grade-A hippopotamus) but she was enormous in personality, and joy. Even at 72 she was still dancing full-out--she didn’t just sit next to the stereo and shout and tap her stick along with the music. She knocked out turns and poses and combinations like they were nothing--exercises that at 17 I couldn’t come close to executing as beautifully. She was full of stories of her days with “Mr. B.”, as Balanchine was known to his dancers: how her father and Balanchine spoke French to each other, how she had visited Mr. B in the hospital just before he passed away. She was gracious and gentle and always, always dignified. She passed away in 2016 at the age of 84, having “retired” (as much as she saw fit to do so) two years earlier. I have always thought that if I can manage to be half as vibrant as she was in my later years, I’ll be lucky.



Godspeed, Gloria. I hope Ballet Heaven is full of gala premieres, pointe shoes that are perfect straight out of the box, and many, many fur coats.

Now, let’s move on to the person who inspired the majority of last week’s post. This woman got more improvement out of me in my first year with her than my previous teacher had in...well, a lot of years. Her methods were unorthodox, to be sure, but exceedingly effective. She yelled. She wielded her stick in a startling manner. She threw things.

She was amazing.

Every time I tell people about how she would tape our thumbs in place if we were ‘serial hitchhikers’ or that she regularly lost her voice during heavy rehearsal times or that every so often we dodged a hurled water bottle the reactions I get are priceless. “Are you serious?” “Oh my God, that’s horrible!” “Why didn’t you quit?” The answers, in order, are yes, not really, and I didn’t quit because I’M NOT A QUITTER, KAREN.

The thing you need to understand is that for all her antics this woman really, truly cared about all of us, in and out of the studio. Yes, she wanted us to be the best dancers we could possibly be, but she also knew that we were human--and teenaged, at that. She made us work, she pushed us, but she also made sure that there was time for silliness and sadness and everything else that comes with existing in the 13-18 year old age bracket. She was on our side, but she also wasn’t so far into the ‘friend’ camp that she didn’t still have our respect. So yes, she was a nut job, but she was a compassionate nut job who wanted to see us succeed, even if it came at the expense of a few hardware-store dowels.

And besides, they were only ever empty water bottles anyway.

Last is a man I studied with in college. The first thing to say about him is that he creased his jeans. Like, ironed them so that they had a crease down the front like dress slacks. On purpose.

Jeans.

That should tell you a little bit about his personal brand of whack-a-doodle.

Everyone who danced at UCI came in contact with him for one reason or another. His reputation went before him. He could be terrifying, but it was all out of love (though you generally spent a long time being terrified before you realized it). He had this shriek. It was so distinctive that I can’t even come up with a good comparison for you. You wouldn’t think that a tiny Phillipino man could generate a sound like that, but by God, he did. He looked down his nose at everything and everybody--literally. It’s just how his face was. He had his own dance vocabulary and you had to learn to speak it quickly or you’d fall on your ass (figuratively--though also possibly literally.) Since my dance department audition had been such a massive failure I got placed in level two when I first danced at college, and level two fell under this man’s purview. After my first quarter, he learned who I was (at that point I was more advanced than the rest of the class because everyone more advanced than me had moved up a level) and I became his model.

“E-liz-a-beth Ma-RIE! Front and cen-TER!”

He always called me by my first and middle names, which to this day I find rather endearing.

You may recall some of the terms I introduced you to last week. This man taught almost exclusively in dancer’s shorthand and single-syllable noises. I know I said he had his own dance vocabulary a bit further up, but in all honesty it was less a vocabulary than a babbled series of commands. The ‘Mah-Mah’ exercise I mentioned in my previous post is one of his. He would stand at the front of the room next to the piano, leaning back, looking down his nose, and he would start muttering his instructions—

“Mah mah mah mah mah mah mah, mah mah mah mah mah mah mah, mah MAH mah MAH mah mah MAH, mahmahmahmahmahmahmahmah MAH MAH MAH”

—and flapping his hands around and you knew it meant something, and you hoped you got it right. If you didn’t, that was fine. He’d shriek at you. And after he shrieked about that, he’d spend the whole combination shrieking, “Pli-é!” and “Fifth posi-tion! You younger generation, you don’t know fifth position?! Fifth position fifth position FIFTH POSITION!” and “Po-po IN!” That was your butt, BTW. Your po-po. Also, we were all ‘you younger generation’. Whatever our failing was, it was a result of us being ‘you younger generation’. I seriously wish I had sound clips from his classes, they were golden.

There was a bit of a shuffle between levels two and three for me during my years at UCI but during my senior year I opted to stick to level two for health reasons (read: I was broken). The first day he taught my class that year he beckoned me over to the piano, looked me up and down, and said, “E-liz-a-beth Ma-rieee. You don’t want to be in Ballet Threeeee?”

I said, “No, thanks. My back hurts too much for that any more.”

There was a pause, and then, “Ah-haaaaaaaaa.”

That was more or less how conversations went with him.

I’m going to leave you with a mini-lecture he delivered to us one morning, and though I wish I could give it to you in all its original splendor with the voice and the emphasis, you’re just going to have to be satisfied with my best attempt with textual manipulation.

He enters the dance studio, puts his bag down, nods to the pianist, and looks at the class. 

“Good morning every-ooooone.”

“Good morning,” we replied.

“Did you eat break-faaaaast?”

::assorted muttered responses::

“You younger generation, you don’t eat break-faaast? You can eat a pound of caaaake. You can eat a pound of baaaaacooon. You are yoooung. You will burn it ooooff.”

Honestly? After that I always kind of wondered if I could make it through a whole pound of bacon without succumbing to instantaneous cardiac arrest, but I’ve never tried.



*Put it this way: Gloria had a boyfriend. She never called him her boyfriend. He was her ‘companion’. They even listed him as her companion in her obituary. That, my friends, is class.

Part 2 of 3 — “God save my little broken body!”: An unconventional ballet dictionary and phrase guide

Know Your Schools:

• Cecchetti—The Italian school. Also the school I studied, and therefore the best school.
• Vaganova—The Russian school. ::puts on Russian accent:: “You stand in line in snow for six days to wait for pointe shoes, possibly get eaten by bear while you wait. If not eaten by bear, you get shoes and go to ballet school where you get shouted at by very scary 90-year-old prima ballerina who danced for the Czar before the Revolution—then get eaten by bear.”
• Danish—The only time this school will be mentioned is during a combination including grande jetés (‘big leaps’), at which point your instructor will shout, “Danish school! Long and low!”
• Balanchine—Just accept that this is the unconventional school. They count weird, they do weird things with their hands, their angles are extreme, and George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky were pals so if you’re a music buff just think of Balanchine as the balletic equivalent of Stravinsky’s Symphony in E Flat Major and...yeah.
• RBS—The Royal Ballet School (of England). Mostly mentioned as being the only school that really utilizes third position as a sort of demi-fifth for young dancers, which actually isn’t a terrible idea because it allows the body to adjust in increments.
• French—Pencil moustaches and berets and cigarettes or something, I don’t know. They invented it.

Dancer’s Shorthand:

• Dancer’s shorthand involves your literal hands. Instructors use this to demonstrate exercises rather than doing them full-out which can be rather tiring if you’re doing it all afternoon. The basics are pretending your arms are your legs and your hands are your feet and marking through the combinations as they are told to you. Things like double beats are marked as sort of flicky motions, and in general the whole thing is kind of floppy—but it gets the point across.

It’s Called What?:

• Woodpecker—This is a seasonal exercise, appearing in pre-performance warm-up classes during Nutcracker and spring recital season. For the remainder of the year it migrates to other climes...I think.
• Mah-Mahs—This is a jump combination. It is always different. Pay close attention to the instructor’s shorthand because instead of actually using words they will be mumbling gibberish. It helps if you can read minds.
• Torture Rolls—Does what it says on the tin, really.

Don’t Do This:

• Popeye arms—Popeye arms are unique to when a dancer is marking through an exercise. The hands are in fists, and the arms are bent at the elbow with the fists either tucked up against the shoulders or several inches out from them--dancer’s choice. Popeye arms are also a sure-fire way to get shouted at because the Ballet Gods have deemed them to be a Bad Habit. (But we all still do it!)

Observations:

• “Your carrier pigeons aren’t flying.”—The information isn’t getting from your brain to your feet in as expedient a manner as would help you be able to do this fucking exercise correctly!

Common Corrections & Teaching Aids for Same:

• “The floor isn’t going anywhere!”—Stop looking down, or I will tape this ballpoint pen to your chest so that every time you look down it marks the underside of your chin--or stabs you, depending on how violently you look down.
• “Your [body part] isn’t where it’s supposed to be.”—This stick isn’t just for keeping time, you know.
• Swashbuckling—When the entire class screws up, your teacher will pantomime sword fighting with his or her stick in your general direction to show their frustration.
• “Hitchhiking is illegal in the state of California!”—Your thumbs are sticking out, and it looks bad. Tuck your damn thumbs, or so help me I will tape them into the correct place.
• “Fifth position!”, “Plié!”, “Spot!”, “Point your toes!” and “I can see you thinking. Stop thinking!”—All of these will be shouted at you with great regularity. Just assume that whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong, and try to make the correction. Nobody ever got hurt trying extra hard for a perfect fifth position. (Except they probably did, because it’s a completely unnatural thing for your body to do.)

Goals:

• ‘Eleven Ruble’ Pirouettes—This is a reference to a scene in the 1985 film White Nights starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines. Hines’ character offers Baryshnikov’s character eleven rubles if he can do as many pirouettes, which, of course, he can. (Fun fact, it was supposed to be 21 rubles, but Baryshnikov dropped it to eleven because he wasn’t getting a perfect finish at 21.) For what it’s worth, I only ever got to a decent triple on my right side, so eleven is a lofty goal.
• Thirty-Two Fouettés—In Act 3 of the well-known ballet Swan Lake, in the coda of the Black Swan Pas de Deux, the prima ballerina traditionally busts out thirty-two fouettés which are possibly the most difficult turns in the ballet universe. Everyone strives for it, few manage to execute it, and even fewer manage to execute it well.

Part 1 of 3 — “God save my little broken body!”: I’m too old for this shit

***Written Wednesday, January 30th***

I used to dance.

That’s not unusual in itself--plenty of people went to dance class when they were kids.

I didn’t just ‘go to dance class’. I trained. By my senior year of high school I was in a ballet studio a minimum of five out of seven days in the week for a minimum of four hours at a time. I wanted to go to college for dance. I knew I’d never be a performer, at least not professionally, but I was a decent choreographer and I could always teach, right? I applied to schools with well-renowned dance programs. I auditioned. I flaunted a track record of dedication and involvement and annual attendance at very expensive summer programs.

It wasn’t enough.

I was too weak in contemporary styles (Jazz was always my achilles heel) and I was coming from a very ‘small pond’. I had one other critical failing, and that was my body. I’m not talking about body image or stereotypes in the dance world--though those were certainly on the table--but a literal failing of my body to be able to cope with the constant strain of dancing. Trust me when I say that ballet is not normal. It forces your muscles and bones into movements and positions that permanently alter your physique. Practice means repetition, and those repetitions eventually create problems. Double all that unnatural nonsense with a body that was already prone to injury in certain areas and you have A Problem.

I have always been remarkably flexible in my hips and back. My mother looked through the pass-through from our kitchen to our living room once when I was three to find me watching TV in a full-blown straddle split. (Her thought at the time, I’ve been told, was, “Well...she’s not crying…?”) I was that kid who would do a ‘basket’ and you could tuck my heels around my chin. This was absolutely a boon to my dance career, but it came at a cost. The muscles around my lumbar region were shockingly weak and by the time I was twenty a light breeze could tweak my L5 and I’d be in serious pain. My left leg would take ‘unannounced vacations’ by simply deciding it didn’t want to be in its socket any more. In fact, the day of the dance department audition for UC Irvine my left leg pulled that trick as I was stretching (gently, even!) before we started the barre section of the ballet audition. It popped out, made a circle, and popped back in. I threw my back out (sadly not for the first time) by overcompensating for my hip all day.

I was a mess.

Even though I didn’t end up in a dance program in college, I did end up at UC Irvine in my second choice of major (Drama) which meant that I was able to take classes in the dance department, which I did. At the end of my sophomore year I had to admit that my body just couldn’t take the strain of ballet any more. Like, at all. Everything hurt, both physically and emotionally. Something I had loved for so long was no longer available to me. But it was stop or cripple myself, so I stopped. Thank goodness I had picked up tap during my freshman year, because at least I still had that.

Fast-forward however many years.

Tonight, I am going to go to an adult ballet class. This is not the first time I have undertaken this sort of endeavor in the past...oh geez, almost twelve years, but thanks to a hell of a lot of good chiropractic/physical therapy care I think I finally have the tools at my disposal to take this on again and not have to stop after a month because my body refuses to cooperate. It will be good for my physical health. It will be good for my mental health. And I will enjoy it a metric fuckton more than going to a horrible, smelly gym. On a related note, I’ll be trying their adult tap class tomorrow night, but I’m far less concerned about the effect on my old bones from that than from ballet.

I’m going to stop here for now and come back to this tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion of: Will Elizabeth Be Able to Walk, or Will She Actually Die?


***


January 31st, Thursday

That was...amazing. Harmonious. Refreshing. Liberating. Joyful. That felt right.

In the aftermath it has left a feeling of quiet confidence, and something I can’t quite put my finger on…

You know what? I think the word I’m looking for is “Ow”.