My Fever Pitch

After saying that we come from very different backgrounds a coworker asked what it was that brought Justin and I together. She jokingly quarried if it was our mutual love of dance. While the Husband loves a good bit of experimental art and postmodern movement explorations as much as the next guy, no, no it was not a love of dance that drew us close. In fact, dance just about turned me into Justin's pre-ex-girlfriend.

The year was 2007. The soon-to-be husband had just returned from a year long stint in New Zealand, fall was setting in, and I was finishing my senior year in the dance department. I was immersed in aesthetic philosophy, movement-based existential ponderings, and rice (200 pounds of which was dumped on our heads as we dove across the stage... rice that is... no one dumped 200 pounds aesthetic philosophy on us... not quite sure how you would do that... unless Immanuel Kant decided to come contact improv with us). (Sorry, I'm fine arts nerding out.) I had never watched a baseball game on TV, I had never scarfed a cheese-stuffed brat, buttery popcorn, and Dipping Dots all in one sitting, I had never heard of the curse of the Bambino. I had written on a Contemporary Views assignment just days before, "NO to answers handed out with program notes to a generation never required to think." 'Cause I was a right, proper, elitist pain in the keister. (Do you ever wish you could go back in time and just smack yourself on the back of the head?)

Fall semester I was selected to perform in Ghostship, a work choreographed by my mentor, a brilliant and very lost professor. It was an incredible opportunity. It was exactly what I wanted to do, and several times I tried to convince said mentor to create a dance company and hire me to kick dance butt day in and day out.

At the time I was into Justin. Really into Justin. (In the same way that lobster is really into butter, Noah is really into bubbles, and baptists are really into coffee.) When the time to perform came I invited him to come to the show. In some small way I wanted him to understand what I do and to believe it to be incredible. Somehow, I thought 200 pounds of rice and a few knee-sades later, he would be smitten.

The night of the show came. I danced. It was awesome. He did not come.

I wasn't devastated. I just assumed this was some kind of sign. He just wasn't that into me, and I actually believed I could be okay with that. He chose not to come. We could still be friends. We were okay...

Until I saw him the next day. "So you weren't able to make it last night," I tried to roll out casually. I expected maybe an awkward moment, maybe a shrug, and then the mutual acceptance that life would continue much as it had, and, after every friend I grew up with was married off, I would run away to New Zealand, and live with the possums in the trees of Whangerei.

However, with barely a pause the Adonis replied, "Yeah, the Red Sox were playing."

I tried not to look like a semi-truck had just side-swiped my heart, backed up, and hit it dead on just to be sure it didn't try anything so foolish as love again. I tried to not narrow my eyes and turn very Gollum-like and wish death to Beckett, Ortiz, Papelbon and anyone else on the planet who wore socks of any shade of redness.

I was not entirely successful in masking the massacre of my heart. Justin suddenly seemed to realize he had said something not entirely endearing. "It's the World Series." He added for clarification. My face must have taken on a deadlier pallor.

The mean part of me, that part that I contain (but not overly well) spat out, "It's called a DVR." Justin muttered something else about this being the World Series, and his Red Sox, and a quarry on what my problem might be.

We started dating not too long after this incident. (After the Red Sox had defeated the Diamondbacks and in fact clenched the Series.) Awhile into our relationship I brought this incident up. I asked Justin if he liked me at the time. "Well yeah, of course," he replied. Apparently the confusion was written on my face. "It's the Red Sox," he re-iterated. As if all those months ago I hadn't heard him quite correctly. As if I should have been slapping my forehead with an 'Oh, it's the Red Sox, how silly of me, of course that's worth breaking the heart of your betrothed over.' Exasperated, the poor man declared, "We weren't even dating at the time!"

Somehow, that makes it worse.

But obviously not bad enough to break us up. Because here we sit, seven years later, he having attended a fair amount of dance concerts, and me knowing the Red Sox line up front to back as well as most of the bull pen. And in spite of our Fever Pitch beginning, we've managed to create something truly amazing:

A Red Sox fan, and












                               a dancer.

In My Defense

At the end of a non-majors creative process class I taught one student wrote in his paper that he couldn't understand why anyone would ever study dance at a university. He was a chemistry major. A nice proper profession. I wrote out a brief defense of my decision, the field, and aesthetics in general on the back of his paper. He never came to pick it up. In the off chance that a chemistry major I knew two years ago for the span of a semester would ever stumble upon the blog of a dancing, Christian mom, who looks vaguely familiar, I now present my case.

The chemistry major, the aspiring scientist, the undergraduate physicist, enters the lab with the goal of conducting experiments. They learn how to make rational science happen. However, the goal of this practice is not truly to follow scientific method and prove a hypothesis. The undergraduate student does not produce original research. They recreate the experimental process of their predecessors. Success is not determined by the actuality of the results proven, but whether those results match previous endeavors. You can know if you have made a mistake. You can know how it should all turn out. As far as I understand it, the undergraduate scientist does not have to think, they have to replicate and regurgitate. I don't begrudge them this bliss. It is not a dangerous road.

The first day I entered the modern dance department as a Sophomore in the program, I had to create three movement phrases and manipulate them into a short work. These works we then combined with other students to make more complex pieces. The first day I was a dance student I fashioned something the world had never seen before. Original research, at 19 years old! It wasn't brilliant; it won't appear in experimental theatres along the dark alleys of New York, but it was new. And it mattered.

There are those who believe art is unnecessary, that we cannot live without experimental pharmacology, but could endure the millennia quite happily without Poe, Forsythe, and Cage. I propose quite the opposite. At this point, the young scientist can make no contribution to the field that will in any way prolong our lives. How could he/she when original research doesn't really occur until masters or even doctorate work? Even the most accomplished physicist, the leading minds of our time, our Hawking, our Haroche, our Gurdon and Yamanaka cannot cure us of our mortality. We all still die.

When I first read Bukowski, I flew. When I first moved with Koester and Handman in ways I had never imagined, I thought perhaps I understood immortality. Yet, it was when I first created, fashioned and sweated, built and devastated, when I took that thing from nothingness into fullness, that I transcended. I locked eyes with my God and understood a small breath of what it must be to fashion a gazelle and watch it run, to carve a waterfall and feed a valley, to mold a child and hear "I love You" from her lips. Science continually reminds us that we are dying. Art has a far better chance of making us immortal.

Ellen Dissanayake is credited as redefining art as "making special". Art takes the everyday, the ordinary, the plain, and makes it special, a little more alive, a little more lovely. If this is the case, I choose a short life without penicillin, I choose a minute reality without genetic engineering, I choose a brief flicker on this planet free from mechanical lungs, spinal rods, and slicing needles, if it be a flicker more beautiful. Of course I don't have to (and haven't) lived without science. But I don't have to (and haven't) and won't live without art.

The Medical System Part 2

Remember back in grade school how all the cool kids wore Air Jordans, and sagged their pants down to their ankles, and got hot lunch to eat? When you grow up and enter a liberal university dance department in search of a master’s degree, all the cool kids are gluten free. They saunter into potlucks with soupy looking cookies, peel the toppings off their pizza, and are constantly searching for the world’s most perfect gluten free beer.

When my doctor first mentioned that I might have Celiacs disease I told him that it is not possible because I am not cool enough to be gluten free. Hip, trendy people who shop at Whole Foods are gluten free. I told him that wheatlessness would just feel like such a lie. He gave me a look. You know the look; the one that says “I’ve got a psychiatrist friend I met at a conference who could maybe help us out here.”

Usually, I have a huge amount of respect for doctors, for the amount of time they put into their education and how they pour into other people’s lives. However, sometimes all the studying in the world can’t teach you more about a body than the lady living in it. As a dancer I understand this mortal coil, its quirks, faults, and beauties better than many. And I’m pretty sure my Little Debbie pounding mortal coil does not have a gluten problem. I have the opposite of Celiacs disease... I think they call that gluttony.

One of the doctors I saw in the last few months suggested I take a break from a new medication I started mid October. Remember this adventure in regurgitation all started at the end of October. Since stopping my regimen with this medication four days ago I have not thrown up. Could it really be that simple? Why did it take me and a highly trained team of disturbingly intelligent professionals two months to figure this out? I am continuing in the experiment before I drawn life-changing conclusions here; however, it is difficult to not be excited when you order a barbecue chicken pizza for dinner and for the first time in two months don't re-experience it twenty minutes later.