Monthly Archives: January 2012

Dancing with Laurie

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I fell completely in love with her the moment I saw her. And then, when I saw her dance, even more so. The fact Laurie Scandurra was slightly older than me, combined with the sadly unavoidable reality that I was 10 or 11 at the time, probably explains why I didn’t propose marriage to her on the spot.

Laurie was and is one of my favorite dancers – ever. And I’ve seen, without exaggeration, hundreds of dancers.

For quite a few years I was a ballet dancer. And, once a dancer always a dancer, at least that’s how I see it.

I wouldn’t trade in my dancing days for anything. I had the privilege of dancing a lead role for the Joffrey Ballet and I danced quite a number of roles (and quite a number of times) for a regional dance company in Orange County, New York called, the Orange County Ballet Theater. It was there that I met Laurie.

She was then and remains now my favorite female dancer. We all had our favorite dancers back then. We’d compare favorites much like kids would compare favorites in their collection of baseball cards.

My love for the ballet preceded my love for Laurie by about five or six years. It happened when, at age five, my mother took me to see the New York City Ballet’s “Nutcracker” at City Center. At the end of the ballet I was sure of three things: I wanted to dance, marry Clara, and beat-up her brother Fritz for breaking her Nutcracker in the first act. I even mailed Clara a love letter addressed to, well, Clara.

I’m still waiting for a response.

My favorite male dancer was, without question, Edward Villella of the New York City Ballet. When Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 and became all the rage, I wasn’t having it. As far as I was concerned he was no match for Villella. And, for pure depth of artistry, no one was a match for Erik Bruhn of the Royal Danish Ballet. Bruhn was, without question, the Laurence Olivier of dance. I’d rather see Bruhn do one pirouette than anyone else do 10.

But when it came to women, Laurie, as I said, was my favorite. She wasn’t just good, she was great. Why? Because like all great dancers, the all of her being, physically, emotionally and spiritually, was present in her every movement. There wasn’t an emotion on the life-scale of emotions that couldn’t flow out of her with breathtaking power and completeness. I could’ve watched her dance forever. And, oh my, how I wanted to dance with her.

Like me, Laurie did not have the over-valued and over-hyped George Balanchine-body, meaning tall, lean, and absent even a hint of curve. As a result, she didn’t get cast in roles like the lead in Sleeping Beauty or Swan Lake (she would have soared in both). Had she ever been given the chance to dance the lead in “Firebird” she would have come close to matching the greatest female lead in that ballet, Maria Tallchief. Francisco Moncion and Maria Tallchief owned the “Firebird.”

Back then Balanchine, in the eyes of many at the time, could do no wrong. He was seen as almost a God by some. Not me. Yes, he was a brilliant choreographer, but I was not a fanatical fan of Balanchine like my mother and so many others. In fact, when I first saw his ballet, “Agon,” my mother positively blanched and nearly lost her footing when, as we were leaving the theatre, I told her the only thing that needed to be done to fully capture my opinion of the ballet was to add a Y to the end of its name. I was seven.

I did like some of Balanchine’s ballets very much. I would have given anything to dance “Tarantella” with Laurie. There are other ballets I would have loved to dance with her as well. “Afternoon of a Faun” comes to mind and then, of course, she would have been spectacular in the role of the ballerina had I ever had the chance to dance the part I coveted more than any other, the role of Petrushka in the ballet “Petrushka.”

I’ll tell you this, if we get a do-over in life,  my plan is to propose marriage to Laurie the second I see her, so what if I’ll only be 10 at the time! And then, of course, I’ll ask her to dance.

This year the classics

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Reading is a sanctuary for me. I suspect this is so for most book lovers. In addition to being a sanctuary, reading offers endless amounts of knowledge; endless amounts of emotional, spiritual, and physical experiences. The latter point might strike some as odd but read a book like Hampton Side’s Ghost Soldiers and you may notice yourself feeling physically drained at times.

I guess that is the wonder of reading, the all of the reader’s person is involved. And given that the world, thankfully, has an endless supply of books, one is wise not to miss the classics. It would be rather disingenuous of me to say I’ve read many classics, though I have gobbled up quite a bit of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. I am immensely glad I did not let the length of War and Peace peace deter me. When I read it (it is one of the greatest reads of my life) my only complaint, one I have with all the books I love, is it ended.

My instinct this year is to read more of the classics. I’m not sure why this is, though I have my suspicions. I am getting older and am well aware that the clock runs out, so, if not now, when?  And then there is this. I wrote my first play in the 1970s when I was living in Brooklyn near Brooklyn Heights. I reached out to the writer Louis Sheaffer. He’d written a Pulitzer Prize winning two-volume biography of playwright Eugene O’Neill; a wonderful read. I asked him if he’d read my play and he said yes. I week or so later I went to visit him. He was a writer’s writer. Hard working, fully committed to the often exhausting craft that is the act of writing. While there were parts of my play he liked, it needed a lot of work. I asked him what advise he had for me as a writer. His answer remains emblazoned in my mind. “Whatever you want to write, read a lot of it. If you want to write plays, read a lot of plays. Novels, read a lot of novels.” He was right, I’ve learned more about writing from my reading than anywhere else.

And so, why the classics? Because, it is clear to me that writers like Dickens, Tolstoy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Shakespeare, Defoe, Melville, the Bronte sisters, Twain, Goethe and more, are the greatest teachers.  While anything but easy, I love writing, and I want to learn.

And then, of course, there is the sanctuary of books. A place to go that, for the time I am there, I am away from daily life. When you are a human rights advocate, which demands that you hold people, companies, agencies, governments, government officials, publically accountable, you will be targeted. Usually, I have learned, not to your face. This is probably so because those who target you know they can’t win on the facts of the matter. And so they take runs at you behind your back. And while these behaviors a predictable, pointless, and will do anything but silence me, managing them can be exhausting. And so, what better sanctuary than reading a classic?

 

Get the black guy out of the White House

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Historians will some day say that the title of this essay accurately represents the largely unspoken and perhaps primary reason for the fanatical efforts on the part of the Republican Party to get President Obama out of the White House. I had thought to reference the Republican Party leadership only in the preceding sentence, but the silence of so many Republicans (with some exceptions)  in the face of the not-so-subtle simmering racism fueling their party’s efforts to take back the White House and get rid of the black guy is sickening, and thus they don’t deserve a pass. Lincoln would be disgusted.

We have Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who fools some fools with his avuncular folksy countenance. Paul’s newsletters in the 1980s and 1990s  have published such racist gems as: "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal" and "We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational" and "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks." Paul claims he didn’t write these things and says he doesn’t agree. Are you kidding me? Are we as a people really so stupid that we believe him?  Sadly, in more cases than we’d like to admit, the answer, it seems, is yes.

And then of course, we’ve got Rick Santorum who, in talking about Medicaid, SSI and food stamps in Iowa  Sunday said,  “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families." Then, of course, he later said he is not racist. And I suppose there are still fools who believe him and racists who believe in him because they know his I’m not a racist claim is merely Santorum’s attempt to cover his, well, why not, lily-white ass.

The fact there are racists among us should surprise no one. The fact they are running for president with support should both surprise and sicken all people. However, most disturbing of all? The dead silence on the part of leaders in both parties, and, perhaps even worse, the silence on the part of the media.

If there is anything that feeds racism, homophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism, anti-disabled, etc., it’s silence. Believe me, in my own efforts as an advocate for people with disabilities I see the damage caused by silence on many fronts. Silence from those who, like those running for the presidency (President Obama and John Huntsman excluded), would want you to believe they really really care.

It’s good to be alive

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Sometimes you don’t realize how sick you’ve been until you start feeling better.

Sickness, as I’m sure you know already, has many personalities. Nausea, fever and then some can jump you out of the blue and you know you’re sick. It’s clear as day. Nothing vague about it. Then too there are ailments like prostatitis, a swelling and inflammation of the walnut-sized prostate gland which sits comfortably, when it’s behaving, under the bladder of the male, like me for instance.  Prostatitis can be caused by a bacterial infection and then there are times there is no bloody rhyme or reason for its appearance, other than to make you urinate frequently, so much so I swear I’ve worn shallow valleys in the floor leading from my sitting chair and bed to the bathroom.

What sneaks up on you, or at least it snuck up on me, is the toll lack of sleep takes on you. At first I sought to manage the symptoms myself, I’ve been through this before and so loaded up on Saw Palmetto (a great name for a gangster in case anyone’s looking for one), Stinging Nettle and Pygeum, but alas, my efforts were, as they say, too little, too late. And so it was that on the 23rd of this month I decided not to wait until my scheduled physical on January 4 and instead headed to the nearest emergency room for treatment: antibiotics and Flomax. By the time I went to the E.R. I’d been operating out of a state of exhaustion far longer than I realized, nearly two months truth be told.

It took awhile to get as sick as I was and it will take a while to feel better; I’m not out of the woods yet, but I can see the clearing. Today, this morning into early afternoon actually, I was able finally to get some uninterrupted sleep in two-hour doses. For more than a month the longest I slept without having to deepen the ravine as it were was an hour, more often than not, less than an hour. And so, this afternoon, for the first time in nearly two months, I felt rested, and, as a result, feel alive. And let me tell you, if there is anything I am sure of, it is this: it’s good to be alive.