It’s past 11:00 PM on Thursday as I begin this newsletter though I’ll likely finish it later. I have another half finished newsletter in my drafts, a longer piece that I haven’t had the time to fully think through or complete. It’s been a busy January. My fiction writing class at Caltech began. Mickey got sick only two days after returning to preschool in the new year. My copyedits were due. The older children have homework again. Around here, everyone is always screaming, not necessarily in a bad way.
I taught at Caltech tonight. The class meets weekly from 7 to 10 pm. I am always WIRED after teaching. It’s like I was just performing on stage for three hours: a combination of stand-up comedy, musical theatre, TED talk, and sermon, all rolled into one. How does one come down from that?
Tonight, during break, I asked the students what was happening this weekend and they told me about a school sanctioned party at one of the campus houses, which are basically dorms. I asked a lot of questions and then one student said, “Please don’t come to the party.”
He thought I might actually try to crash the party.
Now I’m the only one awake in my house, the puzzling third act of Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” playing in the background. I was watching the end of “Along Came Polly” but that, well, ended, and so now I am stuck with Greta Gerwig’s bad perm and Adam Driver’s paunch whereas before I was soothed by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s genius in a stupid comedy.
I’m still wired. Exhausted, but wired. Soon enough I will repair to the bath.
Here’s what I want to write about—
I have one new year’s resolution and it’s this:
DANCE.
I cancelled my Crossfit membership after eighteen months because 1) I injured my shoulders and 2) I didn’t like the weightlifting.
It took me eighteen months to accept that this wasn’t the right form of exercise for me. I liked the people and the sweating, but I didn’t feel like myself doing it. There is no other way to put it.
Weightlifting is having such a moment right now. Every cerebral woman between the ages of 35-50 seems to be into pumping iron. Which means it’s ripe for a backlash. Consider this the start of the backlash.
(Not really. I’ve got nothing against it. For other people.)
I don’t like weightlifting. There. I said it. I find the technical aspects challenging but the actual act deathly boring. I don’t like the clang of weights as they’re flung to the gym floor. Ever the narcissist, I missed mirrors in my workout; but, seriously, if you’re accustomed to using mirrors to learn technique, it’s difficult to shake their absence.
I also missed beauty. I missed artistry masking as exercise…or maybe exercise masking as artistry. I missed the challenge of learning choreography, a skill that gets stronger the more you practice it, and which atrophies with disuse. I wanted to use my brain in this particular way, a crossword puzzle for the body.
I started ballet in junior high. It was always a once- or twice-a-week hobby; I was never a bunhead. In high school, I took free one-on-one lessons with my friend Lucia’s mom, Miss Pam, who owned The Hollywood Dance Center. (Why did she give me these lessons? I still don’t know. Her generosity: even then I knew it was singular.) I danced through college—ballet, modern, hip-hop—and in graduate school, too. I dance into my twenties, too.
Dance was what I did for fun. I’ve never been serious about it. I’ve always known I wasn’t good enough to be serious about it. Maybe I didn’t get better because I wasn’t serious about it?
No. That’s not it. I was never an amazing dancer. I just wasn’t.
That’s also what I loved about it. I loved that I was decent at it, but not great, nothing beyond that. I took pleasure in it, and I didn’t ask for anything more from it.
Everyone should have something like that.
I’ve only been back to dance for about two weeks but I’m already hooked. So far I’ve taken a contemporary modern class and two ballet classes. These are drop-in classes; you can pay cash or Venmo directly to the instructor, and they’re cheaper than most boutique exercise or yoga classes. Some of the students are clearly professional or once had dreams of such things: they wear weird dancer warm-up clothes that they shed like snakeskin, and their extensions are divine, and they catch onto a combo like it’s breathing. Others are totally new to dance. Others are like me: they know (some of) the steps, the rituals, and they’re decent. They’re having a good time.
How could I have forgotten how much I love dance class? I feel like myself.
All the specifics of this world are coming back to me: The languid pace of the class compared to, say, a barre exercise class; the sound of joints cracking during the first grand plié; the way a teacher marks out steps with her hands, eyes dreamy yet focused, before she starts teaching it; phrases like sur le cou-de-pied. How in a modern dance routine you have to remember the moves but also the tone: here it’s sharp, and here it turns delicate. I forgot how anxious I get, trying to remember steps. I forgot my dead fish hands in ballet. I forgot how juicy and graceful it feels to do a port-a-bras.
Those moments when I feel like a dancer. The moments I don’t.
(One of the teachers brought her pit bull, Lulu. Lulu licked my face when I was bent over my feet, stretching, and I laughed and smelled her savory fur. Was I a dancer then? I’d say yes.)
I don’t think I’d been to dance class since I became a mother. Why not?
After each class, I return home. “I’m so happy,” I say, and keep repeating myself. “I’m so happy.” No one is interested in seeing my routines. I do them anyway.
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Other things:
These were easy and tasty cauliflower tacos.
Thanks to my friend and newsletter reader Ruth for sending me this Ezra Klein interview with literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf about reading. Listen to it and then go read a paper book and revel in that deep focus!
The song $20 by boygenius is terrific.
It’s dry January so I’m back on my Sanzo Yuzu sparkling water.
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It’s nearly 1 am. Holy shit!
xoxo
Edan
Weightlifting IS so boring. I couldn't agree more. I love your feeling that you want to exercise in a way that feels truer to yourself.
You *totally* should have crashed the party and showed off your dance moves. Also, the song $20 sounds like a million bucks.