stories

Today, out of nowhere, I suddenly thought of my ballet teacher of many many moons ago.  Was her name Julia?  Or perhaps Claire?  She had beautiful, long, dark blonde hair wrapped in a loose bun, and she always wore soft colors - lavender, pink, powder blue - with white tights.  She was enchanting and I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.

She was probably around seventeen years old, but that was adult enough to me at the time.  I loved watching the home videos she brought with her sometimes, capturing her in Swan Lake or the Nutcracker, the dreamy and obvious ballets - the antitheses of the vulgar "modern" dance I had discovered in World of Dance, a large book of gorgeous photographs I discovered at Media Play whilst enjoying the classical music they used to play on Saturday mornings before everyone mysteriously started (Or started mysteriously? De rien.) shopping at Barnes & Noble.  I was an old child.

We began every dance class properly, with our routine stretching.  To fill the silence, my teacher usually asked one of us to tell a story.  The other girls in our small group would give short, dull descriptions of a recent trip to the zoo or to Southwyck Mall.  My classmates had already caught on that it was often cooler to be nonchalant about everything than to be overly enthusiastic about something.  I didn't fully appreciate this subtlety for another ten years and I was a strange combination of shy yet obnoxious, so when my teacher asked me for a story, I delivered with gusto.  It came to be that as we all gathered neatly in a circle and stretched our as-yet tiny limbs every week, the girls would ask me for another story, preferring to listen.

After a few years of this with roughly the same group of petites danseuses, our young teacher left us.  I remember one day shortly thereafter sitting on my family's front porch, reading the letter she wrote me.  She (what was her name?) had used pale pink stationary with a scented, hot pink gel pen.  I rarely received mail unless it was my birthday or a holiday, and I kept the letter for a long time.  It had said that she was sad to be moving and would miss all of the girls.  She would also miss the beginning of each class, which she had come to think of as the time for "Olivia's stories."  Without realizing it, I had become obsessed with the idea of telling stories.

I'm not sure why this is.  Maybe it's all the reading.  I think partly, though, it must be the need to understand people and to connect with them on some level.  Telling a story yourself or asking someone to tell you one, you quickly discover whether you have similar (or in some cases, wildly dissenting) senses of humor.

Side note:  Probably the best sources of material for stories, I suddenly realize, are dreams.  Not "I have a dream" dreams, but REM, drool-on-the-pillow dreams, hence my recent post of that description.  I mean, come on . . . that was a great dream.  But I apologize if I bother you with too many dream-tales which I discover (too late) to be almost impossible to recreate outside of my head.

These days I am no longer dancing on Tuesday nights, Southwyck Mall has been torn down, I shop at Barnes & Noble (though if Media Play were still around, I would so be there), and I wear more black than pastels.  But I still, quite obviously, love to trade stories.