When I was thinking about a project for the new year, I never thought of dance.
A rural childhood gave me many good things but dance lessons were simply not available.
I remember country family dances where the children watched their parents, all dressed up and dancing to fiddle music. By the time I was old enough to go to dances, social dancing had become do your own thing and I never learned to dance.
Shortly into the new year, my friend Katherine suggested adult beginner dance classes as a good way to exercise. Easy for her to say because she had a childhood background in dance. I wasn’t sure I had any reasonable hope of success. At least it would be exercise.
The class at Argyll School with teacher Debbie Parmenter was a sampler of ballet, tap, jazz and Celtic. The only thing I could do was try to have a good attitude.
With a supernaturally patient teacher and supportive classmates, I started to make slow progress and understood why serious dancers are known for athletic ability.
Then the rumours of the year-end event began.
“What is this festival you speak of?” I asked suspiciously.
“The student recital,” was the answer. I relaxed. Recitals were for kids. Nothing to do with me.
Then Debbie started talking about her ideas for choreography for the adult class in the recital.
“That doesn’t include me,” I thought. “I’m too old to be an adult and I’ve never been on a stage in my life.”
I went along with the choreography business because I was having fun with the little I could do and when it got closer to the time to actually perform, I could break an ankle. A small sacrifice for not messing things up for the rest of the students.
Debbie did the best she could with what she had to work with. She came up with a dance that was to be done in the dark dressed in black and wearing light-up shoe laces and bracelets to techno-Celtic music.
I went along with the charade that I was going to be in the show, until I got the light-up gear. To my surprise, I felt committed to doing it, I think because the others thought I could do it.
Many practices later, I still wasn’t good but a strange sense of the inevitability of it all came over me. As my mother used to say, “That which does not kill you will only make you stronger.” I always thought it was a silly saying. But I decided not to break an ankle.
The premise of the recital was that it was a dress rehearsal and the students did not know that the audience was there until the end. It was a sometimes hilarious look at what goes on behind the scenes.
The students were perfect at pretending to be imperfect while having a chance to show how well they had learned over the year.
My actual on-stage part happened so quickly I barely remember it. I couldn’t get the light on in one of my shoelaces in the evening performance but I thought that was OK because people would only think how brave I was dancing when I was so old and had only one leg.
And that is how it happened that I had my dance début and farewell performance the same day.