Explore, Create, Inquire, Seek, Share, Learn

I sang at an event last night here in Truth or Consequences, at Ingo’s Art Cafe. I’ll be singing at a fundraiser on Saturday evening as well, if you want to come by and support People Growing Together and their local greenhouse. Musician friends, Rich, Gina and T will play jazz instrumentals and I’ll pop in on a few songs throughout the evening. It feels good to connect with people, sing publicly, and be part of a musical project again. I don’t know where this is going. I’m taking it moment by moment, and savoring each note.

What a glorious feeling it must be when even the rain inspires joy.

In the 1980s I once again attempted to learn to dance by taking ballet and tap dancing classes, encouraged and paid for by my mother, who just KNEW I’d get it eventually! Mavis Pakenham was the teacher’s name. She was well known in the small pond of Colorado Springs’s performing arts people. A quick Google search reveals that she passed away in 2008. Her obituary site is loaded with endless tributes, photos, and loving goodbyes. She made a huge impact on our community.

I was trying to be a triple-threat singer, actress, dancer so that I could follow in the footsteps of my idol, Barbra Streisand, and become a Broadway star. She has a new memoir out, I see, which I’ll have to read someday. I love the photo used for her book cover. That album had her best early songs, sung in her uniquely perfect voice, long before the unfortunate (IMO) disco era. Then again, I listened to and sang every song on every track of every vinyl record my father possessed. Sang and sang at the top of my lungs in the living room, the piano room, on stage, off stage, in my car, in the shower. I owe my high school friends amends for torturing them with the CATS! soundtrack in the early 80s.

Was there something in the water back then? WTF? I adored this musical.

Anyway – back to dancing. I couldn’t. I still can’t, really, and I don’t. When I’m at a live music event and people are dancing I feel like an alien looking down on a different species with weird behavioral rituals. That’s how much of a non-dancer I am. Nonetheless, I persisted. Not with any great results. It is still a topic of shame in my life – more comedy now, since it’s been so long. Between the adolescent body image angst over having to wear a black leotard and pink f’ing ballet tights to every class, and my downright lack of ability to remember sequences of physical movement, it was torture. I envied the tall, lithe, graceful girls who seemed to move effortlessly across the floor and through the air. I felt more like an Oompa Loompa dressed in costume, hoping no one notices I don’t belong there.

And that, my friends, is just one of many awkward, cringe-worthy experiences during early performing arts life which led to me avoiding auditions and singing only in my car and my bathroom. Probably some of this contributes to my ongoing depression, but untangling that ball o’ yarn is slow. I still don’t dance. I don’t want to dance. I love yoga and hiking and biking and swimming and being physically active, but thank goodness I never have to take another dance class. Unless I want to. Sometimes I think about learning to tap dance. It might be fun to take an Irish dance class.

Interpretive Irish dancing might be more my realm.