Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (11 page)

“You’re going to be socializing with very important people,” Cindy told me. “You need to know how to comport yourself.”

So she taught me that forks went on the left and knives on the right, that there was a certain spoon for soup and another for dessert.

Cindy was also concerned about my diet and health. Before I went to live with her, I’d subsist on whatever Mommy had the budget to buy, and I’d often stuff myself with junk food that I bought in school or from motel vending machines. I loved spicy Cheetos, corn chips that were heated in the microwave and slathered with cheese squeezed out of a bottle and hot sauce.

But Cindy said that I needed to be better nourished to gain weight and strength for dancing. We had fresh vegetables every night for dinner. And with her, I tasted shrimp for the first time. After my first bite, I craved it constantly. When we went out to restaurants, I’d order shrimp scampi and a Shirley Temple every time.

So now when I went to visit Mommy, I would ask for certain things for dinner, my newly refined taste buds melding with my recently developed opinionated streak.

“Ewww,” I’d say as Mommy poured canned string beans into a pot and heated them on the stove. “Why do you need to put so much salt on my mac and cheese? And none of that pepper, please!”

I’d drink water instead of the orange soda Mommy had bought. And I’d set the table before we Copelands sat down to dinner, folding the paper napkins in half and filling the mismatched glasses. I didn’t want to make her feel bad, but I knew my healthy diet was contributing to a higher purpose. I needed strength to dance, and it was my responsibility to be aware of what I put in my body.

Mommy didn’t appreciate my comments about food, or any of the other changes she was seeing in me. In fact, my attitude made her furious. She felt I was turning my nose up at how she’d raised me, at how she was caring for my brothers and sisters. She felt that now I thought I was better than them.

“Why didn’t you comb your hair?” she asked me one Friday night after Cindy had dropped me off and I walked into the motel room.

“It
is
combed,” I said defiantly. “I just didn’t straighten it. I like it like this.”

Mommy, frowning, sucked her teeth.

She also noticed all the new clothes.

“You’re not a doll for her to dress up,” she said when I pulled out a flowery jumper that I was planning to wear the day I went back to Cindy’s. “And you’re not her daughter. I can take you shopping.”

I thought to myself,
With what money?
But I held my tongue.

After a while, I started coming home less frequently. A week would pass, then two. Cindy, to give me—as well as her dance studio—exposure, had us performing constantly, often at very high-profile gigs. Once, I danced a solo,
en pointe,
at a luncheon for the L.A. Dodgers. I had a baseball cap, a white leotard emblazoned with the Dodgers logo, and even a bat as a prop.

Another time, I—along with some of my classmates—performed at the Special Olympics. And every year we danced at Taste of San Pedro, a popular event where local restaurants set up booths on the street and offered samples of their menus to passersby.

Our primary performance home was the auditorium at San Pedro High School. But wherever we danced, our shows were usually on Saturdays or Sundays. And when I wasn’t performing, I was rehearsing or taking dance classes. There was no time to go home.

That’s when Mommy really started to get angry. She felt as if she was losing me completely.

My mother began calling the Bradleys more often, not to speak to me but to talk to Cindy, who would take the calls in her bedroom, beyond where I could hear. When she came back ten or twenty minutes later to wherever the rest of the family
was gathered, her mouth would be stretched tight. She never shared what Mommy had said—but I could guess.

I can imagine how my mother must have felt. She probably worried that people wouldn’t understand that her daughter had to move out to pursue her dancing dreams and would assume instead that she was simply a bad mother.

Our relationship was so much more complicated than that. Mommy probably envied Cindy—a woman with more resources, a supportive husband, and a comfortable home—and thought she was trying to steal her daughter away.

I don’t think that was Cindy’s intention. But it was true that my living with her and Patrick changed me. Before I moved in with the Bradleys, I was a thirteen-year-old girl who still played with Barbies. I hid from life in games of make-believe, in dance routines choreographed in my mother’s bedroom. But when I moved out of the motel, I left my dolls behind. I was growing up.

To this day, I have no negative feelings about Cindy and Patrick. They were positive forces in my life who pushed me to become a whole person. When I had to leave them, two years after I’d moved in, it would be the most traumatic of all my departures, more wrenching than leaving Harold, more frightening than fleeing Robert. It was the hardest thing I’d ever experienced in my life.

I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know why I was being taken from these people who loved me so much, who had immersed me in the world of ballet, who had exposed me to art, to etiquette, to a taste of what life could and should be.

I would move from that new life to my old one, back into
a motel. And I would resent my mother so much for returning me there.

DURING MY FIRST YEAR
at Cindy’s school, she staged
The Nutcracker
at San Pedro High School. I danced the part of Clara, the little girl whose vivid dream of sugar plum fairies and enchanted dolls has mesmerized theatergoers for generations. Filling rows in the auditorium were Mommy and all my brothers and sisters, along with lots of our friends. It was a wonderful evening.

But when I was fourteen, a retelling of that classic story would help launch me, bringing me attention and a measure of celebrity that I had never experienced.

It was
The Chocolate Nutcracker.

Cindy was always trying to connect me with the black dance community. Once, she found a local African American charity event that I was able to participate in. I danced a solo,
en pointe,
while a jazz saxophonist played. The great actress Angela Bassett, glowing and doe-eyed, was part of the program, and I’d gotten to meet her during the dress rehearsal. I could barely look at her, I was so excited.

I think Cindy saw
The Chocolate Nutcracker
as another chance for me to meld all my worlds, showing the classical ballet repertoire that I was mastering but also allowing me to dip into African dance and meet prominent African Americans.

The Chocolate Nutcracker
was produced by the actress and choreographer Debbie Allen and added twists to the classic story
of Clara and the toy soldiers come to life. Instead of Clara being taken to the land of sweets by her nutcracker-turned-prince, she’d travel the globe. And the nutcracker and his soldiers fought slithering snakes instead of militaristic mice.

My performances throughout Los Angeles were getting attention, and by then I had been the subject of several news articles talking about this late-blooming black ballerina who turned out to be a prodigy. I believe Debbie Allen had seen them and reached out to Cindy to see if I’d be interested in playing Clare,
The Chocolate Nutcracker
’s version of Clara.

Debbie was warm but no-nonsense. At first, she had me work privately with her choreographers to make sure I was capable of all it took to be the lead in the ballet. After I’d won the part, they actually wound up having to alter the dance sequences to make them more challenging for me. I have video footage of my rehearsing for hours and hours.

Since Clare would be traveling to other countries in the ballet’s world, like Egypt, part of my preparation included taking classes with Debbie to learn various ethnic dance forms. Cindy drove me to Debbie’s studio in Los Angeles, and it was a world apart from what I was used to. There were all these beautiful black boys and girls engaged in African and Brazilian dance. There were live drummers, pounding out a beat, and me, in the middle of it all, in my pointe shoes.

We performed at UCLA’s Royce Hall, and I got to share the stage and dialogue with Debbie, who played Clare’s aunt. I was fine doing African dance one minute, and dancing
en pointe
the next. But holding a mic and talking to Debbie Allen?
That
was scary.

But becoming Clare was wonderful. I again felt that sass coming out of me, the way it had in the Point Fermin Elementary talent show, or the way it did at that first performance Cindy set up at a park in San Pedro. The way it did every time I was on a stage, before a crowd.

I remember the audience giving me a standing ovation. And Mommy, there, sitting close to the front row, gave me the most love of all. She was hooting and hollering on her feet, clapping like it was the greatest performance she’d ever seen. It’s not exactly what you would hear at the Metropolitan Opera House where ABT performs, but it was loving and genuine. It just made me want to do it all again.

Later, Debbie Allen would tell the
Los Angeles Times Magazine
that I was “a child who dances in her soul . . . I can’t imagine her doing anything else.”

After that performance, I was on fire.

More articles about my talent followed, in the
Daily Breeze,
San Pedro’s local paper, as well as other news outlets. People were calling Cindy’s dance studio wanting to know when and where this phenomenal little girl they’d heard so much about would be performing next.

My school identity morphed as well. I’d always been Doug and Erica and Chris’s little sister who happened to be captain of the drill team. Now I was
the ballerina.

As shy as I was, all the attention could be a little overwhelming, and I felt uncomfortable at first. But the glare was somehow easier to absorb because it was connected to ballet, my new love. It was like I was carrying the audience with me for a little while after I’d left the stage.

I had been dancing for well over a year and decided to give up the drill team. I wanted to focus every hour that I could, every bit of my energy and creativity on ballet.

After
The Chocolate Nutcracker,
Cindy decided it was time for me to perform my dream role for the first time. The San Pedro Dance Center would stage
Don Quixote,
and I would be Kitri.

With so many performances under my belt, Cindy also said it was time for me to enter competitions, to go up against other experienced ballerinas and win broader recognition for my talent.

My first competition would be one of the most difficult and prestigious, the Music Center’s Spotlight Awards. The competition, which has been staged annually for more than two decades, gives out tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships to teenagers who excel in the arts. There were prizes in various categories, including ballet, modern dance, jazz, and classical music performance. And the judges were at the pinnacle of those genres. Those who won have gone on to perform with the Metropolitan Opera and Alvin Ailey, among other premier cultural institutions.

Since I was preparing to play Kitri in the dance center’s production of
Don Quixote,
we thought it made sense for me to perform a variation from that same ballet at the Spotlight Awards.

But it was a daunting selection, a complicated, arduous dance sequence that most dancers would not have dared to attempt with barely two years of training. And they certainly wouldn’t have debuted it on the Los Angeles Music Center’s grand stage, in front of some of the giants of the ballet world.

I would also be preparing in the glare of the television spotlight on KCET, a local TV station. The program was called
Beating the Odds
and it was doing a segment on some of the teens competing in the Spotlight Awards. They knew of me from all the articles that had been written, and when the show’s producers learned I was one of the entrants, they picked me as one of the handful of teens they would follow.

I was one of two dancers whom they trailed. The crew was there when I auditioned and at some of my rehearsals, and crew members even spent some time at home with me at the Bradleys.

To prepare for the Spotlight Awards, I practiced six days a week for a month. The variation I would perform was Kitri’s third act solo, and I would have to execute the famous thirty-two
fouettés
at the end of the variation.

I should say now that when I danced, I was never nervous, not during rehearsal, not during a performance. It was as if I went into a trance.

Ballet studio walls are lined with mirrors, and you are supposed to use them to correct yourself, to adjust your body or extend your legs to reflect your teacher’s direction about how to improve. But to this day, while there are times when I pay attention to what I see in the mirrors, to master new steps, more often it’s as if they’re not even there. My visual memory, my physical intuition, takes over.

I think I’ve always danced beyond the mirror, transcending the tedium and bounding right to the joy.