Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina (3 page)

After him came our brother Chris, who gave glimpses of the attorney he’d be one day in the way he’d argue every point with absolute conviction. If he was wrong, you’d better not tell him. He was fearless, playing every sport—tennis, basketball, football—at some point in our childhoods. He was so full of energy that he would sometimes just race around the house, literally crashing into the walls.

Our little sister Lindsey, who eventually sprinted her way to a track scholarship at Chico State University, was the baby born to Harold and my mother. She had a luminous smile and a raucous sense of humor like her father. And our baby brother Cameron, who would cry his way through T-ball but found his gift sitting in front of a piano, was born after our mother got involved with Robert.

Then there was me in the middle—quiet, introverted, and happy to disappear within the clamor of our rambunctious family.

I was a nervous child. And my unease, coupled with a perpetual quest for perfection, made my life much harder than it needed to be.

I think I was born worried. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t feel some kind of anxiety, especially in school, and my panic would begin from the moment I woke up, fretting that I would be late to homeroom, until I came back home in the early evening. I was just nervous about life, period. I felt awkward, as if I didn’t fit in anywhere, and I lived in constant fear of letting my mother down, or my teachers, or myself.

It wasn’t like Mommy was a scold. But you had to earn her praise, and I craved it desperately. With so many brothers and sisters, it was hard to command her attention, and my voice,
muted by my intense shyness, could barely be heard above my siblings’.

I strived to be perfect at school as well. The thought of being tardy could set my heart to racing. The summer before I was to follow Erica, Doug, and Chris to Dana Middle School, I constantly reminded myself that Mommy and I had to pay it a visit so I could memorize every turn and twist: which staircase led to algebra, where my English class was in the building. I was terrified of getting lost and then having to walk in front of a sea of staring faces when I arrived after the bell.

Mommy refused to accommodate my summertime walk-through. She was always trying to get me to relax, to calm down. But later, when I was in high school and could make the trek on my own, no one could deter me from my pre–Labor Day route rehearsal or the other strategies I devised to avoid being late. Pretty much all the way through twelfth grade, I would get to school an hour early, plant myself on the floor in front of my locker, and study until it was time to go to my first class.

I was never late, not even once.

I REMEMBER WHEN I
appeared onstage for the first time. I was five years old, but unlike my later performances, what I most recall is not the confidence I felt in front of the crowd, or the rush from the applause, but the way Mommy reacted after the show.

We were still living in Bellflower with Harold, and Mommy entered Chris, Erica, and me into the talent show at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School.

She made our costumes, and we practiced for weeks, shaking our hips and lip-synching to “Please Mr. Postman.” I caught on quickly and I loved the experience, running home every day after school, practicing in the living room. Most of all, it was fun to see my mother so excited, especially when she was getting us ready the night of the performance.

“Oh yes, wait a minute, Mister Postman.”

It was showtime. Erica and I channeled the Marvelettes, while Chris, seven years old and dressed in navy blue shorts and a white shirt, toted a satchel and tossed envelopes to the audience. We were a hit, especially with Mommy.

“You guys were great!” she gushed afterward, snapping our pictures and beaming as members of the audience came over to tell us how cute we were. “You are naturals! Misty, you belong on the stage.”

I felt so special that night. Even though I’d shared the spotlight with Erica and Chris, I felt for once that I’d stood out from the crowd of little Copelands, that Mommy’s attention was focused solely on me.

That happened only occasionally, like when I got a good report card or was picked to be a hall monitor at Dana Middle School. Mommy would bring me bags of sunflower seeds as a treat, or stationery with sketches of sunflowers, or a sickly sweet kiddie perfume called—what else—Sunflower. I would gleefully accept my rewards, clinging to Mommy’s attention for as long as I could.

I didn’t feel particularly good at anything when it came to school. So instead I worked incredibly hard, going over equations, pronouns, and dates of Civil War battles until they were imprinted on my brain. I aced pretty much every exam, but it
would not be until I found ballet in my teenage years that I would realize the true gift of my visual memory—the ability to see movement and quickly imitate it.

My first model for movement wasn’t a dancer at all. It was a gymnast, Nadia Comaneci. I wasn’t born when Comaneci made history in the 1976 Olympics, becoming the first woman to score a perfect 10 in gymnastics and winning gold medals for her strength and elegance on the balance beam and parallel bars. Instead, I discovered her when I was seven and saw her story depicted in a Lifetime movie. Smitten, I recorded the broadcast on our VCR and would sit on the floor in front of the TV, pressing the rewind button so I could watch it again and again. I became obsessed with gymnastics, tuning in to any meet or exhibition that I could find. But from the start, I was more drawn to the floor exercises than the aerial acrobatics—probably, I realize now, because it was the closest thing to classical movement and dance that I’d ever seen.

I started to teach myself gymnastics, and my body knew what my mind didn’t yet comprehend: that rhythmic motion came as naturally to me as breathing. In our new home with Robert, we had huge yards in front and back, and I would stretch out barefoot on the grass, teaching myself how to do backbend walkovers, cartwheels, handstands. I already knew how to do the splits, though no one had ever shown me. My legs just slid into position. I could balance on my head the way others stood firmly on their feet. I didn’t question why I could instantly do moves that it might take others months to achieve, why my arms and legs had the elasticity of a rubber band. They just did, and I just knew.

I spent hours after school and on weekends practicing my
backyard routines. Then when I was done, I would arch my back, throw up my arms, and let the applause only I could hear wash over me. Just like Nadia.

Eventually, I realized that I didn’t really want to be a gymnast. It was the floor routines that transfixed me, not all the tumbling and flips. But for the first time, I’d tapped into the power of movement and felt its meditative grace. In it, I’d found an escape.

IT WAS AROUND THIS
time that I began to get my first migraine headaches. Mommy told me that she had started getting them at around the same age. It was genetic, but I think that the crippling pain I experienced, as well as the vomiting and blurred vision, came mainly from stress. I was a constant ball of fear.

I would leave school early some days, too sick to study or play, falling asleep in my clothes as soon as I reached my bed. Light exacerbated my pain, so I had to lie in a pitch-black room. Robert would wake me when he got home from work and help me change into my pajamas. Over the years, my pain became routine but no less severe.

There was never a moment’s quiet in my house. There was a person sprawled on every chair, a book or toy tossed in every corner. We woke up every morning to a wall of sound, with children yelling, music blaring, and the television on full blast.

The TV became our family altar because that was how we watched sports. It didn’t matter which sport, what game, or which team: the Chicago Bulls, the San Francisco 49ers. Everyone had his or her favorite—everyone, that is, except me. But
the Kansas City Chiefs belonged to us all. Before we children were born, my mother had become a Kansas City Chiefs cheerleader just so she could get free tickets to see the team play.

On house-shaking, popcorn-spilling weekends and Monday nights, the rest of the family would gather in the living room and roar over every stolen yard and fumbled pass. My mom and my siblings were consumed by it. I, on the other hand, would retreat to a bedroom, crank up a pop aria by Mariah Carey, and create. I didn’t know it was called choreographing at the time.

It was more hip swaying and head bopping than anything else. Mirroring the dancing I saw in the music videos that were constantly on the TV, I’d perform a pantomime, literally acting out a song’s lyrics.

“I’ve been THINKING about YOU,”
Mariah would sing. I’d point my fingers at my temples, and then stretch my arms out to my imaginary boyfriend, hips and shoulders pumping to the beat.

Then she crooned that she was falling in love. I’d flutter my arms and slowly drop to the floor.

No, it wasn’t exactly George Balanchine. But I could easily imagine myself directing a video for MTV.

Sometimes I would pull Lindsey into my game so I could see my creation brought to life by another body. She was an unwilling student to say the least, probably because of all of us kids, Lindsey had inherited zero rhythm. We used to tease her mercilessly, asking if she’d been dropped into the wrong family or was secretly a white girl in cocoa skin.

“Please, Lindsey, do this dance for me,” I’d beg.

“I don’t wannnoooo,” she’d wail, tears welling in her eyes.

“I’ll get Chris and Doug to give up the TV and let you watch
Sister, Sister,
” I’d cajole.

That’s usually all it took. Lindsey loved her some Tia and Tamera Mowry. But she’d pout her way through every step.

Though I discovered dance while we lived with Robert, its true role as my sanctuary was yet to develop. Ours was a chaotic life. We had a house and interludes of stability when my mother had a husband, and crowded, cluttered apartments when we lived life in between.

“Ooh, child, things are gonna get easier./Ooh, child, things are gonna get brighter.”
I’d sashay around Mommy’s bedroom, listening to Tupac, hoping he was right.

“Bam.”
I’d fan my hands in front of my face, and swing my hips to the left, rocking out to Salt-N-Pepa’s “Whatta Man.”

“Pop.”
I’d jerk my head to the right, my arms undulating while Craig Mack gave me “Flava in Ya Ear.”

When I was a girl, I loved watching reruns of
The Brady Bunch.
The six kids shared rooms in their spotless house, and the biggest crises they ever faced was Marcia’s skin breaking out the night before the senior prom or Greg’s voice changing on the eve of a talent show.

When we eventually left Robert, like we had Harold and my father before him, and our family had to give up our blue station wagon, I would ride the bus and daydream about all the things a little girl should have that I didn’t: a mommy who cooked dinner for her family; a big, sparkling clean house; and problems no bigger than a pimple.

But whenever I danced, whenever I created, my mind was clear. I didn’t think about how I slept on the floor because I didn’t have a bed, when my mother’s new boyfriend might
become my next stepfather, or if we would be able to dig up enough quarters to buy food. My worries would dissolve with the dance, and there was no crisis that a Mariah Carey song couldn’t cure.

My love of performing was an unlikely one. At school, I was still so afraid of being called on in class that my stomach would tremble.

“Misty,” Mrs. Schweble, our sixth-grade English teacher, would bellow from the front of the room. “Please read the next sentence.”

I’d shakily clutch my copy of
The Catcher in the Rye.

“ ‘Life is a game, boy,’ ” I read, my words catching in my throat before rushing out in a breathless squeak. “ ‘Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.’ ”

But for a little girl who lived in terror of making a mistake, of being embarrassed or criticized in front of others, the stage was somehow an oasis. I came to understand why when I later became a part of ABT, performing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the Bunka Kaikan in Tokyo.