I Will Always Be … A Tashlich Tale

October 3, 2019 LesleyPearl3 Comments

tashlich creek — The “almost” stream in Carpenter’s Woods.

2012. I am standing at the shore of Lake Michigan – the Chicago side. I am wearing my signature orange peep-toe wedges, a tweed dress that hangs on my 12-pounds-thinner-than-usual body, and throwing torn up pieces of bread into the water.

It is Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world, and the bread is part of a Jewish New Year custom called tashlich — the emptying of one’s pockets into moving water, a symbolic casting away of one’s sins. Rabbis of generations past frowned upon the practice, fearing people would not do the hard work of the Days of Awe – of self-examination and making of amends – if they engaged in this ritual, that they would forget that the practice was mere metaphor and would count on the casting to absolve them of their misdeeds.

But I am not casting away sins. (I don’t really believe in them.) Instead, I am casting off an identity, a role I’ve played … as partner and wife. For in this moment I intuitively know that I am now divorced. I can feel it in my bones.

My husband and I have filed dissolution of marriage paperwork in a county that does not require a court appearance, sending off an envelope containing a divorce agreement, our signatures and a notary stamp four weeks earlier. I know that the clerk in this small county signs divorce papers on Mondays. It is Monday.

I move towards my rabbi. “I think I’m divorced,” I say.

“Well, you are pretty intuitive,” he replies.

“I’m going to cast away my Mrs.”

He nods and smiles at me sadly; and I return to the lake, flinging stale bits of challah into the still waters and mumbling something about Dr.’s wife and Mrs. Robertson – a name I never took.

When I return home that afternoon, I call our mediator who checks a database and affirms, “Yes, you are divorced.”

2019. I am still talking about this, writing about this.

Sunday night, erev Rosh Hashanah. A different rabbi asks us to turn to the person nearest us and share what we would like to let go of and what we would like to make room for in the Jewish Year 5780. I turn to my left and tell another rabbinical student that I would like to let go of my ex-husband, my marriage and my divorce as part of my narrative, and that I would like to make room for love.

I am still talking about it.

Tuesday afternoon, I am co-leading a tashlich ritual at a creek just off of campus at the University of Delaware. I tell the story of 2012 — sans peep-toe wedges and dress hanging from my frame — and invite the small group gathered to consider if there is a piece of their identity that no longer fits. Perhaps a role in a romantic relationship or in their family of origin or at work. Maybe a character attribute or behavior they are known for and no longer wish to be.

I ask them to share this with someone near them, either before or after emptying the contents of their pockets – the contents of their hearts – and to consider that in casting off, they might create space for something new … as in my case, when I traded in the role of wife for ex-pat in 2015 and rabbinical student in 2019. I am still talking about it.

I step away to do my own casting off … except I can’t. There is too much chatter around me and there is nowhere to go to let go. So I hold on, until today, when I duck into Carpenter’s Woods, just a few blocks from my house.

I scramble down a dirt and stone path to a clearing where a small, wooden footbridge hovers over an “almost” stream. I don’t have any bread. My pockets are empty. I bend down and pick up a couple of fallen leaves, fold them — once and then again — and rip them into pieces.

As I drop the bits of leaves into the pooled water, I whisper something about letting go of my insistence that my 15-year relationship have no place in my current narrative, my expectation that I should no longer have anything to say about it or him or us. Nothing about letting go of this “former identity.” Nothing about creating space for the universe to rush in.

My words surprise me.

I will always be Lee’s ex-wife. Just as I will always be a massage therapist and a writer — whether or not I get paid for it. Just as I will always have lived in Spain and San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, Seattle and Detroit – even if I don’t now. And even with all of those pieces of my identity firmly intact, there has always been room for “something new” — for a year of teaching in Madrid, for rabbinical school, and for a few juicy romances.

I have no shame in telling those other parts of my life, no expectations that I should be “done” with them, nor any desire to be. I wonder if the same could be true of my marriage and divorce.

Just then, the wooden footbridge begins to bounce. A man and his brown and white-speckled dog cross my path, signaling my ritual is nearly complete.

I pull my pockets inside out, say a prayer and begin my climb out.

Artist Date 108: A Room of One’s Own

June 12, 2015June 12, 2015 LesleyPearl4 Comments

The site of Artist Date 108 -- lots of locations, but no Madrid. — The site of Artist Date 108 — lots of locations, but no Madrid.

I’m supposed to be getting rid of things in preparation for my departure to Madrid later this summer — like the Bianchi road bike I sold last Friday.

Instead, I’m in a furniture store — Artist Date 108.

I’ve passed by here hundreds of times. Today there is a sign in the window pointing to a new entrance. It feels like an invitation.

Inside it is crammed with a collection of furniture sourced from India, Indonesia and other faraway places. Red bookshelves. Green sideboards. A tall chest with tiny drawers — like a library card-catalog file — each painted a different color, each begging to be filled with a special treasure.

A real desk. A weathered armoire. A butcher block on wheels — the one I never got around to buying for my kitchen.

I think of a friend who recently commented that my apartment — while inviting and well-appointed — has a sense about it that implies I never planned on staying.

Perhaps he sees the empty spaces on the futon where pillows and a throw might go. The missing bedside table. The crappy knives.

He does not mention any of these things, but I see them — reminders that I never entirely put down roots.

Or perhaps he sees the table made of suitcases stacked on their sides. The snowshoes tacked to the entryway wall. The hung pieces of fabric I collected in Rwanda. A traveler’s accoutrements.

I think of all the places I’ve lived and what made each one mine.

The Indian cotton blanket and Picasso print I bought at Cost Plus World Market to dress up my dorm room.

The Morticia Addams-style wicker chair I found at a yard sale in the Castro and carried to my apartment in Haight-Ashbury. The yellow walls in the great room of that apartment, painted with my roommate Tim in the wee hours of the morning. The scratched parsons table and chipped black bookshelves gifted to me from the As IS room at Crate and Barrel.

The mezzuzah my friend Pam gave me when I left Chicago, and that I tacked to the doorway in Seattle as soon as I arrived.

Each like a fingerprint, identifying my space.

Much of what fills my current apartment was gifted to me. Two wooden chests of drawers that had been taking up space in my friend Patrick’s storage unit — delivered on my birthday. I sobbed putting away my socks for the first time — overwhelmed and grateful to finally have a place to store them. The dining-room table my friend Tom made from a door. The lamp that was Mimi’s.

Each object has a story. I mention this to my friend — the one who says my apartment has the feeling of being inhabited by one who isn’t planning to stay.

“Somehow I knew that,” he replies.

He reminisces about traveling through India, China and the former Soviet Union — decorating rooms he would keep for just a month or two with postcards, fabric and fragrant bars of soap purchased in the market.

“You will do the same,” he reminds me.

He is right.

The idea is a comfort as I prepare to move overseas with two large suitcases and two carry-ons; my plan being to find a room already outfitted with a bed and a chest of drawers –space within a place someone else calls home.

I trust I will find it. That I will find room within a room to call my own. And that that which is mine will come to me once more, dressing up the empty spaces. A train map. A rock. A card from a lover.

A tattered copy of Tropic of Capricorn. A packet of seeds.

Each with a story I will share with that friend…and that I will share with new friends. Each a fingerprint, marking my place in the world.

Artist Date 96: Kind of a Big Shot

December 9, 2014December 9, 2014 LesleyPearl2 Comments

I used to use the Birchwood Kitchen as my office away from my office.

It was at the center of where I often found myself when I was neither at home nor at work. For the cost of an iced tea (and sometimes not even that, as I was a “regular” and often received drinks and desserts “on the house”) I had a place where I could check my emails, do some writing, take meetings or just stop and sit in between where I was and where I was going.

Sometimes the Art Institute feels like that too. Like today — Artist Date 96.

I’m sitting in the member lounge drinking puerh ginger tea and checking Facebook on my phone. Behind me, a couple is telling the bartender their story. It appears they met online — he is from London — and they are meeting now for the first time. Perhaps not now exactly — but this day, this week, this visit. It sounds crazy and exciting. I wonder how it will all turn out. I wonder if the bartender wonders, or if she is even listening.

My ex-husband used to love to come here because it made him feel just a little bit like a big shot. Flashing his card and drinking free coffee. And hey, who doesn’t like to feel just a little bit like a big shot every once in a while.

I suppose in some small way, that is what membership is about. A reward for faithfulness and patronage. Be it a free beverage, a bag with a logo, discounts or a place to stop in between here and there. And when done well, evokes a sense of identity and belonging. “One of us.”

It whispers to my unrealized teenage dream of attending art school, which at the time, I thought was the only way to be an artist. (I was wrong.)

I am reminded of this as I make my way downstairs to the Edith Stein: Master Weaver exhibit.

The exhibit is small, and there is just one other person in the gallery viewing the work. (There are two Art Institute employees here also — one of them, in my opinion, talking too loudly.)

It doesn’t move me in quite the way I had hoped. I imagined my internal seven-year-old, the one who made potholders on a plastic loom with loopers, awakened, inspired to create. Instead, I am completely enchanted by this 90-something-year-old woman.

Trained in sculpture, she turned her attention to textiles when she was in her 60s. A video loops over and again, showing her working in the studio — clad in heavy sneakers, mixing dye in a pot on top of the stove and immersing wool yarn into it as if it was pasta.

I sit on the bench in the center of the room, watching the short film several times. It is both soothing and inspiring. I want to be like her. Still working, still passionate, respected, at the top of her game.

I want to be like her when I am in my 90s. I want to be like her now.

Working. Passionate. Respected.

At the top of my game.

A little bit of a big shot.

It begins with working.

Artist Date 81: I Could Swim In Your Voice. And Drown In My Own.

July 22, 2014 LesleyPearl2 Comments

With storytellers Carmen and James. Carmen with trophy from the Dollar Store for Best Story of the Night. — With storytellers Carmen and James. Carmen holding Dollar Store trophy for Best Story of the Night.

I am nearly seven years sober and I am sitting in a bar by myself. On its face, this does not sound like a good thing. Except that it is a very good thing.

I’m at Story Club – a monthly “live literature” event where three featured performers tell true-life stories, and three audience members, invited up at random – their names pulled from a monkey carved out of a coconut, the words “Have Fun” scrawled onto the base – do the same. Artist Date 81.

My feet are slick with massage oil and slosh around in my orange peep-toe wedges. My head throbs, a reminder of the two cysts I had removed from my scalp just this morning.

I take a seat at a table up front, and immediately wonder if I should sit on a stool at the bar instead – where “singles” sit. Even though I have trouble seeing and hearing and engaging when I am that far from the stage.

I wonder if I should see if I can join another party of one at one of the banquettes against the wall.

I wonder if it is ok to take up this much space – me alone. It is a question that has haunted me my entire life.

I stay at the table, order a club soda with lime juice, pull out my reading glasses and dive into my book.

I am sitting at a bar alone with a club soda and a book.

At the table to my right, a gaggle of girls talk about San Francisco. About writing. And about a secret Facebook group of women writers – 26,000 strong.

I want to tell them I used to live in San Francisco. That I too have been wooed into the fold of these female wordsmiths. That they both excite and frighten me. And that I’m not even sure how I came to know them. But I say nothing.

My name is pulled from the coconut monkey – the first of the evening. I climb to the stage, take a breath and begin reading…”The waxy brown cotton of my lapa feels soft between my fingers. Like my body. Like my heart.”

My voice is sing-song-y and gentle. A heightened version of what I call my massage voice. It is sweet and loving, lilting and melodic. It tells you the things you wish your mother had told you. That you are human. That you are lovely. That you are good.

I hear my poetry professor Catherine Kaikowska reading her work – perched on top of a desk. Her legs crossed, Diet Coke in hand. Hair wild. “Deja-rendevous. Deja rende, rendezvous.” Hypnotic. I could swim in her voice.

But I would like to drown my own. I have fallen out of love with it. My voice. My story. Just this moment. I am bored with it. All of it.

I have not written about love and pain and loss. I have not written about sex. I have written about my connection to my body, to my spirit. It feels esoteric. Less familiar. Less sexy.

I have left out the juicy bits. The part about tearing off my lapa – my West African dance skirt – and jumping into a pond naked with my crush after the sweat lodge. The part about him plucking me out of the water – naked – when my strength failed me and I could not pull myself onto the high dock.

I have not written about any of it. I have not given him a clever moniker and chronicled the story of my heart. I have held it instead. Held my heart. Held my words. It feels unfamiliar. Untrue. It is the story I am used to telling.

But tonight, James and Carmen tell it instead.

James (AKA GPA – Greatest Poet Alive) who has committed to memory the story of Maria breaking his 5^th-grade heart when she circled “no” in response to the query in his note – “Will you be my girlfriend? Yes? No?” Not even a maybe. Not even a spritz of Geoffrey Beene’s Grey Flannel to the paper could sway her.

Carmen who invites us into her bedroom and her psyche at the moment when her friend with benefits asked her to talk dirty to him in Spanish. Her words are funny and irreverent, honest and sad. She rolls her Rs and says things like, “Aye, Poppi.” She feels like a caricature.

They are storytellers.

I fear that I am not. That I am only a writer. At least right now.

Carmen – one of the gaggle of girls talking about San Francisco and the secret group of women writers – tells me otherwise. As does James, when we gather together after the final performance.

My story is lush, he says. That he closed his eyes while I read. Listened to my words. Let my voice paint the pictures for him.

He let my lilting, sing-song-y massage voice – the voice that tells you that you are human, that you are lovely, that you are good – my storyteller’s voice, tell him a new story.

Artist Date 76: The Lines Un-Blurred

May 23, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

In 7^th grade I kept an oversized scrapbook on the top shelf of my closet, the same place I kept a bag with all of my “important papers” – report cards from every grade, drawings I had made for my mother, my adoption paperwork.

Baryshnikov -- Then. Photo: Galeria de Bailarines. — Baryshnikov — Then. Photo: Galeria de Bailarines.

The scrapbook was a gift my brother received for his Bar Mitzvah that I co-opted. The pages a mismatched collection of images and daydreams affixed with Scotch tape. The musings and considerations of a not-quite woman beginning to define herself.

Pictures of Miss Piggy. An interest I borrowed from my cousin Wendy Schechter and her obsession with all things pig. A review of the book, I, Me, Mine by George Harrison – clipped from the Detroit Free Press. An homage to my best friend Nicole, who had recently introduced me to John, Paul, George and Ringo. An attempt to blur the lines between us, like we did with our matching Tretorn sneakers and Bermuda Bags.

But some of it was purely mine. A coin that my mad crush Kenny picked up off of the floor and handed to me, marked “Lucky penny from Kenny.” A newspaper photograph of Mikhail Baryshnikov. All muscle and tights. Breathtaking.

Neither a pig nor a Preppy Handbook has crossed my threshold in more than 30 years. I do still see Kenny on occasion. And while he has been married to the same man for more than 25 years, I still have a crush on him – a source of joy and amusement for us both.

And last Sunday I saw Baryshnikov for the first time – Artist Date 76.

I receive a text from my friend Stephanie on Friday, asking if I have $50 and want to see Baryshnikov. Oddly, I hesitate. It will mean missing dance class. Irony. I mention this to my friend Pam, who responds, “Are you crazy?” She has a point. This is an icon. A legend. Sarah Jessica Parker’s boyfriend on Sex and the City.

I text back with a definitive “Yes.”

Intellectually I understand this is once again NOT an Artist Date as I am not venturing alone. (I am, however, getting better at breaking the rules.)

But it does fill the criteria of filling my creative coffers. And, perhaps more significant, it reminds me of the juicy, sexy, charmed life I lead. The one I am beginning to reclaim – and by that I mean once again notice – now that there is little distraction in the boy department.

But this evening I am distracted. I Google Baryshnikov. He is 66. And stands 5’6.”

Does he still dance, I wonder, recalling the email I received earlier in the week from Hubbard Street Dance. The subject line “Guess Who Dropped In?” with a photograph of him smiling, observing rehearsals.

I have no idea.

In fact, I don’t actually know where I am going or exactly what I am seeing – I didn’t ask – just that I am going and that I will see him.

Baryshnikov -- now. Photo: T. Charles Erickson. — Baryshnikov — now. Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

And I do. And he does…dance, that is. Just not as I imagined.

His slippers traded for jazz shoes, his tights for pleated trousers. His dance, a part of the story but not the story. The story. Two actually. Adapted from the writings of Anton Chekhov and performed as Man in a Case at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

He glides across the floor softly, alone – his arms holding the lover in his mind, in his heart. Jazz on the radio, his guests dozing after dinner. It feels spontaneous – but of course isn’t – like my mother and I swing dancing on the kitchen linoleum.

My heart leaps.

So convincing in his roles, I have forgotten who he is.

But now I remember, and his every movement is a dance. The gesture of his hand. The roll of his hips. His torso leaning forward and back, flirting but never touching. Sexy.

When it is over, I join the throngs from my fifth row seat, rising in applause. My eyes wet. Looking to him as if I might catch his glance when the lights go up.

I do not.

I do not tell Stephanie about it — my folly, my fantasy — either. Or about my scrapbook. Baryshnikov, the pigs or the penny.

I hold them to myself instead – the lines un-blurred. Mine alone, still.

Artist Date 74: Letting Go of The Ghosts

May 8, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

It is Saturday. My friend Amy has invited me to see the world premiere of Cicada at the GreenHouse Theatre – Artist Date 74. It has been a labor of love – hers and others – for three years. She has asked all of her friends to bring their friends. To spread the word.

I say “yes” to the first part, “no” to the second – honoring my commitment to my weekly solo date. To myself. And write it in my calendar in pen.

But now I want to change my mind. I want to see a boy.

He is young. Younger. He visited my OKCupid profile. I visited his.

He reminds me of Mr. 700 Miles – my last love, my last heartbreak. Right down to the part where he moved home to be with his mother when she was ill. That’s the part that really knocked me out about 700 – his seeming unselfishness and big, shiny heart, which he proudly wore on his sleeve.

It is flawed from the start and I know it. Making contact because he reminds me of someone I used to love. Someone I am trying to let go of and clearly have not entirely because I am still writing about him. Because I am attracted to someone who reminds me of him.

We exchange a few messages. And then we talk. He isn’t 700. But I like his voice and there is something sweet and spiritual inside of him. We talk about gratitude. I tell him I’m sober – something I have consciously not mentioned in my most recent dating forays up until now, for no other reason than it is not yet germane.

We make a date for the following week, based on my schedule. But I want to meet sooner. I think of inviting him to the play with me, reasoning that I sometime go to events with others and still count it as my weekly Artist Date. Even though it isn’t.

But I know this isn’t the answer.

I meet him in the afternoon instead. Prior to the play, when a client cancels. We go for a walk at the lake. I tell him I had thought of inviting him to the play but didn’t – explaining the ritual and commitment of my weekly Artist Date. He says he wouldn’t have gone, he wouldn’t want to get in between me and me. My words, not his.

I had the same experience with 700 in January when I let it slip I would skip my Artist Date to talk with him on the phone for the first time. He said he would feel horrible if I missed the movie I was planning to see and suggested I call him later – which I do.

It is astonishing how quickly I will abandon myself.

——————–

It is a story about holding on. And letting go. About memory. Identity. The stories we repeat.

Conversations with ghosts that allow us to live on with those no longer present. Some haunting and angry. Some decidedly sweet and tender.

I think about my own ghosts. About serendipity – the times 700 has recently “showed up.”

An invitation he sent months ago to download Facebook Messenger pops up on my phone without cause or reason – his name and profile picture announcing the old request.

The license plate frame on the car in front of me, from a car dealership in the town where he lives – a village of only 5,000.

I whisper, “Are you there?” Sometimes I swear I can feel him. I wonder if he is thinking of me in those moments. I like to think so.

It hurts watching Amy, as Lily, struggle to let go of the one she loves best.

It is not a single action, letting go. More a process. A dropping off, bit by bit, until there is nothing left but the shell of what once was, and you don’t even notice until someone asks you about it.

Like when I went to the Facebook page of the Southern Svengali for the first time in months, and saw he was living in Boston. How could I not know? And how is it, I could not care? I was happy for him. For the work he was doing. But I was not affected by it.

——————–

Two days later I cancel my second date with 700 Stand In.

I am overwhelmed. I am working three jobs. Plus writing, dancing, and ostensibly looking for work.

I have not exercised since Sunday. I am again sleeping less than six hours a night. My apartment is a sty.

Something has got to give. The choice is obvious. I choose me.

I let the few other men I have been communicating with know I am on hiatus until June 12 – when my contract work is completed. I give them my email address and I disable my OKCupid account.

I feel sad. Like I have given away a puppy. I forget doing what is right does not always feel good.

I know if I can let go of the attention, and the possibility of romance at least for now – the rest will drop off too. Like it always does. Until I don’t even think of it, think of him, until his name is mentioned. And by then 700 miles is just a measurement of distance between here and there.

Artist Date 66: Risk It. Sell It. Consider It.

March 10, 2014 LesleyPearl9 Comments

I recently entered a Weight Watchers-sponsored contest called, “You Only Live Once,” where I described a bucket-list dream, one that is possible only now that I am a healthy weight.

I had two. One, to dance in Senegal with my instructor Idy Ciss. The other, to dance Alvin Ailey Workshop classes in New York.

Before Class. "I am here!" — Before Class. “I am here!”

I didn’t win. But clearly the universe heard my desire as I am about to walk into a 90-minute Master Class with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater – Artist Date 66.

I feel a little bit like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. A self-identified outsider taking another step inside the sometimes seemingly-closed world of dance.

I notice the opportunity a few weeks ago while purchasing tickets for the Ailey shows. The class lists as intermediate, and I hope my six years of West African instruction will qualify me.

Three days before the workshop I get a call from the Auditorium Theatre requesting payment. I am in.

I am over the moon.

And now, standing at the studio doorway, I feel I should be more nervous than I am. But as I told my dear friend the night before, “The worst that happens is they say, ‘You suck. Please sit down.’ ”

I can live with that.

Inside I meet Kristen. She recognizes me from the Ailey shows earlier in the week – seeing me pin a slip of paper to a board in the lobby reading, “How Does Alvin Ailey inspire you?”

“To Dance. No matter how badly.” I scrawl.

Today I will get my opportunity.

There are about a dozen of us here. I am the oldest by at least 15 years. Surprisingly, this lends me a sense of calm and confidence, which I do not question.

We are joined by company member, Antonio Douthit-Boyd. He appears to be wearing slippers on his feet – quilted booties. I wonder where he is coming from as it is snowing outside.

He moves quickly through the warm up. Much more quickly than I am used to. I breathe and do what I can. So far so good.

He moves across the floor, making adjustments to each dancer’s movements and posture. “Widen your legs. Go lower now. Keep your balance. See.” “Jut your hip first. Muuuch more movement. Excellent.”

He comes to me. I do not avert my eyes, hoping he will not notice me, in case I am doing it wrong. I smile at him.

“Beautiful flat back,” he says, touching the space between my wings. I lower into the squat – legs wide, and come up on to my toes. Antonio meets my outstretched arms with his own, our fingertips touching. My legs are shaking. I struggle to balance. “Good,” he says.

Before class begins. — Before class. One of the “significantly more trained” dancers.

The other dancers have had significantly more training than I. It is clear. Ballet. Jazz. Modern. They nod knowingly to the terms Antonio throws out. And more importantly, they can execute them. I am in over my head. Kind of. But I just keep moving. Smiling. Trying to mimic the other dancers.

I notice that I am not frustrated. I am not angry. I do not stop.

I do not ask Antonio to slow down and bring the class to my level. I do not burst into tears.

I have done all of these things previously.

I am not jealous or envious. I notice the beauty of the dancers. Their bodies. What they can do.

I am amazed by my response.

I am equally amazed that I occasionally “nail it.”

Moving across the floor – a quick, leg-cross-over-leg, jazz step. Hips wagging. I think of Harry Detry, another of my teachers at the Old Town School, calling out over the drums, “Shake your babaloo!” “Sell it!”

I am “selling it.” And I know it. Antonio does too, clapping, “Yes! Yes! That’s it.”

But the final movement has me stymied. Leap, cross over, lift the other leg, turn, lift the other leg, jump. Or something like that.

I am not even close.

No one cares. No one is watching me. They are watching themselves. I am free.

And in that freedom, I see the pattern that will keep my body in constant motion. Give me my momentum. Right leg back, left leg back, right leg back, left leg back.

After class. All smiles, with Antonio Douthit-Boyd.

“Yes, better.”

It is. But I still don’t have it.

A couple more times across the floor and I might. But it doesn’t matter. I risked being “the worst.” And by all accounts, I was. But I don’t feel like it. Not even close. Just less trained.

Pulling on my jeans, my body feels different. My pelvis is open. Open – I could drop a baby out of me with a single squat – open. I like it.

It is the ballet, I am certain of it. The one type of dance I never consider.

I do not have a ballet body, I tell myself. I don’t even know what that is. It is an excuse.

And I am out of excuses.

I consider it.

Artist Date 60: It’s In The Genes

February 12, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

The first thing my birth father told me was that we attended the same university. The second thing was that he wouldn’t have gone there if timing were different.

It was the late 1960s. The United States was fighting in Vietnam. School kept him out of the draft.

Given his druthers he would have gone to New York to be a dancer.

I gasped. My secret-private-fantasy-if-I-could-do-it-all-over career was to be a choreographer.

“It’s in the genes,” he said.

I am walking down Lincoln Avenue to the Old Town School of Music for First Friday – a monthly event of music, dance and community. Tonight’s feature is a series of dance performances by students and instructors – tap, modern, Go-Go, Bhangra. Artist Date 60.

I dance here every Sunday at noon. Josh, Don and a couple of musicians whose names I can’t recall drum us through Idy Ciss’ nearly 90-minute West African class. My church. My masochistic joy.

I have been a consistent presence here for more than five years, and yet, I am nervous tonight. Sixty solo dates consciously chosen, and, at times, I still feel conspicuously alone.

This is one of those times – coupled with self-conscious questioning if I’ve earned my seat at the table, or, on the waxed wood floor, as it were. If I really am a dancer. My musings seem self-absorbed and displaced as I am not performing today, only watching. And yet, something is stirred in me.

A boy and a girl, about 9 or so, tap their way across the stage. They are dressed to match in grey trousers and lavender shirts. The boy is skinny and awkward and sweet. One day he will know how to swing a woman around the floor, showing her who’s boss. Quite possibly the sexiest gesture ever. But not yet.

A group of tween girls perform a Bollywood dance, waving colored scarves. The tiniest one slides into the splits. Like when I was a cheerleader – too small to be on the bottom of the mount, too big to be on the top. Kind of. She is completely present and at ease in her body. Each move seems effortless. I am certain I neither looked nor felt that way.

I think about my single year of ballet lessons, taken in first grade with Mrs. Gantz, Who Likes To Dance. That is what she called herself. I don’t know why I didn’t continue. Perhaps I didn’t like it. It wasn’t easy. Or I wasn’t that good. Maybe I got bored. I quit, setting in motion a pattern – with me opting out of piano, gymnastics and cheerleading later.

No one told me that only a few are truly, naturally brilliant. Geniuses. That the savant is rare. That most of us mere mortals toil toward mastery.

The girls remind me of “the popular girls” I knew in junior high – the ones that took jazz and tap with a woman named Miss Barbara. Strangely, I was talking about them last week. About the time they invited me to the movies. Just once. In seventh grade.

I still remember the film – Young Doctors in Love. A spoof on soap operas. It was rated R. And my mother didn’t allow me to go to R-rated movies.

Except this time she did.

Post-run, swing dancing. Another cool moment with my mother. — Post-run, swing dancing with my mother.

I am fond of saying my mother’s “coolest moment ever” was when she took me to see Prince, The Time and Vanity 6. It was pre-Purple Rain, when Prince was still dirty. And I was in the sixth grade.

But the movie exception was pretty cool too.

I find myself thinking about nurture over nature.

About swing dancing in the kitchen with my mother. And her jumping rope to the Pointer Sisters Jump! About me wearing a pill-box hat with a feather and a veil to high school and her asking if I think that I am one of the Pointer Sisters.

I think about her childhood in Saginaw, Michigan, raised essentially by her maid, Mother Flora Hill. About her Sunday mornings spent at Mount Olive Baptist Church – where she was almost baptized – and her summers at the congregation’s camp. There is a photograph of her and my uncle – two toe-headed Jewish kids – in a sea of dark-skinned, smiling faces. My mother loves sweet potato pie and knows all the words to Leaning on Jesus.

With my dance "partner" in Rwanda. — With my dance “partner” in Rwanda.

I think about her taking me to see Saturday Night Fever when I was in fourth grade because she wanted me to see the dancing. (Her no R-rated movie rule conveniently overlooked.) And about skating with my parents to Peaches and Herb on Tuesday nights at Bonaventure Roller Rink while most of my friends were tucked in at home.

I think about dancing with a troupe in Rwanda a few summers ago and their recognition that I could dance. About the beautiful, bald man who gave me the eye that said, “Follow me.” And I did.

Maybe the dance is in the genes. Maybe it is inside a 1977 Thunderbird with an FM converter box – my mother’s car for as many years as I can remember. It doesn’t really matter. What does is, at the end of First Friday, when the brass band calls the audience up to dance, I go. I quit quitting. So I claim my space on the waxed wood floor.

Artist Date 59: Waiting. On The Journey To Becoming

February 1, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

I am waiting on some news. Both personal and professional. Nothing scary or life-threatening…as a loving friend of mine recently asked. But all in G-d’s time, or at the very least, not mine.

The chime on my phone notifies me of messages received and my response is purely Pavlovian. Hope rises. And when I check my phone and discover I still have no news, hope falls. I feel my heart literally sink just a little bit. Awful.

Radio silence. My friend Michael says it is normal. Winter. “‘Tis the season.” His words, literally.

I want to punch him.

He sends me photographs of the shore of Lake Michigan, taken from the Indiana Dunes. This is what quiet looks like. It is at once both sad and beautiful.

He is right though. It is in the silence that I find my center, that I soothe myself…even though it is the silence, the not knowing, that has me so uncomfortable.

I turn off my phone at dinner with friends. No ringing. No vibrating. No notifying. Silence.

I am completely present with the people about me. I am not thinking about what I do not know. I am happy and serene…until I turn it back on and watch hope rise and fall again. And watch myself respond with a level of emotion that does not feel at all congruent.

Next day, at work, I turn the phone off again. And when I power it back on later, I ignore the notifications alerting me to the messages waiting. Instead, I bring my attention to my friend Nora, who is sitting across from me. I am again happy and serene.

I feel empowered.

It feels a little bit like when I quit smoking, nearly 15 years ago. That first week, I was high on not smoking. That feeling of “I can’t believe I’m doing this…”

The weeks that followed, sans cigarettes, were not filled with that same awe and wonder. But that is a different story. And a different lesson. Fifteen years later I am grateful for a different identity – one of a non-smoker. And the absence of the yellow stain on my second finger that I could not scrub off – my personal breaking point, my bottom.

My bottom here is that I fundamentally understand I am powerless over people, places and things, and yet, I sometimes still find myself allowing the actions of others to determine my sense of happiness, security and well-being. I watch myself hand over my serenity. It is painful.

And it is in this painful awareness that I recognize I have a modicum of control over the anxiety I perpetuate. That I can dial down my discomfort by simply turning off my phone, or ignoring its messages until I am in time and space to better receive them.

That I can receive the same relief by staying busy, and by pointing my attention to what is right in front of me.

Like Nora. Like the Artist Date penciled in my calendar. Number 59. Chicago Cultural Center for the “Wright Before the Lloyd,” exhibit.

I am here just a short time – about 45 minutes. Just long enough to feel the fog in my brain clear, making way for new information, and for my whole body to exhale.

The show is small – photographs, sketches and placards covering either side of a long hallway. It is a journey of becoming. The transition from Frank L. Wright, to Frank Lloyd Wright. A seemingly subtle, but significant, metamorphosis.

I read about his mother, determined that her son should become an architect, placing engravings of cathedrals in his bedroom for inspiration. His uncle with wild long hair, unconventional fashion sense, and a memorable three-part name who served as role model. His work with Adler and Sullivan and the “mistakes” he made on the way to creating his signature style.

I notice that many of the buildings shown on this trajectory from Wright to Lloyd Wright are no longer standing. Either burned down or destroyed. Gone. Like the yellow stain on my second finger.

I think about my own trajectory, and the people and experiences that influenced my becoming the woman I always wanted to be.

The one who dances on red soil in Rwanda and glossed, wood floors in Chicago. Who has been invited in to the intimacy of rooms where life begins and life ends. The one who listens with her hands and her heart.

The one with her own signature style – cropped hair, second-hand clothes and super-fabulous shoes – the kind that strangers inquire about. Who takes herself to museums, operas and lectures – comfortably alone. And out for strong coffee and a really good piece of cake.

The one who has learned to soothe herself. To quiet her own crazy. To be responsible for her own wellbeing.

Post Script: I got a call on some of the news I’d been waiting on. It was positive and it made me smile. But it didn’t change anything. Not my thoughts. My mood. My beliefs. It didn’t make me feel “ok.” It couldn’t. Because in my heart I already was.

Artist Date 56: Kind Of Like I Know You

January 11, 2014January 11, 2014 LesleyPearlLeave a comment

2013-06-04 17.12.55 — I coulda, shoulda
worn this hat this night.

It’s raining. Pissing raining. And dark. The snow from the storm which renamed this place Chi-beria is melting and I’m certain the city will flood.

And what look like parking spots in Rogers Park are a siren’s calling mix of ice, snow and deep water. My wheels are sliding under me. And then my feet, unsteady in the rain boots I never wear. The ones I bought a few years ago. That I thought could pass for winter boots as the shaft is made of grey flannel. I was mistaken.

I walk gingerly into the tiny theatre and choose my seat from the 25 or so, covered in red velvet. I lay my gloves, scarf and hat on the chair next to me to dry.

I smell like wet dog.

Eric Warner sent me an invitation to his performance –“A Life in Tending,” Artist Date 56 – on Facebook, just after his last performance, where he shared the stage with my friend Clover. Artist Date 45. The same night I realized I have danced with his fiancé years.

So I kind of feel like I know him, even though I don’t really. But he greets me at the door like I do. Even though Clover isn’t here. And neither is his fiancé.

He takes me into The Purple Hotel on Lincoln Avenue with him and his friends – long after it has closed. When the ground is grown over with weeds and the swimming pool is filled with black algae. When they snuck in, several years ago. Or more to the point, when they committed a felony in the name of urban excavation. Of bearing witness.

Which takes him into his grandmother’s home.

And he takes me there too, introducing me to the fierce, loving, tough-as-nails matriarch whose only rule was “Do whatever you want but don’t burn the house down.” Who, when informed her grandson’s classmates call him “fat” and “stupid,” asks, “Do you think you are those things?” Adding that people will tell him he is all sorts of things, what matters is that he knows who he is.

It is no longer that place since his grandmother died several years ago – even though his grandfather remains. He has taken to sitting in her chair, instead of staring at the empty space, where she used to be, from his own.

Pimp or Orthodox Jew? — Pimp or
Orthodox Jew?

Her walker, commode and oxygen tank sit, as though waiting for her to return. Tsotchkes line the kitchen table, sold for a song to feed his Keno habit. And perhaps also as a way of emptying the house, so his family won’t have to when he dies.

I think of my birthmother’s home, a place I visited just three times. Once to meet her. Once to say goodbye. And once to bury her.

On the first visit, I noticed the oxygen tanks in the kitchen – she was just 56. When I returned a few years later, a walker, shower bench and commode had been added.

On the third visit, we got rid of all of it. Me, my “aunt, uncles and cousins,” all of whom I’d never met until now. Except for my aunt. And her, just once, on my second visit.

I tossed reams of paper into large, black garbage bags – notes on an unsolved murder mystery she was following, years old credit-card statements, meeting minutes from the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

I remember standing back as my cousins fingered through her jewelry. My uncle telling me to “get in there.” I didn’t want anything, but I took a brooch anyway.

A few weeks later my aunt sent me my birth mom’s fur hat and coat –her name embroidered on the inside lining. It had belonged to their mother, my “grandmother.” I have never worn fur in my life. I cannot decide if I look like a pimp or an Orthodox Jew in it. It hangs in my coat closet still, even on the chilliest of Chicago days.

This morning, my birth mom’s son, my “half brother” friended me on Facebook. We have never met, or even spoken. A few months ago his daughter wrote to me. We exchanged a couple of emails where I filled in the blanks, explaining exactly who I was.

The timing is not lost on me.

I want to tell Eric all of this. To share my story, because he has shared his. Because I feel like I know him. To say “me too.” But I don’t. I do not see him on the way out and I am anxious to get home.

When I arrive I look at the calendar hanging in the kitchen – a gift from my “real” mom, the one who raised me. I’ve written just two things for January. The anniversary of my spiritual teacher’s passing, and my birth mom’s birthday. They are the same day, January 12 – this Sunday.

A Wandering Jewess

My Journey Back To Self

Tag: Identity