Ace, Actually

I was more than a little in love with Richard Campos since he’d first choreographed my solo when I was 11. Richard didn’t work with students so young. I was special. I can’t remember the song we started the year with because, after September 11th, he switched it to Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American.” It likely wasn’t a shrewd, calculated ploy to pluck the heartstrings of the judges at competitions, but it did anyway.

Like all men I’ve been in love with, Richard was very gay.

His choreography was always stunning to witness, but it felt even better to do. It made me feel settled deeply in my body. I wasn’t remembering one step and another, I was flowing inside the melody, between the lyrics, within the beat. I was swimming through the water-thick air. I was both inside the floorboards and skimming feather-light above the stage. 

Richard was highly in-demand, and so didn’t teach exclusively at one studio. His classes at Starlight Dance Center (SDA, to those in the know) were always full; every comp kid signed up. 

One class, the last of the day on some random Thursday during my sophomore year of high school, he turned off the lights in the studio. I loved dancing with the lights out. It wasn’t that we couldn’t see each other, the emergency square of light near the door never went out. It was the absence of oppressive fluorescents and the imaginary coolness of a dark room. Everyone kept tugging off layers and lifting shirts to wipe their forehead, their necks. The air was thick with the scent of clean, well-earned sweat. I felt it drip from the nape of my neck – my hair still pulled tight in its bun from Miss Jenny’s ballet class at 4 – down to my leotard, and disappear in my sweatpants, rolled at the waist. 

I was barefoot. Most everyone was. I preferred to dance barefoot. Maybe, if I knew we’d be practicing pirouettes or seconds, I’d wear a single, rolled-down sock on my left foot. At my former studio, I made the mistake of pirouetting on sweaty feet on tacky marley and 4 of my toes made the turn but my pinky toe did not. I likely broke it; it was swollen, tender, discolored. We didn’t have insurance, and I absolutely refused to stop dancing, even if some doctor told me to, so it was left untreated. 

I wouldn’t dance barefoot on the wooden floor of the tap room across the hall that Joseph preferred. Joseph was the studio owner, former tap dancer for Stomp, and my friend, as much of a friend as an adult man could be to a teenage girl, anyway. In that room, the flaking varnish and splinters caused by hundreds of tap shoes caked my bare feet with a dusty unpleasantness. 

We were in my favorite of the dance rooms. Two other dancers and I had stayed late on a Friday a few weeks earlier and laid down new strips of marley with smoothly applied cloth tape. I was an expert, by now, the strips of marley just barely separated and black tape adhering them together with no wrinkles or bubbles. I’ve wasted yards and yards of tape to build up my skills, but I was damn proud of the results. Here, with the tape still new enough not to have started curling up at the edges, my bare feet were free. 

Richard started the class by having us stretch to Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” and I was suddenly desperate to listen to it on repeat.

“What’s this called?” I asked Richard as he passed me. I wanted him to see me stretched farther towards my outstretched leg than those around me. I found it impossible not to stretch farther, hold a pose longer, pull my leg higher when I felt Richard’s eyes on me. Joni sang the words “’O Canada,’” and I asked if that was the name of the song. 

Richard laughed, a low sound, half lost in the noise of us switching positions. I flushed with embarrassment. He said, “’A Case of You,’” and walked away. It took a minute for the words to make sense. We switched positions again, and I forgot the title. Later, I’d search Google for a line I could remember.

Richard played the song again, and when it finished the second time, we rolled up to a standing position. He didn’t tell us to line up to practice short combinations of moves as we crossed the room, one-by-one. Most skill-based classes went that way. Instead, he had us stay standing, spread out across the floor while he cued up a song. We were learning a combo, and a thrill ran up my body and back down to my toes. 

The haunting piano notes at the start of Tori Amos’ “Silent All These Years” started up. I couldn’t remember hearing it before. Richard’s taste in music was so much better than Kyle’s.

When Kyle subbed for Joseph, he played “This Love” by Maroon 5 on repeat as we crossed the room, one-after-another. It wasn’t a particularly “tap-friendly” song, but that didn’t stop him. The shrill sound of Adam Levine’s voice lamenting the emotional turmoil of a love affair, in endless endless frustrating loops agitated me to no end. It took me years to get over my revulsion at the sound of Adam’s voice singing other songs. I still can’t tolerate that infernal song, even two decades later.

While we watched, Richard blocked out the first 4-count of choreography without speaking. We followed obediently. I couldn’t remember the moves now if I tried. To be fair, I can’t remember more than one or two moves to any dance I’ve ever performed. And some of those I practiced and performed hundreds of times. This one was there and gone within an hour.

I know it was just the right side of difficult. I imagine it as an all-encompassing rhythmic rhapsody requiring large, sweeping steps and lunges; full-body, rocking swings from one point to another; and agonizing, wrenching twists. It was undoubtedly a dance that straddled the line between pedestrian and elegant. 

It was emotional—Richard’s choreography always was. I felt Tori’s melancholy, frustration, and vulnerability as if they were my own.  

As she sang, I was bitter that my boyfriend had jeans that belonged to someone else. 

“What if I’m a mermaid?” That’s why I never belonged here. I wasn’t meant for land. A beautiful creature who lured men into the water and drowned them. 

I was silent. 

“I’ll still be waiting for somebody else to understand.” I’ve been waiting. I’ll never stop waiting.

“I hear my voice” I could hear my voice. I could. And maybe no one else could. Or wanted to. 

“And it’s been years,” a long, drawn-out, painful series of years that felt stretched out of me by the way she agonizingly pulled the word from her throat. 

Richard split the group in two so we had plenty of room to move and could take a second to rest between run-throughs. When I danced, they watched. I didn’t dance alone, but I felt the other group’s eyes on only me. They couldn’t tear them away. And why would they want to? I was breath-taking. I was true.

I was powerful. 

They wouldn’t hear my words. I swear it was like no one could hear any of my words. But I’d be damned if my body didn’t move them.

And maybe nobody was watching. That was fine, too.

The humidity in the room increased. Finally, the air I was breathing wasn’t desert-dry. I could inhale deeply. It smelled heavy with sweat and new marley. It was heavenly.

We ran late. I should have been exhausted from the week of school and classes and homework and the late night, but I’d never felt so wholly alive. I wouldn’t quit dancing this year. Not if it felt this good. I couldn’t give up this dizzying, delirious bliss. This sense that I danced and the universe danced with me. Through me. It wasn’t electric; people created electricity. This feeling was like sinking into that mycorrhizal network that lets trees talk to each other. Except this network connected absolutely everything. A whole universe inhaled with me and didn’t release the breath until I was ready to breathe out. It was primal and essential and I knew it so so well.