As I walked the fields in the first week of April, it was eighty degrees—unseasonably warm. I was more sensitive to the imbalance occurring in nature because my own personal balance had been thrown off. Because of what was happening to me I was more aware of the misfortunes of others.
We and our planet were in trouble, and the awareness we needed to put ourselves back on track was not particularly high. Death seemed to be lurking around every fork in the road, whether from disease or from economics, famine, drought, or crime. I was becoming more and more acutely aware of what was happening in our world. I felt it personally. It began to frighten me. Relationships were in trouble, marriages crumbling, parents and children unable to communicate, teachers and students living two different realities.
We all seemed to be walking contradictions. None of us really, really knew what we were doing or why. So, of course, we couldn’t really understand anyone else—governments out of touch with those they governed; police becoming as violent as the criminals they arrested; church and state corrupt; disease outstripping medical knowledge. I could see why the prophets of doom and gloom abounded.
I reckoned, as I walked the fields of green grass and wildflowers, that none of the answers would come from the outside anyway. I was in effect trying to go within myself to establish a real and lasting support system. My injury had forced me to. I would go as deep as I needed to, to understand what had brought me to this point. Only then would I be in charge of where I was going.
I stopped to peer out over a hill at Mt. Rainier, which was emerging from behind cloud cover. I stepped up on a rock to have a better view. As I did, I felt a painful twinge in the back of my knee. It had become a voice of warning to me. I stopped the pain by bending my knee. “It isn’t quite healed,” I thought. “I need to be cautious, vigilant—not let my guard down.” It was good to have the time to feel a twinge and not be panicked that the audience would see me go down again.
CHAPTER 10
L.A., L.A., L.A.!
In another week I returned to Los Angeles to prepare for my big opening in the city where most of my friends lived. I felt good, strong, and rested. I had been through my tunnel of demons and had come out the other end.
I chuckled to myself at the idea of two psychics and one channeler who had told me that my playing L.A. looked murky and probably wouldn’t happen. “Of course,” said they, “your individual consciousness can change any dynamic; but from what we see now, your playing L.A. is doubtful at this time.”
When asking advice from psychics and teachers from spiritual realms, it is understood that one’s consciousness can change destiny. And I had changed my consciousness, which would therefore alter the prediction. Of that I was certain. L.A. was on, my ankle was more flexible, and my knee didn’t feel as though it held fear. I was going to play the City of the Angels, and more than one of them would be protecting me.
The first event I got through was my birthday. A few close friends of mine gave me a little party and we celebrated. The cake was beautiful with about ten candles on it. When I made a wish and blew on them, two candles remained lit. It caught me by surprise, because I have strong lung capacity. I had to blow several times before the flames were snuffed out. I wondered what that meant.
Sachi, now completely recovered from her surgery, was previewing the play she was in, so she didn’t join us until after dinner.
As sanguine as I was about being fifty-six, I was not so at ease about having a party. Unbelievably, I am shy; and when the introductory testimonial speech had been completed (which was touching but difficult for me), I was mercifully saved by a Mexican trio who followed the toast with folk songs and South of the Border joyful noise, even though I felt unfulfilled that I hadn’t had time to acknowledge the precious friendships of the people there. I was glad I had taken the time in the afternoon to do my projections for the following year. It put me in touch with people I loved, rather than social appropriateness.
I did my projections every year on my birthday, since I knew that I owned the exact moment I was born. And because that energy was mine forever, I wanted to utilize it to create with. It is said that if you visualize what you want in the coming year so acutely that you can taste, feel, hear, see, and love its truth, and accompany that vision with an oral declaration of purpose three times (one for mind, one for body, one for spirit), then let it freely go—the vision will materialize. I had done it every year for the last seven. More often than not, my visualization manifested. And when it didn’t, I knew it Was because I didn’t trust it.
I was becoming more and more aware now that we all need to be more careful about what we think. The positive and the negative are amplified these days and, from what I’m learning, will continue to be as we journey into the nineties and the next century and millennium. The energy of the earth itself has accelerated, and its impact on human consciousness is profound. We are in a speed-up process, whether we admit it or not. The negative is speeding up, as well as the positive. So the old adage “Be careful what you think” rings with truth more now than ever.
Over the years, with each progressive birthday, I am struck by time marching across the faces of my friends, enveloping their bodies, working its influence on their memories and body rhythms, and in general reminding me, through them, that we’re all just passing through.
I see my face and body every day in them and in the mirror. The crinkles and loose-fitting flesh creep up on me, sometimes surprising me as though overnight folds belonging to someone else decided to make a frontal assault on my stomach and drip down over my hips. Where did the love handles suddenly come from? What could I do to prevent them? And would it be worth it?
Sagging skin was hard for me to look at. It represented deterioration to me, the incapacity to control time and gravity. And I could never understand, or rather wouldn’t understand, why older people who continued to exercise vigorously still suffered the same vanity-stricken fate. Ballet dancers, for example—why did their skin have to sag, even when they continued to dance every day? It seemed unfair. Such physical discipline should be rewarded by the gods.
And the memory loss! How could it be happening to me? My mother at eighty-six, okay. But me? There were times now when I forgot who I was calling. My attention span seemed to extend to no more than twenty seconds sometimes! If I didn’t make written notes, I wouldn’t remember my schedule for the next day. My car keys? I forced myself to put them in the same place when coming home and leave them there till I left again. I was lucky I remembered what they were for when I found them.
Sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night and sit up in bed with panic as I tried to remember whether I had taken my vitamins. My mind often wanted to float—cruise—wander—idle in neutral, responding less and less easily to my stringent commands to snap into discipline. I could see myself with very little effort living a quiet, almost reclusive, life—allowing nature to take its course and my body and mind to hover wherever they wanted to be. Perhaps I continued to dance because I knew how fundamentally lazy I could be.
It always amused me that people saw me as a whirling dervish of disciplined overachievement, when in truth, more and more, I preferred doing nothing. Of course, doing nothing for me was feeling so completely blissful in the “moment” that it never occurred to me to address myself to the future. More and more I liked the feeling of channeling time. I remembered how much I loved the philosophical thought that time runs through us, rather than we run through time.
So once again my birthday brought me in touch with my sense of time and bodily mortality. Maybe it was my knee injury that caused me to think suddenly so much about age, for I was well aware that age might have caused the injury. It was not a pleasant thought. I didn’t want to admit it. My body had served me like a workhorse. I was not about to put it out to pasture. And yet—and yet.
* * *
The night after my birthday my telephone rang at three-thirty A.M. I heard a voice drawl a kind of comedic cheery hell
o. It was Debbie Reynolds.
“Well, my dear,” she said. “Happy Birthday or whatever.”
“Thanks, Debbie,” I said. “Happy Birthday to you a few weeks ago. Did you get my flowers?”
“Of course I did, my dear,” she said. “I always get your flowers. I got your flowers when you began the picture. I got your flowers when you finished the picture. I got your flowers on opening night with Molly Brown. I got all your flowers. I’m here to tell you one thing, though.”
“What’s that, Debbie?”
“From now on skip the flowers, just send me those wonderful notes.”
“Oh,” I answered. “Okay.”
“Did you know Groucho, dear?”
“Yes, a little. He made me laugh because he was a sexual put-on artist.”
“Yep,” she said, “that he was. Well, he used to say skip the champagne, skip the caviar, just give me a call! I say to you skip the flowers, I just want to hear what you have to say when you write.” She hung up.
We were scheduled to open Tuesday, May 1, in the theater where I had only been once—to see Debbie Reynolds in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. That seemed like a good omen.
I went into the rehearsal hall Friday, April 27, with Alan and the dancers. We had been off for three weeks (a long time for a dancer not to wrap the body around steps). Alan wanted to give them notes and change a few things. So they danced in the morning, I the afternoon.
It was glorious to be back. My body felt strong. I had been thorough with my workout program; and even though I felt the famous twinge intermittently in the back of my knee, I was so happy to be back with my show, knowing that I could depend on it regardless of what happened to the world or the rest of show business, that I found a way of working with the weakness that allowed movements to be altered slightly so as not to aggravate it. The rehearsal went fine.
The crew loaded into the Pantages the next day, Saturday, while we did another brush-up rehearsal in the rehearsal hall. We were scheduled for a dress rehearsal on Sunday and a preview on Monday night.
Alan altered a few steps to make the choreography easier for my knee, just in case. The dancers were coping with their own injuries (hamstrings and lower back).
The windows were open. The sun streamed through. There were honey graham crackers on the table, along with bottles of Evian water. The jokes flew, our bodies whirled, we found new acting attitudes in the steps, and we were having a wonderful time.
Dancers need to dance. We had been off long enough. We were doing the acting section at the end of the choreographer’s number. Keith and Blane and I were fooling around, finding new nuances in our interplay.
I did a double turn into Blane, came out of it, and brought my right foot down in a modified fifth position to prepare for the lift. It was a routine step—in fact, it wasn’t a step, it was a preparation for a lift. Blane supported me as I sprang into the air from a demi-plié.
Then it happened. The TWINGE became a full-blown tear. I had never felt pain as I did in that moment. And the “moment” seemed to go on and on. It grew. I screamed in midair.
“Oh nooo!” I screamed.
I heard myself scream over and over. Blane gently brought me to the floor, and I tried to lie down. The pain didn’t stop. I couldn’t believe what was happening. A full two minutes of pain ensued. Nobody knew what to do.
“Ice…. Ice. Get some ice.” The dancers’ eternal cry. “Get ice!”
Keith ran out of the room to find ice. Damita bent over me and asked me to describe the pain, which I did. All the time I thought I was dreaming.
“Is this a bad dream?” I asked the dancers. Alan looked into my eyes. He knew what I was talking about. If we all create our own reality and life is a dream we create through which we learn, then what was going on?
I slapped my thigh, hoping it would wake me up. “Someone tell me this is only a bad dream I’ve created for myself.”
“It’s real,” said Alan. “It’s not a dream. You really hurt your knee.”
“What day is this?” I asked, confused about time.
“It’s Saturday,” said Alan.
My mind raced like a computer. I could skip dress rehearsal the next day, maybe even skip the preview on Monday so that I’d be ready to open Tuesday! I simply couldn’t afford to cancel my opening—not after Seattle and San Francisco. People would really think there was something wrong and I was unreliable. I didn’t want them to say that I was too old to dance anymore. I tried to move my knee. Regardless of the position, the pain was excruciating.
“Get Dr. Perry,” I said desperately. “Tell him to come right away.”
Blane rushed to the telephone. People began to make suggestions—maybe the paramedics, maybe an ambulance. In the meantime, all I could think of was getting on that stage at the Pantages regardless of what it took.
The pain began to subside a little. I tried to visualize what had happened inside my knee. The pain was coming from the back of the knee, not the top. It was coming from what had been the “twinge.” The whispers, I thought—I hadn’t listened to the whispers. Even if I had listened, what could I have done?
Someone moved me to the office where there was a telephone. I called Dr. Perry’s wife. She said she’d be hearing from him soon.
The paramedics came with blood pressure equipment and a stretcher. That was definitely not for me, but the young men were sweet about my refusal. They wished me well and said they hoped I’d be able to dance. Oh God, I hated to hear those words.
Mike Flowers had been in rehearsal earlier and had left to go to the theater. He returned, shocked, knowing what this new problem really meant.
I waited for about an hour for Dr. Perry to call but we couldn’t find him. Rehearsal was obviously at an end.
Damita took me home and I managed to limp to my car, already finding ways to maneuver my body around the pain.
“Do you think I’ll be able to dance?” I asked her in that way of wanting reassurance, even if it wasn’t legitimate.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The important thing is that you get well and don’t dance on it too soon. That’s all.” She was right, but that didn’t matter to me.
I put ice on my knee as soon as I got home and waited for Perry. All manner of demonic thoughts rambled and scrambled in my mind, but the heart and core of all of them was the inescapable question: Was this really the end of my dancing career? I remembered a friend of mine coming to see me at the Statue of Liberty Centennial Fourth of July Celebration in New York, because he believed that was the last time I’d dance. I wondered if he was right.
Of course not, I thought. I’ve already danced for two months. Did I have some strange muscle dysfunction that prevented me from sensing an injury before it occurred, which had always been the case? Would I have to learn how to sing better, because I’d soon have to take the dancing out of my act? Would the people come? Were they only coming now in order to see if someone my age could still kick?
Maybe I could learn how to act every song ever written so that people would come to hear and see the true meaning of lyrics. I thought of Julio Iglesias. He was a sportsman, as I recalled, and because of an accident he had to sing.
Dr. Perry arrived in the middle of my paranoid speculation. “What the hell happened?” he asked. I told him. “Torn meniscus [cartilage],” he said, seeming to understand what had happened right away. “It’s probably part of the original injury. We need to do an MRI [Magnetic Resonance Imaging]. Where is your arthrogram from Seattle?”
I told him I’d get all that. What I wanted to know about was my immediate future. Perry was honest. He didn’t know. “But I doubt,” he said, “that you’ll be opening Tuesday night.”
I stared at him. “Really?” I asked.
“Really,” he answered. “You don’t want to injure yourself any further. This should have been taken care of in Seattle.”
“What do you mean taken care of?” I asked.
“I don’t know. We’ll see. W
e’ll know after the MRI. You should have had one done with the first injury. They didn’t read the arthrogram properly in Seattle. But then maybe it didn’t show the full extent of your injury. We’re speculating in the dark now. Have some patience. Remember that previously I told you to go back to work and not give up, as you’d never be able to live with yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Well, now I’m saying don’t go back to work until you are really certain that you won’t hurt yourself.”
I said nothing.
He taped my leg. “Keep the tape on,” he said. “I’ve put a felt material next to your skin. It draws the heat and inflammation out.”
“Can I have a massage?” I asked. “Bonnie is coming. I’m so tense. Every muscle in my body hurts.”
“Yes,” he answered. “I agree with massage.”
I thought of my shoemaker. The man never even realized. I thought of Mary and how she had assured me that I would have a pain-free tour. Pain? I’d settle for a little pain if I could just dance without injury.
Dr. Perry left when Bonnie came. He said he was going to arrange for an orthopedic surgeon to look at me the next day. I needed an MRI and another opinion besides his. A surgeon? “Are you kidding?”
“No,” he answered calmly. “First we need to see what’s wrong. If orthopedic surgery is necessary, we go in there and see what’s going on.”
He went on to tell me of all the athletes and dancers he had treated who went through surgery and were more active than ever afterward. I had never been injured before, at least not to the extent that required surgery. I didn’t know how to relate to it. Perry nodded in reassurance and left.
As Bonnie began to massage my muscles, my wrapped leg began to throb. The wrapping was on too tight. Impetuously I ripped it off.
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