A Little Something About Dance
This is a little something about dance. This is also about my sister. This is also about hands and Zelda Fitzgerald. It can be all these things.
As an older brother of Auburn, NY, I escorted my sister to her weekly dance class. The studio was owned by Sonja Ward who built a small institution with adolescent hands. It nested above the city’s Ukrainian Club where despondent men nursed lagers as Vanna turned letters, slowly revealing words kept hidden.
My cousin Crystal also danced there but she died of cancer. A memory of her radiant in sweaty makeup after a recital waving to me is a little keepsake I have. Sonja died in a car crash. Zelda died in an Asheville fire. My sister is still alive.
Zelda longed to dance. I teach her novel Save Me the Waltz and it’s quite lovely. Wikipedia describes its genre as tragedy. I think of it as a little love story for dance. Early reviews were by and large dismissive. Hemingway hated it.
The main character Alabama Beggs discovers ballet in Paris and is instantly transfixed. My sister loved to dance but understood the limitations of her body to pursue it professionally. Today she is a film producer for mostly commercial work. Even in advertisements I can see a little girl with strawberry curls, dancing invisibly among the products
During my niece’s first holiday season, she waved little feet and hands to “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses when receiving a diaper change. The lead singer, Patty Donahue, died of lung cancer at forty. I always enjoyed Donahue’s dancing. Despite a limited repertoire, she came across as the coolest girl from across the room. She had movement you cannot teach. “I Know
What Boys Like” was recorded the year I was born.
Zelda had a daughter, but she never danced. She died of throat cancer.
Sonja Ward’s family quoted a mawkish poem for her passing. The speaker says, “If tears could build a stairway / and thoughts a memory lane / I’d walk right up to heaven / and bring you home again.” She deserved better literature. A sentence about dancing. A sentence about lifting girls into artistic creation in a prison city. She was Auburn’s surrogate mother throughout the Cold War.
Zelda’s dance teacher was Lyubov Yegorova. In surviving pictures, she looks like a music box made manifest. Another student was Lucia Joyce who died of a stroke the year I was born. She struggled with mental illness.
In the novel, Alabama travels to Naples for her big break. Zelda was unable to go due to a mental breakdown and never danced again. Her daughter sent her a program from the Ballet Russe as a souvenir and she wrote “This will never cease pulling at my heart-strings: not that I wish it would.”
One of my happy memories of elementary school was when a substitute gym teacher played an instrumental mixtape and said dance how the music makes you feel. For an hour I was free to express myself in an otherwise dreary environment ruled by teachers who operated as corrections officers. The regular gym teacher was a former wrestling coach confined to an electric wheelchair. He used it as a tyrant’s mobile throne to scream at terrified children and considered
that physical education.
The speaker of Save Me the Waltz describes Parisian ballet as “Spare, immaculate legs and a consciousness of rib, the vibrant suspension of lean bodies precipitated on the jolt of reiterant rhythmic shock, the violins’ hysteria, evolved themselves to a tortured abstraction of sex.”
Zelda craved evolution from a southern belle into a serious artist. Her handcrafted painting and prose were only taken seriously after she burned alive.
Zelda was interested in dance while still a girl in Alabama. Nancy Milford writes in her biography, “Each year a secret society called Les Mysterieuses, which was composed of sixty socially prominent young matrons and girls, gave a ball. That April it was a “Folly Ball,” and [...] The part of Folly was played by Zelda, who dressed in a costume of black-and-gold malines trimmed with tiny bells, danced upon her toes, ‘using numbers of small balloons as she went through the mazes of the dance.’”
In this passage, “socially prominent” performs a sleight of hand disguising whiteness behind a black-and-gold veil. Like Scott Fitzgerald, actress Ellie Kemper attended Princeton. Like Zelda Fitzgerald, actress Ellie Kemper was part of a secret society upholding white supremacy. It was called The Veiled Prophet Fair.
Ellie was declared Queen of Love and Beauty in 1999. When pictures surfaced online, she posted an apology.
I think it is the nature of Ellie’s roles that surprised audiences about her monstrous wealth. She plays plucky underdogs who struggle for acceptance. She has struggled little in reality.
The Veiled Prophet Fair was created by Confederates to suppress hands of a cross-racial labor strike so they could amass fortunes for white debutantes. They feared solidarity of class.
The girls of Sonja Ward are likely not destined for greatness but find greatness in a little city where crows plunder trash cans every spring.
When I went to my sister’s final recital as a high school senior, the theme of her solo was “Hollywood” because she wanted to study film. For reasons I cannot remember, I was the only member of my family to see her performance that night.
She danced to Mariah Carey’s cover of “Open Arms” off Daydream, an album I bought her for Christmas. I felt our childhoods ending after its final notes vibrated the auditorium and my hands began to clap.
My sister was not the daughter of an elite family like Zelda or Ellie and thus will never twirl in glamorous celebrity.
My niece might. I keep my fingers crossed.