…A few months ago I enrolled in a ballet school. Locally.

Big dream of mine, as an adult-

Kinda Lifelong, really.

Very much a bite the bullet sort of thing, one that was consciously keyed to a particular “until” that all my #ontheroadagainisms had made a moot point.

A lifetime ago, I’d taken adult evening ballet classes sporadically with ABT to help get a grip on the choppy waves of my first bouts of writerhead with no designhead cushion. It’d done wonderful things for that head and my heart.

But I’d left that behind, thrown myself into all that AOLAB became on the road.

Until the climax of my third sojourn in Miami. I was spiritually fn miserable. Even with all the arthead opportunities there for me I knew I had to get the fuck out of there.

& instead of grousing on all the things hated there I focused on what my life would have in it when it was lived fully & loved. I was weirdly drawn to LA. To write. Books.

And when I really feel a sense of home in Los Angeles, I’m going to take dance classes!

Not just any dance classes-

Adult Ballet Classes!”

Minime, in Miami, climbing the Art Deco walls, dreaming of moving to Los Angeles for real, living there. In 2016.

I hadn’t even left Miami yet but it was with that call that I knew I was gone.

I had almost restarted that dance journey the two other seasons I’d been based in Miami for arthead stuff. There were two schools that I looked into I could’ve attended. But there was going to be no sending of mixed signals to myself on this. Out was out… until I was out.

That was eight years ago, and I kept my word.

I moved out west within two months of that declaration.

But then AOLAB bloomed the way it did American Southwest-wise and though I was based here…I was never fully here because every art residency opportunity and cool, off the grid sojourn I got offered, I happily took.

The Miami art scene had been very kind to my Chuck Norris-ing, unconventional AIR arthead ass. Taos and Sedona and all up and down the coast of California let me build upon that madness with cool projects.

The sweetest of the wild arcs all over was getting invited to be a visiting artist in residence at a local school thanks to costumes from my RITU:alist exhibition at the Sedona Art Center.

The school stuck me in a cabin on the grounds of a nearby research center and museum at the foot of a mountain so I could walk over to helm self-designed intensives on their campus in two divisions: New Media & Dance. I brought a Worldbuilding 101 collage course to the New Media upperclassmen & a batshit crazy costume construction class to the upperclass dance majors, riffing on the quipu technique I’d built the Grievechronic Anannke costumes from for the show.

It was straight kismet. The New media teacher was a wild woman in love with collage like me, singing its praises from the rooftops to her motley crew of baby artheads Magii … and I rolled in “who shot the dawg” ing it, point-blank showing the kids how to visually shorthand three & five part movie action arcs and fashion shows guerrilla style, solo and on teams.

It was a circle-closing moment for me. I’d been the teenaged art angel nutter introduced to xeroxing madness on a internship at Cleveland Museum of Art helmed by Dada- headed Brits, a couple that swooped in and changed my fucking life via collage and the importance of ample amounts of clotted cream and crumpets on ritualistic, daily pauses for tea… and there I was, having swooped in from the Arthead Heavens of Taos and Sedona, now watching teenagers who loved fashion and film ( but had written their teacher off as out there) as their brains were being splayed all over the place, straight “You mean I can design a collection from this?! I can be paid to DO this??”

I found out a few years later that the portfolios from my clutch of kids were off the chain because of how equipped they were and that every kid that wanted to go to FIDM, FIT & Parsons from that bunch got to.

But the costuming intensive was even wilder. The costumes from ritu:ALIST had been made to animate on their own, suspended from the sky like mobiles that seemed to get out of peoples ways as they passed by. Motion is everything….and the idea of dancers animating them had them as punchdrunk as I was as the frickin fiber artist… so we went to town.

Not only did they learn how to construct their own bespoke costumes on their own & each other’s bodies[ so they’d never be left without a costuming option budget-wise if push came to shove], they also each were tasked with choreographing a piece to express what the costume was supposed to be about via how they animated it.

All that led to a local dance company commissioning a collection of quipu pieces from me to use in their upcoming season as well as animating Anannke in a repetoire piece after I’d galloped back to the coast for a winery research apprenticeship for grievechronic.

Anyway…life moved on, Globalboho and AOLAB ran wild, Grievechronic birthed again and again…

And every year I made playlists of ballet technique based workouts to use but always shied away, instead focusing on all the other art and book stuff afoot. Then covid hit, then the upsurge of gallivanting that it blessed me with happened on the far side of it, etceteras, etceteras, fast forwarding to almost now.

2022 into 2023 did wing me with the ballet thing again-

I ended up posting up in Palos Verdes for three weeks with two bulldogs for a ballet mom traveling to Europe for the holidays to watch her professional ballerina daughter perform in the Nutcracker or Swan Lake for a nordic company, in a home replete with elk meat(Taoslove)… and a bonafide dance studio with springy floors built over the pool. I danced my brains out , feeling loved by God from so many different directions.

I even got to a point where I even felt I could finally talk about it- ballet-with somebody other than God, you know?

Broaching it earlier than I should have Did open me up to a psychological hit due to other snarky shit…but it didn’t knock the taste for it out of my mouth.

Instead, it made me own it.

All of it.

…Because that was the thing. There’d never been true space TO fully own it as mines in the past.

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I grew up as the visual arthead in a very creative family. My big brother was the photography major, I was visual arts, my kid sister was the dance major.

& I thoroughly understood the power of dance from a completely non traditional place.

It had been dance 5 times a week at Cleveland School of the arts as a kid that helped keep my little sister off the autism spectrum once all the ABA therapy work the whole family did alongside her therapists and school yanked her from its clutches.

Dance was sacred. It saved her. But in comprehending it had saved her all my desires towards it were set aside, tamped down for the team.

As an adult I see it clear as day. What I did. & I see it with loving eyes. Because I loved my sister. I loved how hard she came in here, I loved her where she went to when she “left” because I could somehow still play with her there, and I loved when she came back.

The only thing that may have given it away was this black ballerina doll I’d had when I was about 8. You put her foot on the lil pink battery operated platform she came with, pressed a button and she’d pirouette in circles. Wasn’t a Barbie. Was better than one. Brown as me too, doused in light pink. My sister came off the spectrum into regular classes when she was seven. I was ten. Not even sure if I gave the toy TO her, but it faded out of memory right around then…and I flung myself into the odd-color combos that were coating everything Get In Shape Girl accoutrements-wise.

But we were a family of wilding, dancing giants. My Cheshire Cat grinning deejay back then dad had killed a dream of running off to nyc to join Alvin Ailey at the end of high school but married a Goldie Hawnesque Laugh-In-ing HS high stepper (a dance team majorette captain of sorts is the closest way to make sense of it to me) named Alice he’d met dancing at the Mad Hatter.

She does all that social hand-dancing circuit stuff to this day from what I last heard…and some of my earliest memories outside of the house are of being sprawled on the floor in pretty dresses in church basements under folding tables, watching the two of them hand dance at the close of his sets[ they took us Everywhere lol].

Needless to say, like most Black American houses of the time it was an ass-shaking home from the get-go.

But as a kid I 100% embraced she- my sis- was the one who…needed it…dance… to fully be here. This is totally me putting big person words to all of in awareness, in the now, of course. She was the dancer… and I relinquished my openmouthed smiling love of it because she’d been literally saved by it, rehabilitated by it.

& it’s not like I stopped dancing.

Nah. & with her, I had somebody growing up to devour MGM musicals with, flinging ourselves around the house like madwomen, all “gotta dance.” We all devoured ballroom dance competitions on PBS & you couldn’t be my friend if you didn’t comprehend Christmas was Nutcracker season. Plus 3 of my 5 HS besties were dance majors, already professional due to how fn amazing Cleveland’s cultural arts scene was…and my dancing was blooming underground due to how amazing Cleveland’s club scene in the Flats was. I was the wilding one of the crew, getting us in then recklessly spinning out like a motherfuck while my friends were doing everything they could to throw off their daytripper bunhead technique to be fucking free as they inhaled all the dry ice they could handle, all of us underage like a motherfuck protected by androgynous angels in all sorts of drag-

In other words the shit worked itself out. I got outta Ohio, hit nyc , Europe and Japan, always a clubland at hand factored in for equilibrium… and life became what it was. Lots of it between then and now. Lives.

But in that top of 2023 moment of feeling like I was having to stand up inside of me FOR it… my sincere love of dance feeling dissed… something huge in me shifted. It was recognition. With a capital R.

It was mine. It had ALWAYS been mine.

& fuck anybody doing anything to speak ill of it showing up in me fully formed.

It’s time for this to loudly be all the way mines.

a pissed off Angel, wanting to punch a bro.

But then suddenly I was on the road again.

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I’m going to …find a way to take a class~Here!

…an incredulous Angel

I looked…and when I didn’t find, I kept looking anyway. Quietly. Determinedly.

In late January of this year I was holed up downtown again, and manifested an invite to Matthew Bourne’s Romeo+Juliet while I was around.

I had decided I was going to finally see one of his shows in person after all these years, one way or another. The next day on a tour of the Walt Disney Music Hall and the rest of the Music Center I got invited out the blue by an 80 year old scrappy ex-ballerina that didn’t look a lithe day over 60.

A day after that Invite found out a local school had adult beginning ballet classes not even a breath away from where I was base camped. It’d been hidden in plain sight the entire time!

It still took time.

To work up the courage to even go check out the school.

TWO months, almost on the nose.

But why? Right? Because suddenly it became real.

Everybody else’s co-starring assist in this whole Ballet tale that had deposited me at this junction fell away.

This had fuck all to do with anybody else passively or aggressively once I signed up for me and I knew it. There was no sickly sister beside me, no bffs of yore, no bizarre wannabe dancing clubby pedigrees, no twitterpated ‘may as well be Gene Kelly-Baryshnikov to me’princes that crazily morphed into arrogant ballet-Bro ogres in my mind’s eye (to be the stick since all the carrots of former days hadn’t moved the needle forward).

Because that’s just it…they’re all Fairytales.

Tapes we replay as time ebbs away.

All of it.

Even all the plot-point flourishes leaned on in here up until now to effectively give you mise en scene.

It’s like… sometimes we have to remind ourselves incessantly of what we love… to drown out the sensory overload of just loving the things.

And to stop the tapes it comforts us to play, to pull it out and sit the scissors beside it so you can be with that actual love in the now is a huge thing to do. It’s the toughest part of working up to the eventual cutting.

It was for me, anyway. The 1etherealangel thing is no lie. Arthead life and Writerhead life is, by nature, heady as fuck. Every which way “heady” can bend. Ballet is a manifestation of me moving on the decision to fully be here, me deciding to touch all the way down.

& yeah…There was crazy talk. Pushback. Just shy of inner backlash.

But all the chatter that had once stormed the point of decision abated on its own when I registered me in school with my innerchile standing gamely beside me in the spirit, cheesing like a mug.

I signed us up for my first in-person class…on Mother’s day.

A good six weeks away.

“…you’re going back on the road in 4 days! What is even the point of doing this now?! Fine! Enroll, but don’t pick a class! What if schedules shift and- Fuck! did you really just do this? It’s the end of March! You really think you’re going to be on this bullethead tear in May?! When will it end?!”

tha bullshit kicking up.

That same chatter gagged when on that same day I circle-closed my durn self by also signing up for online classes right where the first bouts of writerhead peace all those years ago had hit.

American Ballet Theatre. To do on the road…in preparation for D-day.

Dance day. The lead-in for Mothers day. All beginning level. No Cap, no brag. No fn shame. The whole point of this with me isn’t that I was good at taking expert-level direction. I’m autonomous and unencumbered by gleeful design. Sometimes I am like puppies wrestling under a blanket with all my projects and ideas…and I Love it that way lol. Shiva’s kid sister dancing worlds into existence across the page, taking a dance floor over a stage every time… that’s my heady heart, wagging mah ass with tha GODS, maaaan!

But this was different. It has always been that I LOVE it, gangly and all akimbo focusing not to fidget, or not. Having to pay attention.

This was me Choosing a different kind of discipline (beyond the virgoan) to underpin the natural abandon I 100% fuss with all day, everyday.

(I actually popped some bubbly over that one.)

I am taking this bleeping’ class. I am the Mother of books…and this helps me and feeds my babies. This is my Mother’s Day gift to me.

Higher Angel, ordering her boots on the ground Self

In addition to stumbling through the weekly online classes happily, I finally deep dove all the playlists made all those years too.

I sincerely practiced for a little bit everyday. So my toes wouldn’t be floating in my hips or knees on mothers day, head hovering halfway up to heaven, coming up with characters. I really prepared. Lowkey cross training-esque.

A friend even got me to take warming up seriously and it just all exploded on the road. After my last ABT class on the road I just started hiking my ass off up in the Palisades in the interim. I was in mellow pregaming mode up and down eight newly discovered secret stairs(whole nother post) for the week between the final ABT & the first in-person for me in over 20 years.

Everything was keyed to not falling on my ass on Mother’s Day , finally WITH other people lol…& being able to keep up with steady breath.

…And then~after I shyly told a buddy of mine at Unita I was finally doing it in person soon last Monday, this week that just passed hit my ass like multiple MAC trucks.

---

It wasn’t full blown carnage per se.

It was having to wedge in a nonstop studio night, KPM surprise stuff, new sojourn start ups, cycle all Hullo~…and then leaving my f reaking phone in an UBER…that spread across three days with psychological chaos lol.

My body felt run over by all it took to mentally stay centered so as not to snap like a motherfuck.

By bedtime, I’d made peace with the idea of postponing the class until later in the week, praying they wouldn’t just write me off as a no-show.

I rarely have those “Who was I kidding?” moments but I tell ya, one was hovering like a motherfuck last night.

I even reached out to the now quasicarrot for everything Caerbannog within me ( that I’d once morphed into a stick, who was now just a weirdly accepting ear…see? FAIRYTALES lol).

BUT….I couldn’t even set my mouth[or fingers] to tell him I’d given up on going, almost at the finish line. Something that is Also the antithesis of everything me. Usually, even if it takes forever, if I say I’m doing x, imma do it.

But I thought I felt that hurt. It was uncanny, actually. Made no real actual sense. The levels. I hadn’t injured myself. & all the chaos figured itself out. It….Just didn’t feel like it was mines. So I went to sleep. Like it wasn’t.

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I woke up at 7am today… with NOT an OUNCE of ache anywhere in my body.

An angel alongside me in the spirit was like “you probably just taxed your Achilles with all your prep and the stress exacerbated the ringing of that through your body. Just mind it…you’ll be fine if you mind it~” {paraphrase}.

Then the Flashdance theme blasted in my head as Minime flung me outta bed and started tossing things in my bag.

I hadn’t packed the night before because I truly had made peace with not going.

But the caveat…was I had fallen asleep with my hair in a casual bun lol.

Not having to fuck with Esmerelda was the true cosmic co-sign lol.

I fed tha cats, grabbed my things- I knew I was gonna HAVE to write after all this- and hit the ground, running. Okay, fast-walking, chugging a green drink. I ignored LA transit directions and went straight New York mode, cutting a train off at the pass by going in the opposite direction to make up the time needed.

It worked. I bounded onto the subway platform at 3rd street promenade like a colossus, breathless and grinning in all Black, straight NYC TD(sommayallknow lol), leather shrunken Moto, leather billowy sweatpants and messy bun, leg warmers and lil wrap skirt in mah bag. All black except for mah bright red feiyues.

“Which one is leaving first?” I huskily growled at an E train attendant draped languidly across a handrail.

He David Lee Roth pointed me onto the right one and soon as I crossed the threshold, we were off!

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I was the first one there, suited and booted like a child.

There was a guy taller than me- thank god(Lol- I always thank god on that, even as a kid in gym, he always factored in one as gangly as me so I could check my body nonsense against his limbs being all akimbo too) & a chick whose eyes got big when she saw my giant red feiyues gleaming.

“Do you do martial arts?” she asked.

“Only qigong,” I blush grinned.

She grinned back. ” I do wushu! Feiyues!”

… so Mah shoes made friends lol.

There were some stragglers but in the end we were a team of 6, all grown assed folks with obvious love for ballet, at least two older than I, everyone else millennial, figuring it out.

My teacher was a substitute. And on top of being a petite Ballethead, she was a Mathlete [a math tutor]!

Which meant…that whenever she explained something we were missing or felt compelled to “break it down” she went full Vulcan mode, and Spocked the fuck out, making all the movement be about mathematics expressed by the body.

But something about that…she did it in a way I still do not even know how I understood…because on paper- and even in this paragraph -that could technically be the most succinct description of why all this IS a task for me and my “ship.”

Math didn’t make sense to me for AGES.

-Fuck geometry{but you’re an artist! It’s friggin shapes! D+!lol}! Trigga-what?!Trigga deez nutz!{are you fn kidding me?! We’re drawing grids for everything, ya bleeping art major!! c+!}! Nothing made sense until hitting physic and calculus by the skin of my teeth, when it starts to rely heavily on words {RUFNKIDDING ME?! A-?! After you just drove this department fn insane the last 3 years?! No pictures or grids, but yes to Words??! ahhh~Fuck you, kid!lol}

Yet…Here she was~ happily putting words ON the body…

And I am telling you…SOME Frickin HOW… I got it for the first time in my bleeping LIFE.

…possibly because I was in person and could See what she was feeling as she demonstrated what she meant. If that makes any sense.

It was wild to me. It was …Language. All this stuff comes down to understanding it’s all language, one way or another. These latter-day breakthroughs.

Heck, maybe if I’d Taken the bleeping dance classes IN high school more than just a handful of times I would’ve been able to take what Cornell was offering me to get into their fashion department. They hinged it on a semester re-doing math shit to make sure it made sense to me and it was like a ring of fire popped up between me and the insane fabrications I was going to be able to fuck with due to all the Nasa pies they’d had their bits in at the time.

I GOT what she meant. Even when it took me a minute to get it, my brain and my body both understood what we were trying to do …mathematically.

And the other thing is I can mimic movement on autopilot pretty easily. But the getting it? Paying attention? That’s different. I don’t lock in to mimic. It’s usually a zone out, if that makes any sense.

This was my first window into it in a bewilderingly comprehendible way.

But you know what else it could’ve been? Because what she was describing mathematically hit me like counterpoint being expressed across the surface Of the body, even though often she was talking about things moving in unison. The balances took what she may have never called counterpoint…but when I thought counterpoint & tried them I could do the things asked.

(Even as I write this, I feel Mr. P winging pointe shoes at my head from the other side of the veil for all this finally getting it shit that went down today…)

The funniest point was when Minime had to push grown assed me “carrying the two ” out the way as I was trying to make mathematical sense of something the teacher was saying at the end getting us to go diagonally across the floor, inner kid yowling “Itsa Skip!” lol and taking off manning the ship.

It was totally the wrong skip lolol but it was a skip in the end. and I could retcon it after the fact.

(Speaking of after the fact: Now that I think of it, there may have been another reason her describing made sense to me as counterpoint… At the end of class Wushu woman asked when else she taught at the school & she said she normally taught Jazz.)

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So…Real Talk. Why is this so important?

It’s that I was secretly terrified.

What?

Oh yeah.

Of What, you say?

Oh, of all kinds of things.

…that it wouldn’t be as fun in person as it had been two decades ago.

Or as restorative.

Or as fun as it’s been online deep diving, occasionally talking to myself like that lil coach dude in Rocky to not give up when I wasn’t getting it.

That the experience would be debilitating instead. Degenerative. Terror.

I think that’s what really freaked me out about the pain bloom of the week leading up to it.

The online zoom was tough because it was the mother freakin American Ballet Theatre and I just threw my ass into the fire of it, finding the inner zen not to spazz over the twenty years since the last so I could keep up. The hardness helped me intellectualize it, which created a buffer…that was a great assist. Afterwards…I could quietly pore over what I mucked up and find online help to shore it up.

It is important because…

It is…just a wholly different part of my head, and right now it is an as insular process as so much of my artistic life often is. It fits nicely.

Seriously, so much of my life is consciously set up to be solo. Because I love the quietness of it all. But this? It’s a manifestation of internal martial arts in a way for me. I have to have a conversation with myself about what I am being asked to do from the outside and hit it in real time, like Jeopardy.

Now dancing-dancing? there’s no discussion. This is fn Shiva stuff, stomping worlds out of existence and spiraling up new ones in the cosmic detritus of it. It’s just go- and the cohesion that comes out of that when others are involved is Not of this earth. When I’m dancing, you’ll find me in the pockets of motherfuckers levitating in pockets giving no fucks about anything but the bass and the beat- y’all disappear if you’re not in there with us. But a Ballet class… is a cosmic malasana for me. It’s a root down, a ” be here now, you f ureaking Angel!” It’s terrestrial time ON earth, all “now what now?” A joining in instead of unfurling for space for my own inner supernovas exploding-

the Angel in afterglow, a frickin’ rhapsody

Here…is here.

Which brings us back to the bigger why of now.

The true swear-off of the classes, the true “until” uttered all those years ago…was simple.

Not until I feel like I am fully home.

It wasn’t about LA per se.

It was that I knew something was going to happen to me here …once I got to basecamp sincerely in LA, all secret shackles against doing so tossed off and melted down once and for all. The doing was to be a thresholding, a piece of marathon tape breaking across my chest in the coolest way.

That’s why, in process of all of this I am not surprised that the whole qigong mode, publicly flare up at the top of the year led to me being ready and open to do this now. Because THAT brought me fully into my body for the first time possibly in my entire life.

It was hard in a way I can’t yet explain. Class.

But I loved it…In person.

The presence I must bring to it is firing the same chunk of brain that lights up when my fingers get something on the piano it hadn’t;t understood before, or at least alongside it.

…the aha moment of why kids should be thrown into all of this young is all up in that previous sentence, but I am sure it is as much of a boon to adults wanting to keep those synapses lighting up.

…the aching is trying to come back as I write.

But that’s okay.

I’m in.

I’m on the other side of having done it now, baby.

& we all know I’m already addicted to tiger balm so we’ll work it out.

It- in person- will only be done from time to time at first. In person.

As a gift.

Because it hit like one today, just like I’d hoped.

I feel the same way I used to feel going out to dance underground.

But it’s done. Maybe between the qigong and keeping to this, all of that underworld stuff will finally have its new form.

That’s all. For today.