Dumb!

I pulled a muscle in my right calf last night. :-(

Jason was saying he could jump really high without bending his knees—if he's in the swimming pool. This was in reference to a conversation/contest we had a few weeks ago, when he asked if I could jump without bending my knees at all. It just so happens that I am very good at jumping without bending my knees, having learned it in ballet class when I was about 13. What you do is pull up all your muscles tight to your center—tighten the back and tummy, squeeze the butt cheeks, pull up the legs—and then you just point your feet hard. So, in slow motion, you would rise up on the balls of your feet, and then keep going, pushing off with your toes. That last little push from your toes propels you into the air, and you can just bounce up off the ground, doing it over and over again—like a bouncy ball.

So last night I told Jason it was cheating to do it in the swimming pool. Then Lindsey started jumping, but she was bending her knees slightly. So I stood up to show them how it's really done. I got in six or seven jumps, but then I think I shifted positions too fast—my weight wasn't centered right. And as I went up I felt a terrible "POP"—like a violin string breaking—in the back of my leg. Pulled the muscle for sure. Bruce got me up to bed, and got the leg propped up and put it on ice. I was very sad; not just because it hurts—and it does, a lot!—but because that was a really dumb way to injure myself.

Since then I haven't been able to walk properly. In fact, this morning it is hurting all the way up my hamstrings, and my toes feel tingly—which is really annoying! I can't straighten the leg, or flex the muscle. I have a wonderful limp—and to get around I have to keep my leg slightly bent and keep up on my toes, supporting myself heavily on countertops, walls, furniture . . .

Well I looked online. Rest, ice, compression and elevation for at least the next two weeks, and then I can start working at being as good as new. What a drag!

Dumb!

You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile

One day when I was a senior in highschool, during my AP Music class, I got a call from the office. There was an emergency and my sister needed me to call her.

This was the problem: Melanie worked for LeAnn at the dance studio teaching the littlest kids, and she had to choreograph a dance for one of her classes (about 8 years old). The song LeAnn wanted her to use was You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile; they'd even picked out the costumes they wanted to use. The emergency? LeAnn wanted Melanie to show her the choreography by that evening; Melanie had gotten a lot of the dance but was stuck in a few parts, so she wanted my help. I didn't have any trouble getting checked out of school, so Melanie picked me up and we worked it out.

The way these little-kid song and dance routines work is usually like this: There's some music that's sung, so you try to do actions that match the words but still look like dancing. Then there's a middle, instrumental section that, in this case, would be tap-dancing; and then there's an end bit where the song is sung again. So we came up with a really cute routine for the singing parts; the tapping stuff would be easy to fill in later.

That night, after the regular classes were done, Melanie and I did our dance for LeAnn. She loved it. "This is too cute for little kids to wreck it!" LeAnn said. She wanted to do it herself, with Melanie and me. She chose a different song and choreographed a dance for Melanie's class herself, so that we could do Never Fully Dressed.

Since Melanie and I were both at the studio every night, we would just stay after classes for about half an hour and work on our dance with LeAnn. Together we choreographed the non-singing part, and figured out how to take our bows at the end. It was fun—and it was way cute! (Actually, I wish I had a video of it to post for you.) Anyway, it was a BIG secret; nobody else in the studio knew we were doing it. Even at the dress rehearsal we waited until everyone else had gone home before we practiced it on the stage. LeAnn went so far as to make up silly names for us to put on the programs: Tillie Thun daThize, Tara Ra-Boom-Deay, and Boris L. TaDeth; that way no one would know ahead of time who was doing this dance. (Although I suspect that when we actually performed it people figured out who we were. LeAnn would have been an obvious guess, Melanie was eight months pregnant, and I was very well-known at the studio too.)

I cannot possibly describe in words the amazing feeling of being on the stage, and the feeling of everyone loving you in that moment; it is like magic! The moment we entered the stage we were a big success; people were laughing, and the applause at the end was terrific. Magic! That was the most fun dance I've ever done!

LeAnn, Melanie and Me

I love this picture; it always makes me smile—so I guess I am always fully dressed when I look at it. ;-)

The Piano and Me

Some of my favorite memories about myself are connected with music. In fact they are of me playing the piano, specifically. So I’ll tell you about them:

The first one was when I was about 13 years old. I was taking piano lessons from a lady named Annette. I was a pretty good pianist by then—I knew that I could play anything I wanted to. (I don't know that quite so much now.) So in addition to my regular piano lesson I decided I would learn the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata as a surprise for my teacher. I had ulterior motives: I wanted her to teach me the second and third movements. Anyway, I worked on it for quite a while, learning the notes and fingering; but more importantly, deciding exactly how I wanted the dynamics to sound—where it should be louder or softer, what notes to emphasize, etc. Finally I was happy with it; after my next piano lesson I told Annette that I had a piece for her to listen to. I played it as I’d practiced and she sat very quietly and still through the whole piece. After I finished she was quiet a bit longer, then she said softly, “That was perfect.”

Wow! What a great moment.

When I was 14 years old I got a job as a ballet pianist at a dance studio. (As a side note, my first paycheck was about $82. Pretty exciting for a 14-year-old!) I also took dance lessons there; so between my piano skills and my knowledge of ballet I think I did a very good job. I worked there until I graduated from high school.

Well, occasionally LeAnn (the teacher) would have “stretch days” where she had her students do a lot of stretching and not much of anything else. A lot of us really liked stretch days, but the one exercise most of the students hated was doing the splits. So when it was time to do the splits LeAnn would always ask me to play a funeral dirge—just a slow piece of music appropriate for stretching to. One day I decided that, for a joke, I would learn a real funeral dirge to play the next time she asked for one. Of course it had to be very recognizable as a funeral piece, so I chose Chopin’s Marche Funèbre, Op. 35 (the one they use in cartoons a lot). It took me a few weeks to work it up, and by the time I was ready LeAnn went through a non-stretching spell, so I had to bide my time for a while.

Finally, one day she instructed the students to do the splits; she turned to me and said, “Loralee, a funeral dirge.” I was ready. The class was standing in fifth position, ready to go; LeAnn set the tempo, “Port de bras, one; two...” And I began playing the funeral march. I hadn’t even finished the first measure when LeAnn started laughing—I mean really laughing; and the more I played the more she laughed. She laughed so hard that the little girls who were on the floor in the splits started laughing too. She laughed so hard that she had to go sit down on her chair at the front of the class; and then she laughed so hard that she fell off the chair! Even better was when she had the next class do the same exercise and I played the same piece. The result was almost the same—except that this time she didn’t fall off of her chair. My joke was a tremendous success! And I still laugh when I think of it!

Another story:

In September of 1985, soon after I graduated from high school, I performed a solo piano recital. My teacher, Cheryl, suggested that I should do one and so we spent most of the year preparing for it. (I don't know why I agreed to do it; I always froze up when I played in recitals.) Anyway, I learned and memorized four pieces of music: part of a suite by Handel (five short pieces); Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique, Op. 1; Polichinelle by Rachmaninoff, and the Overture to Guarany by Carlos Gomes, a Brasilian composer (that one I learned for my mom). I practiced these pieces for at least three hours a day; I could play any of them flawlessly. I loved playing and I'd frequently stop at any place there was a piano—the mall, the church, friends' houses, etc, and play one or more of my songs—all from memory and all perfectly. Unfortunately in our preparations Cheryl and I didn’t factor in nerves. I could play all day knowing that people just happened to be able to hear me; but to have an audience there just specifically to listen to me was another story. So the actual recital didn’t go as well as we'd hoped it would.

I was nervous to begin with, and then a short way into the first piece I made a mistake. So I got even more nervous and things just snowballed from there; I made mistake after mistake and even forgot small passages. The audience (mostly family and friends) loved it anyway and told me how great it was. I thought they were just being very nice to me. We had tape-recorded the recital, but I didn’t want to hear all my horrendous mistakes, and just put the tape away. It wasn’t until about a year later that I actually listened to that recital. And you know, it wasn’t really so bad—in fact, it was really good! I definitely did not play as well as I could have, but it wasn’t nearly as horrible as I had thought either.

Anyway I was in my mom’s house listening to that tape on a summer day when my brother Gregory came over. He heard the music through the window as he came up to the house and he called to me, “Don’t you wish you played that well?” I was surprised! I told him that it was me playing and he said, “Oh, sure!” All right; OK, I was pretty naïve. I really believed that he didn't realize that it was a tape of me playing the piano. Looking back, I’m pretty sure he did know; but it was still a nice compliment.

Well, I have one more really good piano story to tell, but this is already a really long blog so you'll just have to wait in breathless anticipation until I tell it to you. I'm sure you are on the edge of your seats, but you will just have to wait!

Does this little girl look fat?

As an adult I can look at this little eleven-year-old girl and say that she is definitely not fat. In fact, if one of my kids looked like that and thought she was fat I would be really sad and very worried about her. But, oh! My memories and feelings say, "Yeah, there's a little too much tummy there."

I was 10 years old. I had started taking ballet and I loved, loved, loved it; I was going to be a ballerina. My teacher, who had danced with Ballet West herself, was excellent. But she frequently told us how tall and how light and how thin you had to be if you ever wanted to be in a ballet company. I had been taking dance from her for two months; it was early in October, it was a Tuesday, it was around 5:45 p.m, and I was standing in the northwest corner of the room. Our teacher was telling us about how tall you had to be--something she acknowledged you had no control over--but she also said that you had to very thin, and if you were serious you would work on that. She also said that some of us would be too heavy to be in Ballet West.

And I knew she meant me.

I looked around the room at the other girls and thought, "Well, some of them are bigger than me." But I knew she was talking right to me.

OK. Looking back, I'm sure she wasn't singling me out at all. But I was 10 years old. Then, outside of class the teacher's mother would regale us with stories of her daughter's time in the ballet company. One of her favorite stories: the director put all the ballerinas on a diet, except for my teacher, because she was already so thin. I just knew I had to lose weight if I really ever wanted to be a dancer.

On top of that my family was very body-conscious; Mom frequently commented about people who were "fat." And, of course our society perpetuates this all over the place. In eighth grade, my friends complained about how heavy they were--100 pounds. I weighed about 10 pounds more than any of them. You know, my muscles--especially legs and butt--were rock-hard. I took dance classes eight hours a week, plus the practicing at school (plus I was young and active anyway). But I didn't think of that; only that I was heavier than my friends who all thought they were too fat. It's a hard thing to grow up in a time and place where so much emphasis is placed on how good you look, and where the "beautiful people" are brought so much into the forefront.

By the time I was 13 I had put myself on a perma-diet. When I first heard of anorexia and bulimia I thought those were really good ideas for losing weight. Fortunately I had a good--all right, terrific--self-esteem and I never had those problems. But I did stop eating breakfast and lunch. I might have a cup of milk in the morning, a small bowl of cereal if I was really hungry. I skipped lunch at school; instead I took my dance shoes with me and danced through the lunch period. After school I might have a glass of milk again; a half peanut butter sandwich if I was really hungry. Then I went to dance lessons for the evening; I was there not only for my own classes, but waited for my sisters' classes too. By the time I was 14 I was the pianist for all the ballet classes I didn't actually dance in. So I didn't usually get home again until 9:30 or 10:00. Then I did eat a good meal--and down a lot of milk (at least I wasn't getting a calcium deficiency).

Sometimes I wondered...I didn't think I looked too bad, even if I could "pinch an inch." But I knew that I wouldn't--couldn't ever be a ballerina; I would lose one of the great loves of my life if I didn't lose some weight.

When I was 16 I took a ballet class at the University of Utah two evenings a week. I had to audition for the class (bad news--I'm terrible at auditions; nerves) and ended up in the adult class instead of the serious, young ballerina class. Once I was there and my new teacher got to know me and see me dance, she wondered why I wasn't put into a different class; it must be my weight, she said. In December of that year I had to have jaw surgery (orthodontics) and my mouth was wired shut for two months--liquid diet (UGH! I still hate strawberry Quik!). I dropped 10 pounds in the first week but I was so hungry! I skipped school and dance through all of December. In January, when I returned, my University dance teacher said I looked just perfect. And I thought, "Great. If I never eat again I will be thin enough."

The very instant my mouth wires were cut, I gained the ten pounds right back.

This is me at my surprise birthday party. I was 17 and I thought I was 20 lbs. too heavy. I see this picture now and wonder, "What was I thinking?!"

So, for my entire life--since I was ten years old--I've thought I had to lose anywhere from ten to 20 pounds. A few days ago I was going through pictures that my mom had stored away and I found that surprise-party picture. I was in shock!! I looked at myself and said out loud, "Wow! I was hot!" How could I possibly see the girl in that picture and think she needs to lose weight?!

Now I'm married, I'm older, I have eight kids; I've gained some weight. Even though I'm softer now, I think I look OK--except for the mom pouch that doesn't seem to ever go away. Well, and the thighs. Sometimes I look at myself and think I look really good. Sometimes I look at myself and I see "fat." I have mostly come to terms with my body; over all I like myself (self-esteem is still not a problem). But old habits and ways of thinking die so hard! I can't help feeling I'd like to weigh quite a bit less. I tell myself that numbers on the scale don't mean anything, but I don't always entirely believe it.

A couple months ago I was in the temple. I looked around and saw people of all body-types; tall, short, some very heavy, some very thin, and all of them dressed in white. All equal. I had this freeing thought that it really doesn't matter what I weigh; I don't have to lose weight. That lasted about a week.

Soon after that, I had a physical; my doctor told me that my pinched nerve trouble would probably go away if I lost a little weight. He brought out a chart that said a woman my age and height should weigh between 113 and 142. He felt my wrist and said I had a larger bone structure and that the mid 130's would be good for me. Not exactly what I wanted to hear. But in a way it was a relief, as if I now had a good excuse to obsess about my weight. Is this long-time arch-enemy--the need to lose weight--also my friend? A security blanket? A self-identity thing? Hmmm. But if I did lose 30 pounds would I be satisfied? Or would I still look in the mirror and think I need to lose a little more?

And 20 years from now will I see pictures of myself and wonder, "What was I thinking?!"