Boston Ballerina by Laura Young

Author:Laura Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

14

Pas de Chat

Pas de chat. Origin: French. Cat’s step. In a pas de chat, the dancer springs off one foot and the other quickly follows, so that for a moment, at the height of the jump, both legs are tucked up underneath the dancer in the shape of diamond.

BECAUSE OF THE REHEARSAL, technical, and performance schedules that revolve around The Nutcracker, ballet dancers—and everyone else involved in the show of course—rarely join the multitudes who make annual pilgrimages to their family homes for Thanksgiving. For many years, Lefty and her husband David hosted an “orphans’ Thanksgiving” at their South End home for those of us who couldn’t travel for the holiday as we usually opened the run of Nutcracker the very next day. It was always a huge feast and one of the many times that cemented the bond among Lefty, Rose, and me—a bond that had loosened only enough to let our husbands in.

By now Tony and I had moved to Roslindale, a neighborhood of Boston south of the city proper. Tony, whose nickname was Tony the Cat, told one writer that “I like to nest; it is important to me to have a home,” and so we were renting a lovely two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment in a two-family house on one of the area’s main thoroughfares. Although noisy when the big trucks hit one of the inevitable New England potholes, our kitchen, bedroom, and back porch were on the far side so we were shielded from much of the noise. We had full access to the garden and garage and a full basement. Such luxury we enjoyed after a studio apartment in NYC and a one bedroom in the South End. With a park right across the street, our two dogs were ecstatic.

It’s fairly common for romantic relationships to develop within a ballet company, and the topic was frequently irresistible to reporters. Often, when Tony and I guested somewhere, the local newspapers there would make our marriage a highlight of a feature article about the upcoming performance. We’d also had our share of such stories appearing in the Boston-area publications too and had thus developed quite the repertoire of responses—some sweet, some tart, and some matter of fact—to what became familiar questions.

Sometimes the three couples—Tony and me, Lefty and David, and Rose and Al—were all featured in a story together. As the company’s production stage manager, Al was the only nondancer, but in one such Sunday Boston Globe article Rose explained how they were able to help with each other’s work. Al “may not be able to tell me the technical ballet things, but he’ll say whether things work on stage,” she said, while “we might be reviving a ballet we hadn’t done for a while and he’ll be going over the lighting cues and he’ll ask me what’s happening on stage” during a particular cue. One frequent theme in these features was the fact that both partners were working the same unusual hours. Tony once said something along

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