Out on a Leash by Shirley MacLaine

Author:Shirley MacLaine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

Shirley

A dark cloud of concern comes over me because I really don’t want to go to Ireland and leave Terry. It’s beginning to obsess me. Is making a good movie my top priority? That was my modus operandi most of my life. What I really should be doing is making a movie about what I’m learning. But what would be the plot? Where would the dramatic tension come from? Not many people watched The Witches of Salem, which I thought revealed an important aspect of where we Americans came from spiritually—our history of seeing the Devil in other people.

The sun comes out, and then slips behind a bank of dark clouds. In the distance we hear the low roll of thunder. The weather here is moody, just like me. Terry and I are walking the land and I’m thinking that being a “senior citizen” has its advantages and disadvantages. I know that growing old is not for sissies, and hiking works much the same way, but I’m feeling that the wisdom I’ve accumulated and the sense of a bit more peace within me was well worth the wait. Still, I want more. I’m glad that I will never be young again, at least not this time around. I’m more interested in a partnership with my body now, not the kind of adversarial relationship I had with it when I was young and a dancer.

Traveling in Argentina once, I saw an advertisement for cheap tickets to a vaudeville show with the great Maya Plisetskaya on the bill. I couldn’t believe it was the Maya Plisetskaya, one of the finest ballerinas of all time, dancing at her age—middle sixties—and for a pittance. I had seen her perform at the Bolshoi in Russia on many occasions, and when the Bolshoi started coming to the States I got to know her well. During the Cold War I had a party for her and the Bolshoi at my home. It was a time when Americans presumed that wholesale repression existed throughout Soviet society, but even with the KGB in attendance there was a degree of uninhibited sensual behavior most Americans wouldn’t have indulged in, even in private. At two in the morning I poured Galliano for the troupe of Russian dancers and they slowly dispersed throughout the grounds, disappearing behind flowering bushes and trees, doing, I suppose, what dancers all over the world do with enough Galliano in their systems. Even some KGB officers found their way into that sylvan wood, taking an altogether different kind of attendance!

Curious, I bought a ticket to the show in Argentina. Would Maya Plisetskaya really dance again? She came out in the middle of the show dressed in her famous swan costume. She had set the standard for this role, and at sixty-five she could still perform the pas de bourrées and the elegantly disintegrating gestures of the dying swan. Still, I couldn’t help thinking how humiliating it was that Plisetskaya had to dance on a vaudeville stage in South America to make ends meet.

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