Up to This Pointe by Jennifer Longo

Author:Jennifer Longo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2016-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

THE NEW PLAN

1. Audition and be offered a contract at one or more companies, which I will have to

2. Turn down when I accept my company position at the San Francisco Ballet, which will

3. Prove Simone and Kate (and the horrible cancerous doubt I’ve let them plant in my own heart) wrong.

In a studio at SF State, I record an audition tape and send it to forty-three companies in as many cities, all currently accepting applicants. And I wait in hallways crammed with crowds of short-torsoed, long-legged dancers with perfect feet, paper number pinned to my chest. At the first audition, I don’t even make the first cut. Barre exercises and I’m out. At the second, I don’t even get to touch the barre. I am cut from the lineup.

The final two auditions happen on the same Saturday, which involves intricate public transportation transfer tickets, sprinting from one station to another, and incredibly fortunate timing, but I manage to arrive in plenty of time to be cut in the first round from Dance Theatre of Berkeley and then, two hours later, from a nonprofit dance cooperative in Oakland.

I sleep on the train back to San Francisco, wake up past my stop, and walk three miles home along busy Nineteenth Avenue. Cars and trucks barrel past, exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke, ambulance sirens and police cars and blaring horns and clanging Muni cars, and tweekers and homeless guys, and I cannot wait to tell this story—the failed auditions, Simone and Kate, and how I never let them get me down; how, instead, the whole mess lit a fire in me. I am a Scott. How that fire carried me to the San Francisco audition, where the director saw what no one else seemed to. How every dancer’s path to their destiny is unique and never easy, but if you truly know yourself, believe in the gift you were born with and meant to spend your life using to make art that helps the world be more beautiful, and if you work hard your entire life for this one, single dream you have and ever will have, then nothing, no one, can stop a person from achieving this dream; it is impossible that it will not come to pass.

Here I am, I will insist. I am proof.

Aut moriere percipietis conantur.

- - -

I’m up at five the morning after my walk of shame, after my final failed fire-lighting audition. Only a few days before Christmas, today is my Sunday to work at the bakery. Mom is asleep; Luke and Dad were up and gone before me. I stretch my poor legs, sore from the miles of pavement walking. Yuan Yuan Tan and Robert Falcon Scott stare down at me from the ceiling. It’s up to you, they say.

Got it.

An hour later, I’m showered, dressed, and pushing glass doors open into the warm, sweet yeasty air of our Fog City Bakery.

The bells above the door ring bright, evergreen and holly berries everywhere, mistletoe and twinkle lights.

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