DO YOU REMEMBER?<\/p>\n
During the Covid quarantine in 2020, when I was looking for\u00a0activities to fill up my time, I began organizing my linen closet. I opened and\u00a0refolded pillowcases, sheets and towels, matching them by color, when I reached\u00a0into the back of a shelf and came out with a pair of pink pointe shoes, their\u00a0satin ribbons neatly wrapped around and tucked into each other. I unwrapped the\u00a0ribbons and let them dangle. I brought the shoes up to my nose and inhaled the
lingering scents of glue and the sticky rosin that dancers smash into a powder\u00a0with the squared off toes so we wouldn\u2019t \u00a0slip. Images sparked my memory of a\u00a0hundred different rehearsal halls and stages all over the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I carried the shoes upstairs, put them on my desk where I\u00a0could see them, marveled at the other worldly aura they suggested and I sat down\u00a0at my computer. My mind filled with pictures and my hands started flying across\u00a0the keyboard. I was in Monte Carlo, standing on a stage, looking out at an\u00a0empty theater on the ground floor of the Casino. I was 17, a new member of the\u00a0Harkness Ballet company and we had just arrived in France for a year long\u00a0residency sponsored by Princess Grace. If that wasn\u2019t magical enough, I was
standing in the very theater where they had filmed the movie, \u201cThe Red Shoes\u201d\u00a0in 1948, a year before I was born. As a child, I’d watched it over and over, it\u00a0had provided inspiration for my ballet career, a backdrop for the rigorous\u00a0training that had gotten me to Monaco, the famed principality on the northern\u00a0coast of the French Riviera.<\/p>\n
I remembered being all alone, gazing out at the ornate\u00a0theater, the golden sconces, the velvet curtains, the hand painted ceiling and the
tear drop chandeliers as I cried my own teardrops. I had done it. My dream had\u00a0come true. Now, decades later as I stared at the pointe shoes on my desk, I\u00a0remembered details of my time in Monte Carlo: croissants and caf\u00e9 au lait.\u00a0Rudolph Nureyev strutting across the white sand beach in a purple bikini with\u00a0purple suspenders. The patisseries where I rewarded myself with delectable\u00a0French pastries after a ten hour day of rehearsals. Sidewalk carts that offered
fresh escargots and oysters. \u201cThe Alcazar,\u201d a building where we took class and\u00a0rehearsed six days a week. The disco called the \u201cTick Tock,\u201d (the title way\u00a0before its time), the place where we went during the weekend to dance wildly and\u00a0let off steam. The images in my mind were moving so much faster than my\u00a0fingers, I could barely get the words on the page and when I looked up, two\u00a0hours had gone by.<\/p>\n
One of the rewards of writing is losing time and watching\u00a0old memories rise up and come alive, and spark other memories if we take a moment\u00a0and let them surface. These memories aren’t all good or all bad. They are the ingredients,\u00a0sweet and sour, that make up a life, that describe trials and victories, gains\u00a0and losses that define us as whole human beings. In my case, along with the
stunning remembrances of traveling, performing and my first love, were bouts of\u00a0acute loneliness that began when I left home at fourteen to pursue career in\u00a0ballet. As I kept putting words on the page, it surprised me to learn that my loneliness\u00a0didn\u2019t feel like emptiness. Rather, it was a looming presence with heft and\u00a0substance. the weight of hopelessness, a murmur in my ear that if I were dead\u00a0and gone, no one would notice or care.<\/p>\n
But the gift of writing about the past is that we can\u00a0separate the truth from the stories we tell ourselves. We can heal our history\u00a0so we don’t have to relive the pain and suffering. I often wonder how we
survived our childhoods, but I keep in mind that remembering is not suffering. Rather\u00a0it\u2019s investigating what we felt and what we learned so we can free ourselves of\u00a0the mistakes and confusions that are clogging up our minds and hearts. We can\u00a0get rid of the events and hold onto the lessons. We can celebrate the fact that\u00a0we made it through, that we are still here and every day we have a chance to
give new meaning to our lives in a way that makes us feel worthy and hopeful.<\/p>\n
Two years after I found the pointe shoes on that shelf, I\u00a0draped them over a several large crystals on my living room floor and gazed at
them for a while. I remembered sleeping with my first pair of pointe shoes and\u00a0their beauty never diminished, even with the pain of bleeding blisters and\u00a0aching muscles. I remember the difficulty but I also remember that they made me\u00a0feel like I was light as a feather, like I could defy gravity and fly. I had a\u00a0smile on my face as I logged onto Google and opened a web site called,\u00a0\u201cMemories in Bronze.\u201d I decided to have someone dip my shoes into bronze so\u00a0their memory would live forever, a reminder of both the pain and the glory that
made up the magic of my career, my dream that came true and will remain with me\u00a0as long as I am here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DO YOU REMEMBER? During the Covid quarantine in 2020, when I was looking for\u00a0activities to fill up my time, I began organizing my linen closet. I opened and\u00a0refolded pillowcases, sheets and towels, matching them by color, when I reached\u00a0into the back of a shelf and came out with a pair of pink pointe shoes, their\u00a0satin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2204,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2203\/revisions\/2204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}