Authors: Gen LaGreca
“I asked you where got this driver’s license,” the clerk squawked.
She knew of a Motor Vehicles office in the same building as the courtroom that heard cases brought by the New York State Department of Child Welfare.
“I got it at the municipal building on West 28th Street.”
The tired entity that was the clerk returned the license. He didn’t seem to notice the relief filling the blue eyes almost to tears and the tension draining from the slim shoulders. He didn’t seem to notice that beneath layers of eye shadow were the wide eyes of a child.
“Where to?”
“San Francisco.”
“Round trip?”
“One way.”
When she’d felt driven to leave New York’s stifling depot of foster care, San Francisco had become her destination. She knew of a great school for ballet there called the Benoir Academy.
Gracefully, she lowered her head to gather her cash, wondering if anyone had reported her missing or was looking for her. Apparently no one had or was. She paid the clerk and took her ticket.
Walking to her gate, she didn’t hear the sterile music piped through the loudspeaker. Instead, she hummed a joyous melody from the first ballet she had ever seen, at age six, sitting with a group of vagabond children. Their unsupervised playground was Manhattan, except when they were gathered, washed, and fed by the nuns of St. Jude’s, a parish in her neighborhood. Their ballet tickets were a gift from an anonymous church benefactor. Perhaps because many of the youngsters had entered the world trembling from one addiction or another or routinely visited relatives in jail or witnessed more violence in real time than on any movie screen, the supreme innocence of the ballet provoked in them only jeers.
But the little girl with the long blond hair never noticed their snickering as she sat hypnotized by the magic of the stage. She saw an enchanted forest of tall trees cut by a watercolor meadow of pastel pink and powder blue flowers. A lovely princess danced with a young prince in an unimaginable world of beauty and goodness.
After that day, the chaotic events of her life became simple. The ballet reduced all choices of true or false, right or wrong, life or death to one golden rule: To dance was good; not to dance was bad.
Her first ballet slippers were the child’s bounty after weeks of rummaging through the trash outside Madame Maximova’s School of Ballet, where the affluent children of a nearby neighborhood took classes. Worn and discarded by a young student, the slippers got a second chance at life—and gave one to the future Nicole Hudson. They became the one absolute in her otherwise uncertain world.
The slippers were with her the day her mother—never quite stable or sober—told her, “Get your things together,” then left her on the steps of St. Jude’s Parish. “Tell the sisters I’ll be back for you soon,” said the drawn figure whose unkempt hair and dark-ringed eyes added a troubled decade to her twenty-five years. The child of eight carrying a shopping bag of clothing stared at her mother blankly. “And don’t be a pest and ask a lot of questions, Cathleen. Do what they say, you hear?”
Her mother never did come back, so the ballet slippers assumed the role of surrogate. They were the child’s solid footing through a revolving door of foster families. When she was frightened, their soles whispered of a better life. When she cried, their cloth wiped her tears. The slippers were with her in the courtroom at age ten when she was pronounced abandoned and eligible for adoption. And the shoes were with her when she peeked at a paper in her file on a caseworker’s desk that declared she was “maladjusted” and “unadoptable.”
The slippers fit her feet in the early years when she danced on her first makeshift stage, the cramped living room of the tenement where she lived with her mother. To clear a space for her future, the child would push aside the clutter from her mother’s disheveled life—the tattered armchair hauled there from a pawnshop, the chipped-veneer coffee table, the pages from a two-day-old tabloid strewn around the room, the soiled plates from the previous night’s supper eaten before the television set, and an array of empty beer cans. Under a rust-colored water ring that stained the white ceiling like an old wound, the little princess would dance. Her mother, who had not yet decided what to do with her own life, could not understand how the child just knew what she herself would do with hers.
The girl became a persistent, uninvited presence at Madame Maximova’s, searching for chores to do—sweeping floors, removing trash, cleaning locker rooms. The teachers objected at first to her unsolicited labors, chasing her home. But like a pesky squirrel hunting for food in its indomitable struggle for survival, the child kept returning. Eventually, the staff grew accustomed to her after-school assistance. Thus, she was allowed to take classes for free. Through the years, she continued to do chores—running the reception desk, enrolling students, issuing bills—without ever asking for money or receiving any. She just took the classes she wished for free, and no one stopped her.
When she learned her first steps, the slippers were on her feet. They arabesqued and pirouetted—and fell—with her. They and their successors covered frequently tired, sometimes blistered, but always nimble feet. They sat idle for periods in which she was sent to the dreaded suburbs, to foster families that comprehended nothing of the divine world of Madame Maximova’s, which she missed desperately. Hence, she would run away to the shelter at St. Jude’s and to her beloved classes. She returned to the sweet torture of exercises repeated hundreds of times until swollen, bleeding feet no longer could hold her. She took her lumps proudly, for pain was not a valid reason to stop. Then she would be retrieved by social workers who thought they knew best.
But that was in the past, when others were in charge. Now there would be
no
interruption of her training, she resolved, clutching her bus ticket, hoping it was not too late.
A toneless voice over the loudspeaker announced the most thrilling news of her life: “Gate sixteen to San Francisco now boarding.”
Suppressing the wild cry of laughter swelling in her throat, she climbed the narrow steps into the musty vehicle, then found a seat. As the skyscrapers of Manhattan faded to a jagged gray backdrop in the rear window of the bus, she counted her money. Fifty dollars left. She smiled, unworried. She laid her head back and closed her eyes on the serene vision of fairies dancing in an enchanted forest where
she
was the princess. That day, an indifferent world barely noticed the last of Cathleen Hughes, homeless child of thirteen, and the first of Nicole Hudson, woman of eighteen.
*
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*
*
*
On a July afternoon ten years later, the Taylor Theater of Broadway carried a hushed audience back to the dawn of mankind. A packed house formed a crescent of rows around the legendary stage. The chandeliers’ starlike clusters of light slowly faded to black on the gilded ceiling of the historic building. With the luxurious rustle of soft velvet, the massive red curtain rose on a ballet that had become a Broadway sensation:
Triumph
.
The stage was divided into two opposite realms. On the left stood a white Doric temple rising from a grassy knoll into a slate blue night sky. Torchlights flanking the entrance cast a brilliant golden light over the scene. Ballerinas in sheer pastel gowns danced gaily to a pastorale. Male dancers joined them, clad in princely white tunics with full, flowing sleeves fastened tight at the wrist. The playbill described the realm as “an untroubled world of warmth, light, and beauty—Olympus, the home of the mythological Greek gods.”
On the right, a dusty yellow stretch of barren field with shiny patches of frost faded into a charcoal sky. A straw hut stood swaying like an injured soldier. Icicles hung in slippery spikes from the roof. Missing from this world were the lively torches of Olympus, and with them the life-giving warmth, light, and gaiety of that world. Also absent were female figures to soften the stark landscape. Men in brown tunics shivered in the cold, dancing dispiritedly to a somber theme. They laid an animal carcass on a wooden altar, then, turning to the deities of Olympus, groveled on their knees, bowing their heads and offering their sacrifice. The playbill described this scene as “the first mortals on Earth in the Greek legend of man’s creation.”
On Olympus, an exciting male dancer with the sinewy body of youth and the tangled beard of old age portrayed the greatest of the gods, Zeus. He carried a giant torch whose flame streaked behind him with every leap. In a daring move, another male dancer, one with the beauty of a god and the anguish of a man, seized Zeus’s torch. Before the indignant Zeus could stop him, the young rebel blazed to the Earth like a fiery comet. Flames raged across that bleak land, brightening the murky sky and melting the frost. Zeus’s divine torch brought warmth, light, and a wondrous, new power to the men of Earth. Music of deliverance resounded as they rose from their knees and danced jubilantly around the fire. They removed the sacrificial animal from the altar, cooked the meat over their first hearth, and consumed it themselves. The Olympians looked on, aghast at their irreverence. The playbill announced: “Prometheus steals fire from the gods and brings it to man.”
Enraged, Zeus hurled thunderbolts at Earth. The men in brown tunics, led by Prometheus in white, danced fearlessly against the piercing wind and rain of the ensuing storm. Imbued with a new courage, they withstood the tempest. Then, through theatrical magic, the men’s brown tunics turned a shimmering white, resembling those of the deities in Olympus. Endowed with Prometheus’s gift of fire, the men became godlike.
Zeus ordered his servants, Force and Violence, to seize Prometheus. The two nimble dancers tied him to a rock on a lonely Earth cliff. The curtain fell on the fiery figure of Zeus, dancing violently, vowing his revenge on mankind.
The next act opened on a rustic riverbed on Olympus. A lovely maiden appeared, dressed not in a gown but in a transparent hint of one that barely covered her shapely figure, evident underneath a skin-toned leotard. Flowing streams of lustrous blond hair bordered the delicate landscape of her face. She danced around Olympus with the weightless gaiety of a kitten. This was the being whom Zeus had created as his curse on man: the first mortal woman, Pandora.
Apollo, the god of the sun, placed a wreath on Pandora’s head, bestowing the gift of curiosity. Zeus gave her a giant golden box, its lid fastened with a red ribbon, and told her to take it on a journey to Earth. The maiden attempted to lift the lid. Apollo urgently pulled her away, warning her never to open the box. Pandora did not seem to hear the sun god’s admonishment but danced unmindfully around the chest like a child with a new toy.
On reaching Earth, she discovered the chained Prometheus on a cliff. They stared at each other with a dangerous excitement that overstepped the bounds of classical ballet. Pandora struggled to release the ropes that held the handsome young god but to no avail. As if emboldened by the ties that restrained his response, her own desire awakened. She danced before him with the grace of a ballerina and with a passion too physical for the fragile dance form, yet too spiritual for any other. She caressed his face daintily, then brushed her arms across his chest more ardently. With a flurry of staccato steps, she tiptoed away, frightened by her boldness. Then she again drew closer, pulled back by his arresting presence. The scene ended with Pandora’s mouth raised to Prometheus for her first daring kiss. The audience did what it had done for eight months:
“Brava! Brava!”
The men of Earth gazed in amazement at Pandora, the first woman they had ever seen, and at her gift, the golden box. Endowed with a lively curiosity from Apollo, she pirouetted around the large chest, leaped over it, danced on it—and finally untied the ribbon. As the kettledrum roared, Pandora opened the box.
Monstrous creatures in grotesque masks and sleek bodysuits jumped out of the chest. The men of Earth recoiled in fear. Plagues of every sort escaped, casting colossal shadows against the blue backdrop. Pestilence, Misery, Worry, and Misfortune flew past the horrified Pandora to infest the Earth. Prometheus watched helplessly from the cliff. The men of Earth groveled once again, begging the gods’ forgiveness for their arrogance. As act two ended, Zeus howled with laughter at the doomed human race.
In the final act, the inquisitive Pandora discovered a lone object at the bottom of the box, a female dancer in a pink gown—Hope. Like a flower bending over in the wind to pollinate another, Hope reached out to Pandora and placed a feather boa around her shoulders. The gift of Hope sparked Pandora with a new courage. She seized Zeus’s torch and burned through the ropes binding Prometheus. In a fury of flying arms and nimble feet, the two of them chased the woes back into the box and shut the lid for good.
The playbill explained: “In the actual Greek myth, Prometheus remains chained to the rock and the miseries plague the Earth forever, demonstrating Zeus’s mastery over mankind. However, in this audacious rewriting of the ancient legend, Prometheus and Pandora, armed with fire and hope, chase the woes back into the box and save the human race.”
Warmth and light again bathed the Earth. A corps of ballerinas joined the men of Earth in a great celebration. Pandora and Prometheus took center stage for the final pas de deux.
The playbill concluded: “Man discovers woman and enters an age of innocence, goodness, and joy.”
The creation of Pandora was also the making of the twenty-three-year-old playing the role, who, after a decade of poverty and struggle, exploded on a dance world that finally took notice: Nicole Hudson.