Showbiz!

Inside my mother's timid, anxious, passive-aggressive heart, there is a fierce flamenco dancer yearning to get out. Her name is Juanita, and she can play the castanets and give you the evil eye like nobody's business. I know this because she has told us many times of her secret passion, and I think it's the reason that she made all her daughters take dance lessons as children. Wherever it came from, perhaps a medieval ancestor who joined a traveling theatre troupe, we have always had a streak of ham in our family which kept us from sinking into a permanent, self-absorbed, book-reading, day-dreaming torpor. As children it started innocently enough with singing Christmas carols to our parents on Christmas Eve. The adoration and forced attention inspired us to start writing short holiday themed skits, and as Mom kept having children, we were slowly building a ready-made cast. As we got older the traditional themes went out the window. Steph became the resident playwright and was turning out masterpieces like 'Christmas Aboard the Starship Enterprise', giving herself the plum roles, of course. (rehearsals were the usual chaos of sibling squabbling and attention-deficit-disorder).She created two very surreal projects, one was an opera of Don Giovanni, where we were forced to sing our lines, and the ultimate in minimalism, a finger puppet rendition of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' called 'Christmas at George and Martha's'.
Meanwhile we continued to perform in annual dance studio recitals. My once-lanky coltish body hit puberty and suddenly I appeared onstage looking as if someone had encased a sack of potatoes in gold sequins. In my illustrious dance career I had run the gamut from tap-dancing cowboy to bored-yet-stoic hip-heavy ballerina with big feet. I wasn't the next Pavlova but I gamely struggled on. It wouldn't be until college that I discovered an art form for high-functioning nerds like me: it was called Modern Dance. We got to wear black all the time and dance barefoot. Perfect.
All of which, yet I had not seen the pattern, was slowly preparing me for a career I accidentally stumbled into back in 1983, like a drunk wandering into a church service:

teaching high school. Because the last thing I ever wanted to do was stand in front of a roomful of bored, critical, dismissive teenagers and actually talk to them. I was still having flashbacks to my own time in the trenches as Ally Sheedy's character in The Breakfast Club. Still, I would be teaching dance (and putting on shows!) and as the old showbiz maxim goes: "never let them see you sweat". So every morning, like Roy Scheider as Bob Fosse in "All That Jazz", minus the cigarette dangling from his lips, I would look at myself in the mirror and think "It's showtime, folks!"