My sister lives somewhere over there, a good distance far off, and she and I do not overspend our time keeping the relationship fresh.
Petunia (not her real name) lives alone with a 17-year old cat, and a few weeks ago she purchased her first computer ever, a laptop she thought would help her learn tap dance routines. She is in her 80th year and neither computers nor tap dancing have played a part in the previous 79.
She is not by inclination bold and filled with determination to live life to its fullest climbing every mountain, swimming every sea and learning Esperanto. Bucket list? She doesn’t own a bucket let alone a list. But she’s always had an independent streak and a physical toughness that belies her age.
Mostly Petunia’s been quiet: She went through high school and college as anonymously as Jane Doe. I was surprised to learn she took up harmonica a few years back, gasping and wheezing her way through Hot Cross Buns, Freire Jacques and Three Blind Mice.
Recently she set aside her harp to take up tap dancing. Of course. What else? If not tap dancing it would have been potato collecting.
She told me a while ago in a random phone talk that her tap dance class planned to perform at a downtown theater. Swell, I thought, and maybe even said. Bear in mind that I live one block from the SPACE dance academy in Ukiah, a venue in which public dance performances performed by dancers who can’t dance are not at all rare.
Her tap group is a collection from various local troupes, almost 100% female and almost 100% young, meaning some little girls in it for the cute dresses, others into their teenage years, and a sizable number in college and early 20s. Some have been dancing 10 or 15 years.
They practice regularly and my sister gamely keeps up, albeit with the assistance of her laptop, mastering steps by hoofing about on her kitchen’s linoleum floor. She worked hard at it. I know my sister.
The big night grew near. Petunia fretted and worried and couldn’t sleep in anticipation of her onstage debut at the town’s biggest theater, then scolded herself for worrying so. What’s the big deal? What’s the worst that can happen” Flub a step? Miss a cue? Sheesh.
So she practiced more until she had it down as best anyone could who had never tapped a tap step until sometime in 2024. Then, her fragile confidence in precarious balance, she attended final rehearsals on the afternoon of the Main Event.
It was there that her drill instructor, aka dance teacher, singled out poor Petunia for inappropriate hairdo and for clumsy noises while tip-toeing (in tap shoes, but still) around backstage. As if her confidence needed undermining.
Later that evening the ensemble gathered at the two small dressing rooms in advance of their allotted appearance: half a dozen boys in one dressing room, two-and-a-half dozen girls in the other.
Have you ever worried and sweated over something and it turned out to be nothing? Then an insignificant detail suddenly surfaced and caused panic?
For Petunia, that “insignificant detail” erupted in the tiny, crowded girls’ dressing room. The room is A) covered wall-to-wall with big mirrors, and B) everyone is young, lovely, and in full blossom of youthful, goddess-like daffodil splendor.
Almost everybody. Petunia was startled to learn she’d have to completely disrobe, just like P.E. class circa 1960. She tried not to stare at her dance-mates but couldn’t help peeping at the long perfect legs and the gleaming lustrous hair. Not a single gray strand anywhere. No bumps, no sags, no lumps, no bags.
Just a crowded corral of beautiful, frisky ponies laughing, primping and twirling unconsciously about, the years of dance resulting in unintended benefits of taut muscles, creamy complexions and no blotchy, warty skin patches. All those females in the room, and only one knew of the word “cellulite.”
They took the stage. Her tap dance performance? Who knows? Who remembers? All her synchronized staccato steps accompanied by graceful arm movements and a fixed smile drifted off in a blur.
The show was over, but in fact had ended 40 minutes earlier in the dressing room. Petunia slunk out the back door and fought the urge to hit a nearby bar to throw down a couple bourbons.
Instead she went home and sat in a stupor for more than an hour, and then spent another three days defeated, home with her cat. On a Thursday night as her humiliation began to ebb, she called me.
She was suddenly aware, and in despair, of her frail, elderly old age. What next?
Well, according to Benjamin Franklin, what comes next is that we are food for worms.
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