Some thoughts on belonging
It has been a gift and a pleasure to write this monthly column, and to hear from so many of you. As autumn kicks into full gear, I am going to take a break from writing monthly, and instead post only when—and if—a small essay falls into my mind & heart. Thank you all for reading along!
May I have your attention please. When we hear this, don’t we usually take it as an invitation to tune out? For what comes next is usually only a reminder (a scolding, really) to put away our cell phones, to not block the doors, to not smoke in your lavatories. May I have your attention please.
But when the crisp disembodied voice cut through the pre-theater chatter at the David Koch Theater at Lincoln Center last Tuesday at 7:45pm, all noise ceased. Moments ago, thirty ushers in black vests had sealed the doors, and spontaneous applause had broken out, for it felt like we 2586 souls—a full house—were now sealed up in a great ship. But those cheers were nothing compared to what erupted when the crisp disembodied voice went on to say, Welcome to the New York City Ballet.
We cheered. We stomped our feet and whistled. Some stood—an ovation before the first dance. We were back. Masked, every one of us, with vaccine cards tucked in purses, but back, finally, here: in this red plush theater, in this house of dreams, from which we had been so abruptly exiled. We were back. Not quite like before—at my feet were sealed boxes of takeout, smuggled into the theater. Too nervous to eat indoors, my mother and I had dined al fresco in Lincoln Center’s stony courtyard. Not our usual pre-theater ritual—and I’d miss intermission, too, the people-watching and champagne—but what did it matter?
During lockdown I think many of us were haunted by specific places we could no longer go. Dennis kept picturing himself biking down Bedford. He doesn’t even like biking down Bedford, but he found himself visited daily by the memory of wind and traffic, the blare of car horns. Emma spoke of sitting at a bar with a friend and drinking a glass of wine. The moment that came to me so often was standing on the Manhattan-bound Church Avenue subway platform in my black boots with a bag over my shoulder. Going to school, going on a date, going to meet friends. Didn’t matter. Didn’t matter that I don’t particularly like the subway platform, that I usually feel restless—am I running late?—or bored, or antsy there. Suddenly I craved it.
That was one kind of Covid dream, a kind of phantom limb twitch from our severed daily lives. But there was another kind of dream that haunted me, and maybe you, a dream not of the ordinary bits of life, but of the magic that can happen in stadiums and theaters and night clubs, that human yearning to mass together and collectively dream. All last winter I longed to sit in the dark of the Koch Theater with my mother and watch the dancers whom I know by name; I longed to lose myself in the wordless beauty of ballet. It seemed so unspeakably far away, so incredibly dangerous: to sit together with thousands of others in a sealed room? When would that ever feel safe again?
The lights dimmed. The conductor in his tuxedo and mask took the podium. The strings hummed, and then the grand mournful slide of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings swelled from the orchestra pit. Tears pricked my eyes. I smelled pine, I saw moonlight. The curtain rose, and there they were: seventeen women in blue tulle with their arms gently raised.
As I swam into the blue world my cheeks were wet, my chest was tight, there was an almost painful wrench in my head from all the beauty. Eighteen months without live music—and now cello, now violin. Eighteen months without dance—and now Sterling Hyltin lingers in the quick waltz, so that her arabesque shimmers like a bright flash of lightening imprinted on the sky.
That I like ballet so much sometimes confuses me. It is not exactly an art form associated with progressive politics. The stink of patriarchal control hangs about it. Also elitism.
Strolling the Promenade before the performance, taking in the lofted champagne flutes, the ten thousand dollar heels and handbags, the glitter of evening gowns and tailored suits, I felt uneasy. Here we are, the privileged enjoying our privileges. Even my mom and I, with our smuggled brown bag of greasy takeout, seemed ostentatious.
In moments like these, unable to reconcile ballet with my politics, I instead embrace it defiantly. I love it the way you love the junk food of your youth. An indulgence of sexism, of wealth. A guilty pleasure. Right?
Or is it not more complicated?
For who I loved most in that pre-performance crowd were the pairs of women: some older, in dove gray, with diamonds; some in dowdy tweeds and turtlenecks; some young and gawky, herons in heels. For a long minute my mom and I watched a pair of young women giggle up the stairs, one dressed in clinging black lace like Count Dracula’s bride, the other sugar-spun sweet in a Bo-Peep frock. Dressing up for each other, going to the ballet together. And what I love most in Serenade is not the doomed Waltz Girl—though she catches my heart every time—but the corps, dancing together in intricate braided sisterhood, a republic of women with its own joyous celebration and strange rites.
After the rest of the program, after a pensive pas de deux of gently turning geometric shapes, like a Calder mobile; after the orchestra played, unannounced, the Waltz of the Flowers; after the vivacious sparkle of Bizet’s Symphony in C, all tiara and tours and bounce; after all that, silver and gold confetti floated down over the beaming dancers, sparkles of foil scattering light. Two, three, four curtain calls—we could not get enough. A man behind us shouted Brava! Brava! until he was hoarse.
And then it was done. Both cold and hot, exhausted and wired, I filed out with the others to discover puddles shining on the pavement. While we had been inside, it had rained—and it could have been my mood, it could have been the moonlight, but even the rain felt like benediction, an anointment from the sky.
On the subway ride home a man in a wheelchair came through our car, calling mournfully for money, for food, for help. What did his sign say? Something about God, something about Please. The word HUNGRY in black marker. When he approached I gave him the potatoes from our takeout bag.
The next station was ours. As we walked down the platform I saw the same man in the next car, hunched over the opened plastic bowl, eating the potato chunks with his hands. What I felt then was shame. What I feel now, writing these words, is shame. Shame that we had so much. Shame that he would need what we were ready to throw away. Shame at this world, and my place in it. Shame at where we had been, and what we had been doing.
Obviously there are many things to say. We should give our ballet ticket money to a worthy non-profit combatting hunger in America. We should give the money directly to the man. We should call our political leaders. We should organize. There are things to say about structural oppression, about capitalism, about altruism, about compassion—but hush. All of these leave the man in the wheelchair with his hand-lettered sign behind.
I can’t quite say why I want to tell you about both of these things—the ballet, the man. I don’t know why I think they go together except that they both happened on the same night, in the same city. And I am aware that the impulse to bring them together, to fold the story of the man into the story of the night, is to domesticate him, defang the discomforts of that moment, make him part of some tidy whole. I don’t want to do that.
But—can I even say it? Is it too self-justifying?—I do think the way that ballet sometimes rips open my heart is not unrelated to the ripping I felt at the man eating potatoes. There are things in this world that are simply unbearable. How easy it is to harden yourself against them. But the way ballet blasts me open, leaving me ragged and porous, stops me from this hardening. It forces me to look.
It is not enough. Shame alone will not build a better world. But we cannot build one without it. More and more I believe this. Shame—shame at your privilege—pins you. It asks you to see yourself as part of the collective whole, to see yourself as others see you. Not the collective you choose for a night—the beautiful people with their coiffed hair and manicured nails—but the collective city which you choose every day, the city to which you undeniably, involuntarily, blessedly once again belong.