Shelley: Dancing, Part 1
From a very, very young age, Shelley and I wanted to dance. We were like Sarah Jessica Parker’s character in the opening scene of the 1985 dance movie Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (a very good dance movie) when she says “I love to dance”, made evident in the subsequent 86 minutes of the film when she does, a lot.
Shortly after we became aware of what a ballerina was we started asking Mum if we could start dance classes. I remember when Mum, Michael, Shelley and I were getting into the family car in the carpark of Glenrose Shopping Centre — an area featured heavily in our early driving lessons sometime later — Mum squinted towards the shops and said “back in a minute”.
Even from a distance she was able to make out the false eyelashes and out-turned walk of Janece Green, ballet teacher at the dance school housed on the second floor of the shops. We thought Mum had an incredible sixth sense for picking dance teachers from a distance, but we didn’t realise how rare false eyelashes were in the newly-minted Belrose-Davidson area. Mum took a punt.
Our very first ballet lesson included an arm exercise where, sitting on the floor, we were encouraged to gracefully move our arms through the floors of a small imaginary building. “First floor, second floor, third floor, through the roof!” said Janece as we flailed.
We absolutely loved it.
We loved learning about spring points, plié, jete, pas de chat, and pirouette. We loved watching the older teenage dancers with their massive thighs and bony collarbones. We loved dipping our ballet shoes into the wooden box of crunchy rosin — dried tree sap used to stop slippers slipping — in the corner of the studio. And we were utterly terrified of Janece.
Janece had a tiny, ruthless Maltese terrier (called either Miffy or something equally disarming) and a short fuse. On at least one occasion the class would be required to hold a deep plié until Miffy had jumped through our legs, such was the performative nature of Janece’s tyranny. I’m sure it seemed worse than it actually was, and having a demanding despot at the front of a ballet class fits the stereotype, but one of our classmates was so frightened of what might happen if she asked to go to the toilet that she accidentally did once, mid-class, on the studio floor.
Shelley and I were blessed from childhood with the family bottom, which Dad sometimes referred to as “the shelf” and the type of which is less whimsically referred to in the contemporary vernacular as a “bubble butt”. Ballet requires that one must tuck in all non-essential protuberances, and the slightest suggestion of a swayback posture is often rigorously corrected. Often when Janece walked behind Shelley or me during class, there was a high risk that she would give our bottoms a disapproving, corrective jab and shout “derriere!”.
The traditional totalitarian, body-shaming approach did nothing to put us off, though. We increased the number of dance styles attempted and classes attended to a parent-inconveniencing degree, eventually becoming proficient-ish at ballet, jazz, and tap, needing a whole drawer in our shared bedroom just for stretchy outfits. I kept attending classes until I was 13, and Shelley stayed even longer, making it into a pair of pretty-on-the-outside, brutal-on-the-inside pointe shoes. I still have Shelley’s pointe shoes, and I’m still astounded and horrified at the sound the hard-as-rock toes make when you clunk them lightly together. Only masochists forget to cut their toenails before jamming them into the pointy end of a ballet slipper.
Mum was incredible throughout our early dance obsession. She worked part time and gave piano lessons at our house part time and ferried us to and from dance classes and put our hair in buns and did our make-up backstage at concerts in dressing rooms crowded with other juvenile ballerinas and their less-composed mothers. As Mum was already giving piano lessons to Janece’s daughters Emma and Melissa, Janece also asked her to give regular music theory lessons at the dance school, and we sat around the piano on the floor, listening to Mum talk about three-four and four-four and watching her play short pieces to demonstrate tempo and tone.
She also sewed some of our costumes and, due to a months-long Whitsundays family boat trip that concluded just before the annual dance school concert, learned one of our dances so we could rehearse on whatever beach we were anchored at. The trip was utterly fantastic and probably sounds much fancier than it was. A family of five in a 22-foot yacht without full adult headroom in the cabin, meals were cooked over a tiny galley stove, with dishes washed in a plastic tub in the cockpit with kettle-heated water. We left for three months, put Smoggy the cat in the care of a neighbour, and Mum and Dad consulted with our primary school to make sure we didn’t fall behind. Mum and Dad presided over maths lessons and illustrated journalling in the morning, with ad-hoc ballet rehearsals whenever accommodating shoreline was available.
Shelley and I were rehearsing to be the two turtle doves in a concert based on The Twelve Days of Christmas, and Mum had started sewing our twin tutus before leaving for Queensland. The dance culminated in a little leap that ended with Shelley and me each down on one knee, arms gracefully posed and tooth-gaps from lost baby teeth undisguised. Unfortunately, as we’d been rehearsing on sand for weeks, our first rehearsal back on the wooden floorboards of the studio meant we came down to kneel with a shocking and painful thud, but if there was any bruising it was gone by concert time.
In 2010 when I wrote on a personal blog about the concert, Shelley left the comment “The only part I think you’ve left out of the Turtle Doves story is the Last Fitting of the Tutus, at which my mid-section had grown beyond the seams of the satin. Mum gave me a frustrated, light-handed wallop on the back of the legs, quickly apologised and sat back down at the sewing machine”. Considering the sacrifices Mum regularly made to the dance gods, I think a little frustration was warranted.
Our parents sat through many hours of concerts, weathering performance after performance featuring children they didn’t know waiting for those featuring their own. Brother Mike vaguely remembers hanging out in the theatre’s foyer a lot of the time, running around with the other dragged-along brothers. Knowing Mike, he would have also brought a book.
Some of the choreographed routines were fantastic, and I remember being keenly envious of the jazz ballet class who got to wear extremely cool-for-the-time midnight blue asymmetrical lycra costumes dancing to The Knack’s My Sharona in the same year it was released. A lot of the costumes and concepts were vastly less cool, and to both illustrate that and keep a record of what I can still remember, the concert dances we participated in included:
The Two Turtle Doves in The Twelve Days of Christmas (cute, duet, beautiful hand-made costumes).
The Seven Dwarfs, in which Shelley wore green felt and I was excused.
Monday’s Child, which involved pink leotards and dancers holding fake cardboard mirrors, due to the ‘fair of face’ part of the poem it was inspired by. I have no recollection of whether or not the other days of the week were performed by other classes, but I’d love to see the dance for “Wednesday’s child is full of woe”.
The Can Can, performed every year, with a rainbow of frilled satin dresses. Considering the age of the performers the original French sexy element was obviously removed, but there were still lots of shouts of “woo!” and a few cartwheels. Shelley and I were not much help when it came to cartwheels, but pretty good at the woos.
A jazz routine to Toni Basil’s Mickey, with the class dressed as cheerleaders with crepe-paper pompoms that bled colour onto our hands as soon as they got sweaty, which was instantly and always. Our cheerleader costumes were maroon and white, because our dance school was in the catchment area for the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles. Jazz ballet and rugby league, together at last.
Lullaby of Broadway, a beginner’s tap routine that had absolutely no business being anywhere near the word ‘lullaby’. The costumes where white satin 40s-style flared shorts and midriff-baring tops, smattered with big shimmery sequins that had little hope of distracting attention from the arrhythmic clod-hopping juveniles they were attached to. Half spangle, all gangle.
Finally, a jazz ballet banjo dance. I’ve tried to find the song we performed to by Googling the only lyrics I can remember (If I had the money to buy-uy a hole in my pocket) with no luck, but it was a jaunty number that suggested jaunty costuming. Red lycra leotard and tights accessorised with a red-and-white striped waistcoat with silver-sequinned buttons and a red-and-white striped boater hat each. To add to the I-hope-my-friends-don’t-see-this teenage cringe, for the entire performance the whole class, while dancing, had to mime playing banjo.
People have commented throughout our lives on their ability to tell Shelley and me apart — some find it easy, some difficult, some pinpoint specific features that they use as mnemonic aids. We always looked pretty similar, but the main things that would make people gasp with twin-similar astonishment wouldn’t be our looks, but our facial expressions, speech, and the way we moved. Interestingly our dance teachers found it impossible to reliably tell us apart, and I assume that was because they’re the kind of people who focus on movement over other factors.
So if you’ve never seen Shelley and me play an imaginary banjo, you’re really missing out.
