Assignment

My oldest sister, Gina, has asked me to write a little remembrance about my very first dance teacher, Willa Dean Nilesen. I was about five years old when I started taking dance class at Nielsen's school of Dance and the only reason I was there was because my sister, Holly, was taking class with her friend, Emily Youngman. With my mother, I sat--or tried to--and watched from the sidelines. Apparently, as Blumenthal legend has it, sitting was just too much for me and, standing near my mom, I would copy the dance steps that my sister was learning until they finally decided I should be taking the class, too. This isn't really a story about Willa Dean. In fact, I can't really recall a story about her, particularly. My memories tend towards events that involved her, but only as a figure at the front of the class. Or, sitting behind her desk as we practiced our dances. Her sadness when her daughter, Pam, died tragically in a senseless motorcycle accident. Doesn't seem right to talk about how she always seemed too old to have a teenage daughter, that she seemed more like a grandmother than anything else. Her hair cut, colored and set. Painted eyebrows and red-pink lipstick. My childish ideas of her weren't meant to be disrespectful or mean-spirited. I liked her a great deal, looked up to her. My own grandmother died around the same time that I'd started the dance classes, at least my memory is that it happened within the same year. And Willa Dean looked more like my grandmother than she did my mother. So it wasn't with malice that I thought her old; it was a youthful syllogism long before I knew what the word meant. Shocking 20 years later when during a visit with my mom, living once again in Southern Idaho, we run into her at a store and she's even older than she was the last time I'd seen her, in 1984. My goodness, I remember thinking, she was old when I was 7!
So, what story can I write for Gina, in celebration of 50 years of Nielsen's School of Dance? 50 years, really?! How excited we were when the Stargazers dance class got to have the matching, white and blue "v" striped leotards so that she could see better if someone wasn't doing the same dance step that everyone else was doing? The silver tinsel Christmas tree that was in the upper right corner of the studio, every year, with empty wrapped boxes stacked festively underneath it? How she hated ballet and how anyone who wanted to take it had to do so on the sly at another studio? I always thought that was so funny. Strange funny. When we moved to Utah, and I took my first ballet classes, I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about.
I see her so clearly, in her tan colored jazz shoes, black dance pants of that parachute-like material, rolled down at the waist, leotard and accessorized with a skinny belt. Demonstrating a dance step. I see her sitting behind that desk, counting and clapping on the down beat. I just can't come up with a single moment that translates to a story of guidance. Something that has stuck with me all these many years. The kind that you tell your own children--nieces and/or nephews in my case--when they're feeling blue. "Someone once told me..." it begins. I remember her presence. And her love for the dance studio and the students. The long and strenuous preparations for the annual dance recital held on the stage of CSI (College of Southern Idaho). Always a theme. Always a beautiful, lyrical solo for Pam. A family dance for all the Nielsen's. The supporting cast made up of the rest of the students. When Michael Jackson's Thriller was released, that was our theme. The older students recreating the graveyard zombie dance. Our own Footloose for another recital, as well as a Rainbow Connection the year the Muppet Movie came out. For that year's finale, sung by Kermit the Frog, we were a rainbow of dancers. Each class a different color. Was that the year, while waiting to rehearse in one of the college's classrooms, I toppled over in a heavy, metal desk that sliced my right hand middle finger requiring an emergency room visit and stitches, though not missing the recital? Dancing with my right arm bent, but upright the entire time? Maybe that was the Footloose year...