We know ball
faith on the sidelines
Last year, I was a guest of Ballet Tech for their annual spring “gala” performance, a production by their students who are all in 4th to 8th grade. I was there because I worked on a marketing and fundraising project with the brand MZ Wallace, who had co-designed a ballet bag in collaboration with Joseph Gordon and Megan Fairchild, principal dancers at NYCB ( Megan just retired a few weeks ago after 25 years with the company). Proceeds from the sale of the bags went to Ballet Tech - the only NYC public dance school for kids grades 4-8.
Do you know of Ballet Tech already? It is a NYC public school that was originally created in the 70s by the dancer Eliot Feld, invested in outreach to NYC kids who otherwise would not have access to dance. Ballet is a notoriously expensive, elitist, time-intensive art, and with a combination of help from The Ford Foundation and the NYC public school system, Feld and his team were able to design their multi-tiered outreach program that still operates today. Their little campus shares space with American Ballet Theatre HQ and draws in kids from all over the city, while also conducting outreach to visit kids in underserved neighborhoods to create avenues into dance for a wider array of kids. Please check them out and support if you feel moved to.
Anyway, to open the show the former Commissioner for the Dept. of Cultural Affairs, Laurie Combo, gave a welcome speech that I still think about a lot. I’m paraphrasing, but her thesis was that even though some of the kids in this program may not go on to dance professionally, their years at Ballet Tech will have cultivated an inner attitude that will inform the rest of their lives. Dance is an art and art is earned in increments. You have to show up every day and decide you’re going to get a little bit better, and then trust that cumulatively, you will be able to look back and see progress. So you just show up to the studio every day and say to yourself, today I’m going to jump a little bit higher. Then the next day, you show up and say the same thing.
And maybe one day you do dance professionally, but maybe you decide you actually want to be a doctor, or work for the peace corps, or I don’t know…. be a surfing instructor. It doesn’t really matter, none of this is forever. But the point is that your body and mind and spirit will remember what dedication and focus and making promises to yourself feels like, and how satisfying it is to live up to your own ambitions.
Last week I was invited by Spread the Jelly to Nike HQ with a bunch of amazing women as part of the launch of Soccer Mom, parallel programming alongside the World Cup celebrating the people who make it possible for players to learn to play in the first place. They pulled in a very cute partnership with Rummage Stretch, do you know about them already? She’s a super cute curator of vintage and gently worn workout wear, I had never heard of her before.
I cried a few times! An embarrassing fact about me is that I cry during sports events - I will be crying in a minute when the Knicks game comes on (it’s Wednesday eve as I write this, Knick in 5, go NY go NY go¹) just as I will throughout most of the World Cup games this summer. Sports are so hard on your body, but they also push you to the boundaries of psychosis - you can see from people’s behavior and facial expressions that while they are in it, they are not really on this earth. I also cried during my daughter’s dance performances last week. I have endless emotional tears for anyone who studies and studies and studies and tries and tries and tries. Life knocks you down so many times, and you really have to decide whether to get back up, and every time you decide you will you are deciding that you are worth believing in. I know that’s corny, but I think corny is underrated right now.
Anyway a lot of the talk and discussions were about the enormous amount of LABOR moms perform when their kids are passionate about something, and if you have ever had a passionate kid you know it doesn’t have to be soccer to qualify. Could be painting. Chess. Or spelunking, it doesn’t matter. For the first decade plus, you are the athlete as much as they are. Commuting them to their practice (you’re commuting, too!), waking them up early (you are somehow already awake!), making sure they’ve eaten well and will have energy (did you? do you??), paying for the equipment and fees (not to mention earning the money that pays for the equipment and fees), whatever their interest is becomes something of a team sport between the two of you, until it isn’t. I remember commuting my daughter to dance classes and then sitting in the lobby working from my laptop and looking around noticing how wild around the eye all of these moms are, myself included. The labor is exhausting.
I suck at cheeky little videos, and Spread the Jelly had a bunch of video prompts to record while we were in conversation during our visit. One of them was: what’s always in your bag/what do you always have on the sidelines? After the panic subsided from someone pointing a video camera at me and asking me to speak, I shot out something stupid and kept it pushing, but I thought a lot about what the real answer was. What do I always try to have with me?
No physical item materialized in my mind, instead it was a litany of behaviors.
Creating the discipline to go to class - or just show up in general - when you don’t feel like it. More generally, doing things that you don’t always enjoy but know you must do. Celebrating wins, and I mean reeaaallly acknowledging that achievement did not happen in the moment but rather cumulatively through lots of invested time. Metabolizing disappointment into something meaningful. Being there through a fall or an injury, but also being the person to say: time to fix your face and try again.
And most of all, the encouragement to try a little harder every day, because you believe in who you will be tomorrow. The proof doesn’t exist yet, the worth is in the work.
A few hours ago I got a passage from Doing Well about faith. “Faith (not necessarily connected to religious ideas) takes practice. Prayer is a peaceful way to relate to the unknown and find strength in our vulnerability.”
I think the thing that I bring, not just to the sidelines of my daughter’s life but to my own and hopefully to the lives of my friends and loved ones, is the practice of faith. The work itself is a prayer. And faith is a lot to start with, for what it’s worth.
yours again tomorrow,
x Anja
¹ writing this from after game 4 to tell you NEW YORK IS THE ONLY CITY IN THE WORLD
Just reading this makes me want to cry (again.) You’re so good at putting feelings into words.