Through challenges of jumping into a busy conservatory five weeks into the semester, the students remained my biggest joy. A few of them got beneath my skin in the endearing way.
Of course, it is always the one that tries you the first week of class that becomes an instant member of your family.
I was busy giving a difficult combination across the floor that involved a lot of turning. As usual, my feet were protected in the sock-clad ballet slipper.
“Easy in socks,” Whitney mumbled. “Try it barefoot.”
She didn’t think I heard her.
“Huh?” I shouted. “What was that? I should try it barefoot?” I made a production of taking off my socks and ballet slippers. “Well let’s just see.”
Even as I approached the chaine turns that shut her up, I realized in an instant that I had a special kinship for this short spicy chile with a mouth.
Over the next few weeks I got to discover quite a bit about Whitney. She’s a beautiful young lady who cleans up very nicely, but would be perfectly content in a world that did not require from women more dolling up than a pair of sweatpants and an oversized sweatshirt. She gets away with it because she has the “it” factor.
She takes more pride in her ability to case a logistics challenge, find a way when there isn’t one and create one if necessary, as is the case with this parallel parking situation. She is not afraid to use bumpers. Whitney can drive. She is a natural driver, one who – like my mother (and Tamica Washington) – can shift gears, eat a sandwich steer the car at once.
Whitney has parking tickets galore, so many that the Office of the Registrar at the university began sticking the fees on her student account. Yet her car has never had a boot.
“Don’t you want to let me use your faculty pass when you’re not using it?” she asked me via text.
“And when would that be, given that I’m married to the conservatory just like you?” I replied. But I had to give her mad props for gumption; nobody else asked.
Other dancers in the division have to miss an occasional rehearsal because they are members of the university dance team. Whitney is seldom available because she is a Kansas City Chiefs cheerleader and has a second job at Victoria’s Secret.
She learns choreography at breakneck speed, which is almost always an indication of quick adaptability.
My mother constantly came to mind.
In fact, my mother, too, is a beautiful lady who, to this day, does not wear make-up, lipstick or any other cosmetics whatsoever but has the “it” factor. She would rather not dress up nicely at all, ever.
My mother is a master problem-solver. To deal with her aversion to computers and her inefficiency as a typist, she exploited her nine-year-old only child’s interest in computers to cajole him into taking a typing class. This way he could transfer articles for the student newspaper (for which she was journalism advisor) via her dictation. Brilliant.
Mom is a fantastic driver. When trying to evade authorities who wanted her to return her child cousins to a drug-addict relative, Mom led the police on a TV-worthy car chase, so good a driver is she. I suspect she may have on occasion created an even more questionable parking spot than the one on this page when she was Whitney’s age.
And of course, my mother has a mouth. When she was a few years older than Whitney, at the height of The Black Power Movement, Mom was arrested (yes, I’m telling all her business in complete admiration) for giving the racist officer a heartier piece of her mind. It helps to understand that she had an Angela Davis fro and resembled her in physicality.
So I guess I saw my mother every day at work. It explains how Whitney wore me out and yet I love her to death.
