Last Fall I saw the movie Save the Last Dance. I watched as Julia Stiles pursued her dream of becoming a dancer despite the obstacle of her guilt; her mom died in a car accident while rushing to her daughter's audition at Juliard. Julia's character put away her pointe shoes that day, and it took a good friend and a lot of determination to get her back to dancing again.

There is this scene at the end of the movie where Julia's character dances this piece. I don't think that I can describe what emotion and passion there was in that performance. She took traditional ballet, dancing on pointe, and mixed it with all of the experiences and emotions that she had endured to get to where she was at that second Juliard audition. She nailed it. She danced that piece into the ground and was asked to join the company of Juliard dancers. It was this piece that made me want to jump up and rush the screen. I wanted to be there, sitting in the audience at the audition. I wanted to tell her that I was going to dance again, that I wanted to be a dancer again because of what I saw her do.

It may sound funny that this movie inspired me to start dancing again, but it did. It's not like I hadn't been thinking about it already, but somehow I felt that there was a hidden message in that movie just for me...telling me to quit making excuses and start dancing again.

My friend Liz, who saw the movie with me, used to be a dancer too. We talked about taking a class at a local studio together; finding a time that we both could go and dance. But it turned out that I ended up finding a class at CSU to take, and Liz couldn't fit it into her schedule. As much as I didn't want to, I had to do it alone.

At that point, the Fall semester had not yet started, but I couldn't enroll in the ballet class without the permission of the instructor. So I waited until the first day that the class would meet, and I went to talk to the instructor.

The class started at 9 am. I didn't figure that there would be a problem with the class having enough space to take me, but when I showed up, I was wrong. There were about thirty girls waiting outside the classrooom studio door...some had enrolled in the class, they had already taken the prerequisits for it, but I hadn't, and realized that I would be fighting for the permission that I needed to take the class.

All of the girls looked to be about sixteen...actually fourteen. Their skinny bodies lacked the cellulite and saddlebags of a typical 24-year-old body. All I could think about were the sheer pink tights and tight black leotard that I would be forced to wear. They were probably looking forward to that.

It had been ten years since I had danced, at least. I told her five, but when I left and actually calculated, I realized that I had lied. Five years seemed like a really long time ago, but it was ten. She told me that I was welcome to audition on the first day of class...I was welcome to do the barre work and center work with the rest of the class, and that after she saw me perform, she would let me know if I could stay. In my brain I picked through the movements that I was hanging onto from my childhood dancing years...and there weren't many that were still there.