The dancing queen

This it after the ballet Christmas party in 2025.

Last March, I decided to take up dancing. And I don’t mean ballroom dancing, Latin dancing, or swing dancing, although I’ve done all of those before. I mean actual dancing.

Ballet. Jazz. Tap.

The kind of dancing I had wanted to do since I was a little girl.

My mother raised us on movies from the Silver Screen and Technicolor eras, and one of the things I loved about those films was how much dancing there was. I loved watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers tap. I loved the ballet sequences. I loved the chorus lines and the high kicks. And then there was Hello, Dolly! There is a massive dance sequence near the end of that movie, and my sister and I watched it so many times that we basically knew the choreography. That sort of thing stayed with me. I always wanted to do what I saw in that movie

When I went away to college, I actually wanted to take tap lessons at the Peabody Preparatory. I don’t remember why it didn’t work out, but it didn’t. I did eventually take up swing dancing, along with some ballroom and Latin dancing, and I kept doing bits and pieces of that after school. But that wasn’t quite what I wanted.

I wanted ballet.

I wanted tap.

I wanted jazz.

The problem was that, for years, adult classes in those styles seemed almost impossible to find. Every so often I would search online, but nothing ever really came of it.

There was also another complication. When I was twelve years old, I suffered a traumatic injury to my right hip. It healed, but the healing process left me with hip ossification, which basically means that extra bone formed in the area around the joint. My understanding is that the injury destabilized the joint so badly that my body essentially responded by building more bone around it.

Years later, when I got my first Apple Watch and became obsessed with closing my rings, I was doing a lot of speed walking with my dog at night. During the colder weather, I started noticing that the exercise was aggravating my hip and that my leg would sometimes go numb. That was when I learned that the additional bone was pressing on a nerve. The doctor made it very clear that I needed to stay active, stretch regularly, and keep my range of motion as good as possible so that the area around that nerve did not become even more restricted. At the same time, too much aggravation could make things worse. Eventually, I may need surgery. I would very much prefer not to get there. The orthopedic surgeon I spoke with explained that the procedure could require radiation treatment afterward to reduce the chance of the bone growing back, and that is not something I am particularly eager to sign up for.

So I kept exercising. I went to the gym. I lifted weights. I stayed active. But over time, I started noticing something else. My muscles were getting tighter. My flexibility was decreasing. My range of motion was not what I wanted it to be.

And every year, after taking a break from gardening over the winter, the first few weeks back outside became increasingly painful.

So I started looking at dancing again. And wonder of wonders, I finally found a place offering adult dance classes. That was Powerhouse Studio. I started taking classes once or twice a week. It was welcoming and very much a judgment-free environment, which was exactly what I needed to get started. But eventually I realized I wanted more technique.

Then one Sunday, while I was in Philadelphia for church, I ran another search for adult dance schools near me and found Philly Dance Fitness. That opened up an entirely different world. Their ballet program is much more rigorous, so I started taking ballet there. Then tap. Then jazz. After that, I found another studio in Northeast Philadelphia called Second Chance Dance, and I started taking classes there too.

And apparently, somewhere along the way, I became a dancer. I’ve now been dancing for well over a year.

I have ballet shoes.

Jazz shoes.

More than one pair of tap shoes.

Leotards.

Tights.

Leg warmers.

All the things.

And I love it. I can tell that my legs are stronger. I can tell that my balance is better. I can tell that I have more control over my body than I did when I started. I still need to get back into the gym probably twice a week, especially for strength work, and I’m trying to rearrange my schedule so that I can do that without giving up the dance classes I enjoy.

But I’m happy I finally did this. I do sometimes wish I had started when I was a child. I wonder what I might have been able to do if I had started ballet at six instead of forty-five. But there is not much point in mourning the version of my life that did not happen. I am never going to be Misty Copeland. That’s fine.

I want strength.

I want flexibility.

I want range of motion.

I want to learn the choreography.

I want to be able to turn without falling over.

And, every once in a while, I want to feel like the little girl who watched those old movie musicals and thought:

I want to do that too.

Now I finally am.