About Me

I’ve always loved sitting in a darkened theatre. It literally gives me goosebumps – velvet curtains, chandeliers, a fancy dress, the orchestra warming up – being in the theatre is like disappearing into magic. I love opera, plays, music events, and ballet… most of all, ballet. I love the movement, the gestures, the costumes, the impossibility of it all – people who can seemingly float around about the floor and tell a story that you feel all the way to your core without ever speaking a word  – and the reality and immediacy of it right in front of me – that the spell is broken with the lowering of a curtain, like a fairytale. I love it.

I have a background in music from childhood. I had spurts of lessons in classical guitar, saxophone, and violin. I’ve always fancied classical music and never been one to indulge much in pop music. I feigned an appreciation for Duran Duran and actually found some Depeche Mode to be interesting in high school, but my real love was Satie, Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven.

It never really occurred to me to ask for dance lessons as a child. I only had the opportunity for music lessons when they were offered as part of the curriculum at school and didn’t cost extra. Besides I wasn’t an active child, to the opposite, I was tiny, fragile, and had pretty bad asthma. Add that to my tendency to be completely anti-social and you have the perfect set up for a kid who not only doesn’t dance but barely moves! Reading and listening classical music in solitude pretty much sums it up.

In college, I discovered student rush tickets for theatre events and pretty much went to everything that I could manage to get tickets for. I saw great theatre and had a fantastic figure since opera, ballet, or the philharmonic won out over spending limited funds on food. As much as I loved it, sitting in the darkness of the theatre made sense to me and trying to take a dance lesson didn’t. I’d like to say that there was some kind of revelation that led me to start taking lessons myself but there wasn’t. I just started trolling the internet to see if such a thing as beginning ballet lessons for adults existed. Lo and behold, it did! Truth be told, it still doesn’t make sense, yet here I am.

So there I was, old enough to probably know better, not in terribly great shape, looking for a ballet class. Unfortunately its very hard for an adult who has zero dance experience to find good classes, as most classes assume some kind of background knowledge and experience in ballet but persistence won out. I had heard of a teacher on the westside of LA who came highly recommended. I had not wanted to make the trek from my part of LA on the N/E side all the way across town but my experiences were so bad, some even required recovery time, that I decided to make the journey. Am I glad that I did! If you want to know how awesome my ballet teacher is, I cross a town known worldwide for hideous traffic and high gas prices, no less than three times a week and am happy to do so!

So this is the story here… my journey as a grown-up with minus dance experience trying to learn the hardest form of dance there is, classical ballet. Like most adults, I have a full time job and a life filled with various grown-up type responsibilities and now we add a pursuit of ballet to that list. I’ve had only seven months working with my Awesome Ballet Teacher but I can no longer imagine life without dance – not just sitting in the darkness – but dancing to the music.

All will be well. Let’s dance.

~Lorry