Kind of a surreal dream, except it wasn't

It is as though I wandered into a performance in progress. Walked right out onstage into the middle of someone else’s show and had to blend myself into the choreography like I knew it, even though I had no idea of what was going on around me. I didn’t know the story or the steps and had never met any of the people but I had to try to fit in and smile and look like I knew exactly what was going on. The stage was crowded with performers and the audience was full. The show went on for a long time, and the story took a very dark turn, but I was still smiling and pretending everything was fine. Then all of a sudden it was over. The audience left and the other dancers went home. 

I was left alone in the center of the stage in a darkened, empty theater asking, what just happened to me?!!! 

And absolutely no one was there. It looked like nothing had happened, but I was shattered. There was no trace of the show that had just ended. No people, no sets, no lights, no music, nothing. . . if anyone had seen me at that moment, they would never imagine the sulfurous depth of the trauma that had occurred, because it was completely empty and quiet. 

And it was not until long after the show was over, and I had been frozen on that stage in a dissociative trance for quite some time, that I began to have even the remotest understanding or recollection of the story. All I had left from the performance was a shoebox full of glass shards, reflective fragments of memory. I sat in the middle of the stage like a child playing with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to fit them back together. They were so sharp I could hardly touch them.




© Copyright Katherine Healy 2014, all rights reserved

In honor of the choreographer I had always wanted to work with, and got the chance. . . .

http://youtu.be/54sOsy0meV8 

 

Yesterday, Betty Ford, today, Roland. Sigh. . . . I was somehow lucky enough that he created this on me and then I got to do it, and do it, and do it. I am sitting here thanking him for this work he created for me. He was absolutely terrifying to work with and didn't give me an inch. He was determined to squeeze every bit of my technical freakiness out of me. :) Dancing here with Olivier Wexcsteen, the always and forever favorite partner. Olivier's was the one set of footprints in the sand carrying me through this at "the most troublesome times," so to speak.

Betty Ford

In 1975, at a Martha Graham gala. I was very nervous meeting her, but she was so very kind.

Katherine Healy Tango solo rehearsal ballet

Something different. . . . While I was at it, I did a full runthrough with more complicated choreography than what I have been doing for the girls. The old Governor Ann Richards canard that Ginger did everything Fred did, but "backwards and in high heels" comes to mind. I am actually more comfortable in pointe shoes, but this was fun, if rather difficult to get through. Getting in the tango in my overtime period. This is the postgame for me. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfXXOBS_WgI

L'Chaim!

I found this at an estate sale several years ago and was so touched by it that I bought it for myself as a keepsake. I finally have somewhere to show it off. As far as I know, Dennis and I are not related, but clearly someone on The Healy Team performed a Mitzvah! The only thing I can find about him is that he was a veteran of WWI from Stoughton, if that is indeed the same Dennis A. Healy. It is a VERY heavy, big and beautiful bronze plaque. I am proud of you, Dennis, you have honored the Healy name. Happy Passover to all!

New York City

So Cathie Black had to resign. Thank Heavens. Next, please, please, Janette Sadik-Khan. The problem with people like Mayor Bloomberg is that they are not New Yorkers. They view Manhattan as an Emerald City on top of the hill, encrusted with jewels, and not to be tarnished with the vagaries of everyday living. There are real native New Yorkers who grow up here, and know the streets as their home town. New Yorkers don't see it as the place where they come to make their fortune, but rather the place where they have walked to school and to the playground as children. They take the subway without it being a photo opportunity and cause for self-congratulation. Their families live locally, and are--surprise!--also native New Yorkers. Mayor Bloomberg and his cohorts, who come to the City later in life, try to reshape it as a playground for the rich, and they fail to see or appreciate the nitty-gritty aspects. When they do see anything approaching quotidien reality, they try to eradicate it. They need to be reminded at some point in the proceedings that there are other boroughs which comprise the city of New York. A Danish friend of mine turned to me one evening at a dinner in Manhattan a few years ago and said: "Kathy, where are you from?"

"Here," I answered.

"No, I mean, where are you from before?"

"Here," I answered again.

"No, I mean, before you came here," he persisted.

"I was born here," I explained.

"You were?" He was dumbfounded. "You are a New Yorker?!"

"Yes."

"I don't think I've ever met one! I didn't know there were any!" He was really taken aback. Some rich irony in that he lived here for many years and never met a native New Yorker. Rich irony, too, in that he hails from Copenhagen. Our esteemed DOT commissioner is laboring mightily to remake NYC into Copenhagen, being as she vacationed there once and was struck by the beauty and quaintness of the Danish capital--not to mention its preponderance of bicycle traffic. I doubt that Copenhagen would care to be remolded into Manhattan, but for reasons which remain unfathomable to anyone but Ms. Sadik-Khan, she envisions the shaping of our five boroughs into a quaint European capital. Likewise Mr. Dictator, who rode roughshod over term limits, and does not wish anyone to be able to travel in a gas-guzzling black fancy SUV unobstructed through the City streets except for, of course, Himself. He does not know the City the way people who grew up there do. The way I think of New York is more the way Willa Cather closed the novel Lucy Gayheart: "What was a man's "home town" anyway, but the place where he had had disappointments, and had learned to bear them?" If Michael Bloomberg and his dilettante Ladies-Who-Lunch accomplices knew the City in that way, they would never be trying to perpetrate these affronts to the character of the City.

Thank you, Elizabeth Taylor

Photo copyright Walter Healy. All rights reserved.

With the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, I have been reflecting back on living through the initial period of the AIDS epidemic in New York as an adolescent, albeit one who was preternaturally professional in the ballet world. I signed a senior principal contract with the English National Ballet when I was fifteen years old, which situated me firmly in an adult professional world. The first one of my close friends died of the disease on my seventeenth birthday. By the time I was about twenty-seven, I had lost twenty-six people to HIV and AIDS. They were people I knew, had worked with or in some cases, was particularly close to. I deliberately stopped counting after that because counting them in trying to remember them hurt my brain. I would rather think of the people I lost by name than by numbers or quantity. There is a theological concept of embracing someone’s essence by “naming” them, so I wrote down their names on a small green sheet of paper and taped it up to my wall. It is almost filled on the second side of the sheet now. It wasn’t when I put it up first. Mercifully, the rate slowed after that. It has transmogrified into people who are living with HIV/AIDS as a condition that can be managed.

At the time, AIDS attached a dark cloud to the rest of us in the business. I experienced, in some measure, the same stigma as a gay man, because such was the ignorance of the disease that when I came up against “civilians,” they assumed anyone in “the business” might have it. I saw and felt firsthand much of the prejudice and fear gay men faced from people outside their community. Everyone was scared in the early eighties in Manhattan when there was so little information about the disease. I was scared, too, for myself, because at that point in the trajectory of the epidemic, no one understood exactly how the disease could be contracted.

But the worst part for me on a personal level came later. I was most terrified at the thought of losing people close to me. I lost several of them. I feared the potential loss of one of them in particular. I prayed every single night for years that he would be okay and I made several bargains with the Lord on that one. He is still living. I don’t think he survived because of my prayers and bargains (although I am grateful that he did), but rather because he was able to hang on long enough to get the stronger drug cocktails they have now that control it. There is some perverse irony and humor in my friend being an ornery personality. I have no doubt whatsoever that if he had suspected I was praying for him and making “survival” bargains on his behalf, he would have gone right ahead and died just to spite me.

Another excruciating aspect was the good-bye conversation. I had several of those, where people I had known for years bade me farewell, making pronouncements that took on apocalyptic tones in retrospect. “You have to try to do everything, Katherine, don’t let the bums get you down,” one of my friends admonished me in one such parting conversation. Another one observed in painful, slowed speech in the hospice where he was spending his final days that what he liked about me best was that “you are always a lady, and always so kind to everyone.” I seemed to lose my ability to verbalize at moments like that when I could have used it the most. And always, always, there were the people who were left behind. There was one practice where the coach who was rehearsing me had valiantly come in to work right after losing his lover. He started to cry during the practice session, and we both just gave up. I sat next to him and held his hand while he cried, and that was the rehearsal. I wished I could have made it better. Maybe I helped a little bit, because where we were (not New York City anymore) was not a place where you could easily bring up the topics of either homosexuality or AIDS, which immeasurably complicated the grieving process.

I remained mute for decades about the whole experience of losing that many people and living through a plague. No one understood if I did talk about it, even after the epidemic had subsided. They would still look at me funny, as though I might have it myself. If someone had a cold during the eighties in my little corner of the world, it was not uncommon to hear that they had died shortly afterwards. I had terrible hypochondria for years because I was traumatized by the suddenness and repetitiveness of those disappearances, which were possessed of the flat finality of granite. I came to forget what had triggered my hypochondria, and when I remembered again one day out of the clear blue, I got a shock.

What is awful now is that young people today have no conception of what it was like or what was lost: the people, the talent and the teachers. They also, perhaps not least, have no idea of how much trauma there remains in those of us who lived through it and didn’t die, those of us who are still walking around and remember all the people who did die. I don’t want anyone else to suffer through that the way we did in the eighties and well into the nineties, but it is important to comprehend what happened to us, too. It is also of paramount importance to understand certain things about this disease, in order to prevent it from happening again. Just because HIV/AIDS is considered a manageable condition now, doesn’t mean it is much fun to have, or that one should be careless about getting it. The light at the end of this sulfurous tunnel was a massive paradigm shift. A shift to a happier place (all relative, of course), where you can have normal everyday disagreements with a friend who has HIV, instead of being horribly aware that they might not be around for long and must therefore be treated with kid gloves, like angels-in-waiting hovering around a hellish airline gate.

Thank goodness for people like Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana. In the darkest hours, they made it less frightening. They showed everyone that you could interact with people living with HIV and AIDS, and they brought the disease out into the open so that there could be progress and research.

Some stray feral kittens and cats adopted me eight years ago. There is a theory that sometimes people reincarnate as animals, and I have often wondered if any of my cats are the souls of people I knew who have come back to me. I hope they are. Perhaps it is not quite as glamorous and “happening” as their previous go-round, but they have a loving and quiet life with me and they could have fared a lot worse.

As for myself, I walk around with an army of ghosts. I am like that kid in "The Sixth Sense.” I see dead people.

--Katherine Healy

   April 2, 2011