Crossing Social Borders

As a child I wanted to be a great ballerina. I was told I started dancing to the music my mother played on the piano before I started walking.

The world I came from: I went to a NYC public Junior High School, in which the principal would address us every day over the sputtering PA system, warning us that anyone caught with a garrison belt, brass knuckles or a switchblade knife would be immediately expelled.

The candy store across the street sold "candy" (aka heroin) to students. The first time I went to the girls’ bathroom I saw 2 girls shooting up. I immediately left and refused to use any bathrooms in that school thereafter. I developed an extraordinary bladder control as a result.

My whole focus was on my dance training and choreography. Before I was 13 I went to the music teacher and said I wanted to put on a ballet for the school. He liked the idea and got permission from the principal. I was able to find 5 students who wanted to be part of it. I decided to do my own version of Coppelia and choreographed each person’s part according to their abilities.  We made stage sets and made our own costumes. And I produced and performed the ballet for the whole school in the auditorium.

It was a bit crazy to put on a ballet in a school where the principal was trying to keep the gangs (all over the City then) out of his school. To my surprise everyone stopped calling me "Weirdo" and then started telling me "Wow you really can dance."

I tried out for Performing Arts but was rejected for being too tall ("No male dancers will be tall enough for you.")  I was angry because the female head of the dance department was over 6 feet tall and because of the assumption that a woman can only dance if she has a partner.

So, my mother had me apply to Northfield. I liked the campus and was assured there would be opportunities for me to dance.

I arrived at the dorm, a stranger in a strange land. But, in spite of my "rough NYC" background, I was soon engaged with my classmates and loved the classes and teachers, who expected us to learn and think for ourselves. We were engaged in dynamic and stimulating discussions. The beautiful campus and the conversations awakened my spiritual awareness. I fell in love with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and loved reciting the Prologue, which we had to memorize.  The beautiful campus, the music and daily "quiet time" were a blessing for me.

Freshman year we had the 2^nd pandemic of the 20^th Century, during which the vertically sick took care of those who were too sick to move about. And there was the blizzard in January, when we returned after Christmas break, that dropped several feet of snow on the campus, making walking to classes through the plowed tunnel-like pathways a deep-freeze challenge. Yet we didn’t complain about the cold. (It got down into the -20’s).

Northfield gave me a good command of the English language, life-long friends that I value, and the experience of living on a beautiful campus and singing in Sacred Concert. I am very grateful for all that I learned and experienced (even in the restrictive atmosphere of the 1950s). Freshman year was the year of Sputnik, humanity’s venture into space. I remember running outside in my "dummy" smock after scrubbing tins in the dorm kitchen and looking up into the sky, hoping to catch a sight of Sputnik crossing over the US at that time.

We were also among the first generation of women who had to break out of the "keep the women home" culture and navigate the primarily male world of job hunting in the corporate world. It was a time of great transition.