Feb 28, 2001 My little dog Lucy and I left NYC to move to Paris.
Changing Your Life
I am asked quite frequently why I moved my life over to the other side of the Atlantic. I am always at a loss as to how I can answer this question with originality, while holding to the sincerity still there in my heart after all these years living here.
“I wanted to change my life.” Then the inquirer waits for the other shoe to drop. How do you convey that it would take hours and then some to explain, that this is a very personal question, that there would be so many shoes dropping on them if they really wanted to know......
A Yoga Teacher
Years of offering Teacher Trainings at the Centre de Yoga du Marais in Paris allows me to say this introductory phrase which I never tire of,
Fasten your seat belts, because what you have wanted to manifest is being put into operation. Just as in the expression, ‘be careful what you wish for because you will get it.’
With the power of the teachings and the strength and knowledge of the teachers transmitting them, a shift happens. One takes a Teacher Training to first dive deeper into his or her own practice, the rest of the story unfolds with Grace. If you are meant to teach, you will teach. If it is meant to be, you will discover Grace in the most unexpected and then yes, truly obvious ways.
June 2000
My teachers were wonderful and are dear friends to this day. I was so nervous teaching my final class. Friends came to support me. It was June and much of the nervousness and excitement was encapsulated in the fact that I was getting ready for my third annual trip to Paris with a stop at my mom’s in Germany and a visit to Michele in Trieste on the way. I was leaving New York for quite some time and again, my friends stepped in to care for Lucy for me.
Leaving her always broke my heart. I hated the handoff. She had seen the suitcase before and snuggled anticipating another plane trip which she loved. But ultimately, when the leash was handed off to my friend and she knew for sure that she was not coming with me, she pulled against her collar toward me and when my friends walked away, she dug in her 4 paws and said if I’m leaving her, you will have to drag my nails the whole way. I hated that, her role was to be by my side. We always knew our pact.
Of
course I was always back for her and forever hope that deep down dogs know
that. I came back with the news that I secured an apartment in Paris for us. I
found a place, a tiny flat like the fellas and I used to find in flyers, peruse
and fantasize about. The guys, Steve and Ed backed out but I decided to do this
on my own, fasten your seatbelts. If you want it, it will present itself to
you. I loved the little place, it was only the third apartment I saw and when
the agent opened the door of the top floor apartment and I saw the sky windows
in 2 rooms, yes, 2 rooms, with a door between them, I said, Yes!, accepting the asking price. I had my checkbook and they took a check drawn from an American bank.
The details I would work out later. Something was moving me forward.
I came back to New York mid-July, I was in love with my Italian boyfriend, I had an apartment in Paris, France just won the World Cup, the mood was jubilant all the way around.
I had only graduated from an Intensive Yoga Study, YTT 6 weeks before, life was speeding up even faster.
Once
my offer was approved, my father told me from Australia that he would help me
with financing the balance, I said I would pay back every penny, I had renters
interested in the flat and I would start the bedrock of my imminent move to
France. The future came in on fiery heels.
My
renters backed out at the last minute.
My dad said after my first payment to him, that he wanted to give me the rest of the apartment.
Michele was coming to visit me in New York.
My Wall street job
did not renew my contract for 2001. All this happened in a week.
Finally, the push that moved me abroad sooner than I ever anticipated, the 2000U.S. presidential election.
We
are the body politic, life is political, if you are a citizen in a governed
society, you are political by definition. There is no such thing as being
apolitical. This election bruised me. I saw division in my country like I never experienced
before. The systemic injustice of our electoral college. How one citizen one
vote doesn't work out.
Florida.
Falling chads. Re-districting, re-counts, refusals to recount and the coup de
grace, the Supreme Court steps in after 6 weeks of confusion and chaos to call
the election, the Supreme Court chose our next president, not We the People. I
was angry, fed-up, emotionally exhausted and ready to leave. Immediately after the November Tuesday, I applied for permission to come to France to
ultimately ask for a longue séjour. At the French Consulate on Park Avenue, my
fonctionaire told me he was getting ready to retire and this was his last tour.
I said I want to retire, too, he said I was too young.
‑‑What else do you have?
‑‑Political asylum.
--Take a number. You have no idea how many applications I am getting from the tri-State area who want to leave.
--I’m a dancer, I have taught tap dance workshops in Paris.
--OK
That was it, that was my entrée.
I filed, I waited, I decided regardless of the outcome, I was leaving anyway and I would go by tourist visa length to tourist visa length, I always had my mom in Germany to go to. But I needn’t have worried because on February 14th, my visa was approved. I had pre-booked my flight for Feb 28, and now I could go with visa in hand, I was on my way.
Lucy and I moved into our small deux-pièce on March 1, 2001.
{Insert here}
Mom took the train in from Germany to see me and watch Lucy because Michele invited me down to meet him while he was managing a production in Milan. It was March 19, it was his birthday. Over dinner at the Galleria at the Duomo, he gave me a ring.
On
the anniversary of my YTT, I received the news that I could take over the whole
tap program at the well-known Centre de Danse du Marais, I would begin the
children’s program in the rentreé in September. I had my Michele, an apartment,
a job I came here to do. A beautiful summer to spend in Italy with my fiancé. Life looked pretty rosey.
I want to take notice of things.
NYC The final years and the ever growing list of reasons I want to move.
I loved returning home to Germany to see my mom and visit my friends in Stuttgart.
I loved walking the streets of London for the first time, but most of all, I loved Paris.
When I auditioned for Maguy Marin on a brief trip to Paris in 1988, I stayed in a gritty area near Place de la République, danced in some grimy studios at Place de Clichy, walked the sublime boulevards, discovered tiny neighborhoods with even tinier streets and I knew I was going to return. I didn’t get a contract to dance in Paris, but I had a nice one in Stuttgart and shelved this idea for sometime in my future. I stayed in Germany another 2 years before returning to NY.
By the late 90’s I was restless, Lucy and I were running, all over the place, she constantly at my side, at rehearsals, in dance classes, she was actually cast once in a regional theater production of Camelot as Mordred’s flea-bitten dog. She scratched her fleas on cue-a complete accident, the audience roared, the actors completely upstaged. Turned out Lucy really did have fleas. I was too busy to notice. Too busy to notice as well that 40 was around the corner. Always running.
Running a loop around Central Park I saw a sign-up sheet for Fred’s Team, a fund raising initiative for cancer research to benefit the work at Sloan Kettering. The runner was required to raise 3000USD to be on the team which would run the marathon in Paris. Fred’s Team would take care of the rest, flight, hotels, marathon registration, etc. At last, I thought, running around for a purpose. Fred’s Team was named after Fred Lebow who fought valiantly against leukemia. He was determined to use running as a means to fight the disease. Lebow was treated at Sloan Kettering, but eventually lost the fight in 1994 to a brain tumor.
I started to share the news of Fred's Team with friends and colleagues. Two of my closest friends signed up and they in turn incentivized other friends as well.. It was a chain of goodwill that eventually circled around my friend Steve’s niece who was diagnosed, as a toddler, also with leukemia. The care she got at Sloan Kettering saved her life.
Lucy could not go to Paris with me, friends who loved her once again stepped in to help me. My friend Judith’s daughter asked her family --since Michelle needs to travel so much, maybe she will just give her to us? Was I taking notice of things?
Edmund, Steve and I ran the Paris Marathon together, it was 1998. It has to be the most beautiful city marathon in the world. How can it not be? You begin down the cobble stones of the Champs Elysees, it is April, you run down rue de Rivoli and circle the Place de la Bastille filled with cheerleaders handing out fresh oranges, live music and more cobblestones, you run the whole Bois de Vincennes come out to circle the Bastille again, run along the Seine through the posh neighborhood of Passy until the final stretch through the Bois de Boulogne and finish at the Arc de Triomphe. The city is beneath your footsteps. I was smitten. I can fall just as hard for a place as a lover. This relationship is now serious.
My friends/teammates bring up this crazy idea, “’Look how affordable this city is compared to New York, look at the prices of small apartments? Wouldn’t it be fun to have a place to come to?” Our remaining days in Paris we can hardly walk, we are far from seasoned marathoners and we sit in cafes dreaming about a little pied de terre. My pals and I look at the absolute possibility of it becoming true if we go in it together, à trois.
Back in NY my heart is already over there and now I want to figure this out.
I want to live a happy life.
I want to listen to what you just said.
I want to take notice of things.
Have animals teach me,
Have children reach me....
These affirmations go on, but I can’t remember the rest of them, it was taped to my door since my high school days where I grew up in San Diego, the little poem followed me to UCLA and then when I moved to NYC it got lost somewhere and I don’t know the source, just that these opening lines are etched in me. I continue to add lines as my life lengthens, grows more complex, richer and deeper.
Following the 1998 marathon and staring down the face of 40, I decided my auditioning days are over, what does my life look like now as a grown-up? What kind of work do I want to do, what is meaningful to me? I asked these questions to my colleagues and friends and said what if we were to create something that simply came from what we always wanted to do, something not imposed upon us because we need to pay the bills, or perform something that does not speak to our sensibilities or even ethics?
We created a show called Wishes and Dreams. It was an
innocent time and we had a wonderful time being who we were together. It was a
cast of friends from past shows, our version of the “Gypsies”, the time honored
fashion in musical theater when singers, hoofers, actors and dancers were on
call and would happily jump in to fill a cast.
This community loves the rehearsal process even more than
the show and this time is so special to me, we had a fabulous time together
1999 can best be
described as a frenzy of projection. Y2K, what will happen when the computers
don’t roll over to 00? Planes will crash in the sky. The markets will collapse,
what will happen to the banking industry? The
doomsayers were out in full force. It was nuts. My boyfriend at the time
broke up with me because he said he had to devote his energies to safe-guarding
the firewall at work.
Of course he did.
As things got more tumultuous, I went quiet and deeper inside. I want to live a simple life, I want to leave here, have a tiny apartment in Paris with Lucy, be where I feel simple.
Among my friends in NYC was a large French family of eight. They had been relocated to the U.S. from Paris, a corporate transfer, a long stay. My friend and three of her six children were in my tap classes. They thought it charming and amusing how I would want to leave this fabulous boisterous city, give up what I have and have worked so long for to move to Paris. Be that as it may, if I needed a place to stay while I am working this all out, they would like to help me. When I am in Paris I can stay with the children’s grandparents. I stayed with the Michelins for a couple of weeks one summer, spent an Easter holiday with the whole family, went back the following summer to seriously look at apartments and see what it would be like to live over there. I taught tap workshops and mostly volunteered to sub for classes to help get my foot in the door as a dancer and dance teacher. I was taking this in earnest, my friends whose idea this was in the first place were intrigued, but it was clear that I was going to be doing this on my own.
Back to NY from my little workshop in Paris,
it was August, the news was awful
JFK Jr's plane went down in the Atlantic on the way to the Cape, his wife Caroline and his wife’s sister, all of them together. One of my students hiking in the Colorado Rockies was struck by lightening, out of a literally clear blue sky. The week of his funeral, I come home to a little light flashing on my answering machine. “It’s Michele here, I am a friend of Dino’s and he kindly gave me your number, would you like to have a coffee with me.” That's nice. Dino, I met through one of my running friends, he was Michele's cousin.
I liked his voice, his Italian accent, it was a hot August, New York was empty and quiet. Yes, a coffee would be very nice.
That’s how it started, conversation, a walk, a feeling of contentment, it was just a meeting, this was nice and he was going to go back on a plane to Trieste and September will come and life goes on.
But Michele didn’t leave, we stayed on each other’s minds. He got an email address, we wrote so many letters, shared our stories long distance, he sent faxes with cute drawings from the machine in his dad’s office. Something was up, This was special, we loved to write letters.
Michele worked on his theater projects, I worked on my next one, Stepping Over a Century, which was my creative reaction to the mania over the impending close of the year, the decade, the century, no, the millennium, which is not really beginning at 00, but 01, but who is counting, who cares?. It’s a race for ratings on 24-hour news channels and the media has roped everyone in on the hysteria as well. For the New Year, my friend Melanie and I go to the local mountains to ski and get away from the noise. I followed the new year, decade, century, dawning from New Zealand all the way to California, around the world on TV. It was beautiful. I thought of Michele.
I had been a fairly regular yoga student for 6 years, my teachers were asking me as they had previously before the dawn of this new year, 2000, would I like to take the Teacher Training, my answer is always the same. Yoga is what I do for me, I teach so many things, I come to the mat to learn, to receive, to put my antenna up, to be one with me for 90 minutes.
Then something else happened. One of the Wall Street executives that takes German language lessons offers me something. Tom is one of the handful of most dedicated German students at Dresdner Bank. His exact words were, "I realize that you outside contractors get no bonuses, I know how small business work, my job is their financing, and I know what it takes to keep one afloat. We on this end have bonuses of embarrassing sizes. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable with what I would like to offer you from my bonus, but since it is more than I would have ever expected and since you are a source of my well-being in this job, I would like to share some of this bonus with you.”
It did feel awkward to me, kind of reckless, worthy of
careful consideration, mostly I weighed the consequences on his feelings if I
refused.
I accepted with a shyness but hearty dose of gratitude
and thought the best thing to do with generosity is pay it forward, I looked at
the check, it was the exact amount of the Yoga Teacher Training, I enrolled.
