Dancing in the Light (2 page)

Mercifully, Christopher wheeled in the birthday cake (I had asked for carrot—my favorite), and as I blew out the candles I found myself struggling with how to thank everyone. I stared down at the cake for some time. The room was silent. I was deeply touched by the tributes of these, my dearest friends and colleagues, and was having trouble clearing my throat. Also I wanted very much to say something meaningful, for this was indeed a special occasion, a special time for me, a special outpouring of love.
Then I got a picture in my mind and spoke it out loud—after I blew my nose. “Friendship is like a ship on the horizon,” I said. “You see it etched against the sky, and then as it moves on, the ship dips out of your vision, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Friendship is not linear. It moves in all directions, teaching us about ourselves and each other.

“That’s why, over the period of long friendships, as with most of the people in this room, we are there for each other, even if we are not always seen.” I wanted to say more, but choked up and so came to a stop. And discovered I was very hungry as we all plowed into white asparagus in pastry shells, roast veal, green vegetables I had never heard of, morel mushrooms, and mixed salad with herbs only a health food store would recognize, all topped off with that divine carrot cake.

Dinner over, we repaired to the public rooms to join a cast of apparently thousands thronging the nave of the ex-church. From a floodlit balcony overlooking the milling, shouting, cheering, singing audience we watched delightedly as a roster of extraordinary entertainers joyfully tore the night apart.

I definitely was treated to a coruscating birthday in a Love and Light temple out of one of my old Atlantean lifetimes!

I gazed out at Welfare Island as I thought about the night before, wondering what other people’s perceptions of the party had been. I always loved to speculate on whether others were seeing through their eyes what I was seeing through mine. Truth and reality were so relative, I mused, residing only in the mind’s eye. I wondered how others felt about being fifty. Did they look back and inward as much as I, wondering how life to that point had happened? Did others also speculate on lives they might have led before which brought them to the life they were leading now?

I rolled over and lifted my legs out of bed—my
dancer’s legs—my two-shows-a-day-on-the-weekend legs—my twenty-five-years-apiece legs. I knew the reality of these legs in this life, this morning, all right. They were killing me. They needed a hot shower to make a transition into a less painful reality.

Jesus, I thought as I shuffled like a fifty-year-old toward the bathroom, was pain real or something I just figured I should have because I was working hard and was half a hundred years old?

I looked full-face into the mirror. Pretty good, I thought. Clear, translucent-pink skin ever since my last hicky disintegrated just before my daughter, Sachi, was born, and hardly any wrinkles, except the laugh lines sprinkled around the eyes which I considered my badges of positive thinking. I tilted my head downward slightly so I could observe the part in my hairline. Did I need a touch-up; how visible was my own streaked red hair from Clairol’s version? It was fine. I had another week or two. My mind flashed to the pared-down basics I enjoyed when traveling, out of touch with the technology of twentieth-century beauty aids, and challenged to rely on my own resources. The experience of living in huts in the Himalayas, or the Andes of Peru, or in tents on the plains of Africa, or in shacks in the backwoods of the American South, was etched in my memory—a sharp contrast to the life I was leading now in New York as a musical-comedy performer in my own show at the Gershwin Theater.

I flipped the shower curtain closed and turned on the hot water. Hot water is a dancer’s trump card. I hadn’t learned how important it was to me until the last ten years. It worked liquid miracles on the body. And fast too. I didn’t have to contend with the scheduling of the eucalyptus steam room in a health club. I had an immediate hot, wet therapy in my own bathroom as long as I knew how to use it.

I checked the positions of my four quartz crystals sitting on each corner of the tub. I had been
learning to work with the power of crystals and that discipline had become part of my daily life. I stepped into the tub and let the steaming water run over my face, hair, and body. I could feel the sleep congestion in my chest loosen up and the muscles along my spinal column become more pliable. I did a quick chiropractic back adjustment, feeling the vertebrae slip into place, and breathed deeply, inhaling and exhaling the steam about ten times. I leaned over and poured some sea salt into a warm glass of shower water and began another disciplined ritual which I did every day. I put my nose to the edge of the glass and sniffed in the salt water. My grandmother, and several other people’s grandmothers, had used this method to purify the nasal, throat, and sinus tracts. It worked, too, as far as I was concerned. Whenever I did happen to catch a rare cold, sniffing the salt water usually nipped the cold in the bud the first day. Natural, holistic approaches worked better for me than medicines or drugs. In fact, I no longer had a family doctor. Experience had taught me that orthodox Western medicine relied far too heavily on drugs.

I touched my thumbs and forefingers together and prepared to do my chanting mantras. By closing the thumb and forefinger together, the energy circulated through my body in a cycle, nourishing each cell as the frequency of the sound waves of my chanting increased. I loved the feeling of sound waves coursing through my body. I had first understood the power of the frequency of sound when I began singing lessons years ago. The vocalizing during warm-ups actually made my body feel more aligned than before. Physical therapists had used diathermy (circulated sound waves) on any injury I had incurred as a dancer. It was quite effective. So it made sense to me that one could use sound therapy on oneself without a machine by simply chanting as the Hindus have done in their temples for centuries, or, for that matter, as thousands of people have done,
joyously caroling in bathtub and shower for generations, ever since plumbing was adopted by the West. And no doubt the Romans did it too.

As I chanted my Hindu mantras I visualized white light flowing through my bloodstream. It made me feel centered and balanced. I had learned to draw in white light that I visualized coming from some source above me, and with the sound vibrating through my body, the light traveled through me causing a sensation of calm alignment. I had no doubts about what the AMA would think of my morning discipline as a contribution to maintaining health, but some members of even that august body were using visualization techniques with their terminally ill patients—when there was nothing to lose.

I rubbed some salt on my throat and down the front of my chest. Salt is a basic purifier. Nature knows what it is doing. Any negative energy I was carrying from the tumult of the night before I would purify while chanting with the salt. Again, it might nave seemed “new age” faddistic, but it worked for me.

I chanted and visualized the white light for about five minutes. That’s all it took. Five minutes out of my morning life every day. I don’t think I would have continued with these techniques if I hadn’t gotten practical, functional, concrete, solid results from them. I have always been a pragmatic person. When you’re trained as a dancer, you have to be.

Your orientation is earthbound because pain is a reality you live with. Dancing, using the body in creative ways, is one of the oldest arts known to man. But sophisticated forms force and strain the body, challenging its apparent limitations to become unlimited. A good dancer always knows that challenge to the capability of the body involves far more than an orientation to the physical. A superb athlete always understands that there is a dimension of mind and spirit necessary to realize the full potential of the body. So,
esoteric, holistic, mysticism
, might be
words that sound unpragmatic, but when translated into physical terms, the practitioner understands that he or she is simply learning how to use invisible energies to their best advantage.

I stepped out of the shower. The phone rang. People seemed to know when I was up. I let it ring until the service picked it up. I had learned how a simple phone call could interrupt the alignment of energies for the rest of the day. If I waited until I finished, all news was good news.

I put on my yoga tape and began my twenty-five postures, feeling the pliability from the hot shower elongate my muscles. The yoga took about fifty minutes, or seven more phone calls, to complete. I felt energized and proud of myself that I had not been seduced by contact from the outside world.

Now I was ready. I called my service and picked up many messages; among them, that my publisher (Bantam) was expecting to give me a birthday present. They hoped that afternoon would be suitable.

I dressed and went downstairs to the living room. Sachi and my friends Sandy and Dennis Kucinich were out.

I felt neglected because no one was there to wish me a real happy birthday. Spoiled rotten, I thought to myself, after the lavishing of affection the night before.

Simo walked into the living room from the kitchen with a dish of his homemade apple compote and a cup of decaf coffee. Simo worked for me. He did everything. He was my friend, runner of the household, and companion in spiritual quest. We had met through the metaphysical community in Manhattan, and the spiritual path he was treading had reoriented his life as much as it had mine. He just laughed wisely when I introduced him as my wife, because before he came to work for me, I had said, “Look, what I need is a wife in every respect but the bedroom.” He had said, “I’m your man. I’ve
always wanted to take care of someone.” So that’s the way it was with us.

“So, did you sleep after all that last night?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

He shook his head, and his tummy jiggled up and down as he laughed and joked about what had happened.

“You know,” he said, slowly rocking on his heels, looking up at the ceiling as though he could snare some elusive thought up there. “You know,” he murmured again, “they just wanted to touch you to remind themselves that somebody like you is real, didn’t they?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well,” said Simo, “Christopher said the same thing. After everything that has happened to you over the past year, people wanted to see for themselves that you were not an illusion, not a myth. That you had a wart or two and still, as they say, put on your pants one leg at a time.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “I guess that’s why celebrities are hot items. We’re some kind of symbol that anything is possible—good or bad.”

“It’s everything,” said Simo. “Your Oscar, the success of all that stuff you’re talking about in
Out on a Limb.
How it’s so obviously working for you on the stage with this hit show. They feel you have an answer they would like to be a part of. And the people that said you didn’t have all your paddles in the water a year ago are beginning to wonder what they might have missed.”

I smiled to myself. Gloating was not one of my things. In fact, I despised it. I could never stand people who said, “I told you so,” to me, so I wasn’t about to do it to anyone else. I didn’t even like I-told-you-so’s when they agreed with me. It is so prejudicial and self-serving and ultimately arrogant.

Simo picked up some dirty napkins from the
coffee table and put one hand on his hip. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know. My former friends who thought I was weird because I understood it are really hard for me to communicate with now. We don’t have anything to say to each other.” He hesitated a moment. “But then,” he went on, “there are others who are beginning to see what I was talking about, and I find it easier to be with them.” He walked into the kitchen.

I looked out the window down First Avenue. It seemed so simple to me, as it did to Simo or to any of us who were pursuing our self-search from a karmic point of view.
The concrete difference between the karmic spiritual perspective and the earth plane, “prove it,” materialistic perspective was self-responsibility.
When we realized
we
were responsible for everything that happened to us, we could get on with living in a positive and contributive way. And that went for everything, whether it was a love affair, a death, a lost job, or a disease.
We
choose to have these experiences in order to learn from them—and to me, that is what life is about: learning. Learning and enjoying the knowledge that life is all about lessons.

I remembered how I had felt just prior to the publication of
Out on a Limb.
A few of my friends had said it would be a “career buster.” Was it really necessary to be so public about my beliefs? Couldn’t I have them in private just as well?

I’d thought a lot about that. Of course I could have safely kept my thoughts and feelings to myself. But my life had been about expression. From the time I was three years old, I was attending dancing classes because I loved to express myself physically. And when, as a teenager, I went from dancing to singing and musical comedy, that expanded experience was a natural and logical extension of self-expression.

When I carried expression even further, into acting, I felt a different kind of joy, the delight of becoming more specific through the use of words
and language, which painted a more detailed portrait than song and dance could accomplish. I loved the intricate mystery of being another character, sorting out background and motivation and meaning, exploring my own feelings and thoughts in relation to this new person.

Writing became, yet again, another logical and natural extension of understanding and explaining my thoughts and feelings, of trying to understand the thoughts and feelings of others.

When my internal explorations began to take a metaphysical and spiritual turn, I felt, at first, that this was a purely private matter, a curiosity, something which I would write about only for myself. But then the discoveries I was making began to take on significance and importance not only for me, personally, but as a philosophy with a power of its own. To sit on my fresh awareness would have meant curbing the expression of a whole set of concepts new and vital in my experience. For me, such repression would be tantamount to paralysis. I could not have lived with myself if I had failed to write, or had calculated my writing according to what the market would bear. I would then have been living my life to the dictates of some amorphous public “image.” And
that
was not in my lexicon of behavior.