Chapter 12 Metatarsal #5
TWELVE
I was riding the Anchorman high when the chance to be in the musical came my way.
It doesn’t matter who you are, though—you don’t just jump into that role.
Charity Hope Valentine, “the girl who wanted to be loved,” is a character who barely ever leaves the stage.
If you’re not dancing as Charity, you’re dancing and singing.
And if you’re not dancing and singing, you’re acting and crying and trying to make people laugh, all at the same time.
It’s one of the hardest roles in all of Broadway, and certainly the hardest I had ever done.
I wanted it. Dance had been my number one love, all my life, and this was my chance to do what I’d been working toward since childhood.
I started in the prestigious Julie O’Connell Dancers at age ten and danced with them for the next five or six years. We did tap, ballet, jazz—everything. If ever I was depressed, my mom would say, “When was the last time you went to class? It’s been a week? That’s why. You need to go.”
It was the 1980s, so we wore neon unitards, leg warmers up to our thighs, headbands, and wide belts.
We danced to eighties pop, some of which was pretty terrible (here’s looking at you, “Neutron Dance”).
Then, one day, I was walking through the Debbie Reynolds Studios in North Hollywood, where we rehearsed, when I heard a very different kind of music coming from one of the other studios: Studio F.
I think it was a Melissa Etheridge song, but whatever it was, it was a siren call to me.
I peeked in to watch, and my whole body froze.
What is this? I thought.
Leading the class was a dancer named Doug Caldwell.
Doug’s work mixed ballet and modern, though I’m loath to use the word “modern” because that is its own thing.
Doug’s style was something entirely new: fluid and beautiful, with every fingertip, every part of the body, emotionally in tune.
Here was a man doing something that was filled with passion and love and spirituality.
Doug had been a ballet dancer, but he didn’t have the best turn-out, so he switched to choreography and teaching. It was the same story as Bob Fosse, who also had horrible turn-out. He’d pivoted to create his mind-bending dance filled with uncanny turn-in and angular poses, an art form all its own.
Doug Caldwell had invented an entirely new and beautiful form of expression, too, a place where balletic and modern met, but not flexed-foot modern.
He drew gorgeous lines, which led to what was known as “the reach.” Lyrical, as Doug’s creation would come to be known, would eventually lead to contemporary, which is now the big thing.
Back in the mid-eighties, lyrical was just getting started as a dance form all its own.
I could feel the soul through every movement the dancers made, the arms reaching for something, a yearning in the body that amplified the inner yearnings we dancers so often carried.
I was hooked instantly.
I found Julie O’Connell the next day, determined to chase this new art form. “I have to do this other thing now,” I said. She understood and gave me her blessing.
I was fifteen years old.
Going to class with Doug was church for me, for all of us—eventually we’d actually call it “church.” Doug’s dancers stuck with him for years.
We would see the young ones come in and stay, and then more young ones, and more.
But there was a core group of us that had always been there, each with our own spot for his warm-ups.
If anyone even put their towel down near my spot, or any of our spots, we’d pick it up and move it.
This is my spot, I’d think. I was always to the left of the mirror, first row.
That was my spot for thirty years of dance with Doug Caldwell, from sixteen to my mid-forties.
I had started dancing when I was three and have been in dance classes ever since, often for twenty-five hours a week in the summers when I wasn’t acting.
I loved it. It was life. I would eat a huge bowl of pasta Parmesan to get the carbs.
Sometimes I’d go to work at Married… with Children, leave, and head straight to dance class until eleven o’clock at night. It saved me.
Some days I’d take as many as five classes: Doug’s class, Alex Magno’s class, and three others. I relished Alex’s technical and challenging warm-ups. He was a Brazilian dance teacher, and his class was all sensuality. When I was older, I’d act as his assistant, modeling the warm-up for everyone.
But Doug was where my heart lay. And he loved me.
Once there was one perfect technician in our class—every t was crossed and i dotted.
I’ll always remember what Doug said about me, though, while referencing this dancing technician: “Christina is not the best technician, but she’s the only person I want to watch in class. ” I still hold those words close.
I wasn’t a technician and was never fully a ballerina either, but I knew how to move, and I like to think that my lines were beautiful and my reach expressive.
I went to Doug’s class at Studio F when I was feeling sad and wanted to be happier, or sad and wanted to be sadder, or happy and wanted to be happier.
There I was able to release the pain I was feeling in my life.
I was there for myself and for my heart, for my soul, for my spirit.
I did that for thirty years with this man, and with Alex.
Every movement Doug made expressed his soul, and that’s what I wanted to replicate in my own dancing.
He listened to every tick, every boom, every sound, every breath of the music, and danced accordingly.
There was so much crying in that class, and it was never performative, not once. It was real and true.
Some nights, after years of building a friendship, we’d go to his house after class to drink red wine and watch So You Think You Can Dance. Once the show was over, we would dance again for hours, even though we’d already had a three-hour class.
Doug’s dance room was part of his carpeted living room, and we would freestyle and do floor work. I would sometimes look down to find that the entire top of my foot was bleeding from the carpet, but I didn’t care.
I still have scars on my feet from those nights. I loved being around that bunch of dancers, around Doug. I love dancers. I love their whole world. It is my world.
Or was.
I was a damn good dancer. Damn good. I wasn’t a technician, but yes, I think I could dance.
As for Doug, well, he knew chronic pain, too. When you dance all day, every day, and teach conventions all over the world, you’re going to hurt everywhere. As he got older, his pain only grew.
One day I got a voicemail from him.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m doing so good. Can’t wait to see you. I miss you and can’t wait to see Sadie.”
Sadie too had loved his classes. I remember picking her up from her first lyrical class, and she said, “Mom, I know what you’ve been talking about, and I know what Doug has been talking about. I almost cried while I was dancing.”
I texted Doug immediately: “Shit, well done.”
I listened to his voicemail and made a mental note to call him. But before I got the chance, a friend texted me, “Have you talked to Doug?” After I texted no, he texted back, “He’s dead.”
I lost it. I didn’t stop crying for a week.
I still have his last voicemail, the call I never got to return. I keep saving it so I don’t lose it. But I will never return it, never tell him once again how much that reach expresses something fundamental about me, something deep in my soul that can only be touched by dance.
Dance was everything to me, and the chance to dance on Broadway? I could not let this pass me by.
Every single detail of what happened next is burned into my mind because it was the most devastating thing I’ve ever been through—and yes, I can say that even knowing everything else I’ve been through.
It is Chicago, March 5, 2005. I have auditioned and been offered the role of a lifetime, and now I am in the Windy City preparing for previews before heading to Broadway.
It is the first night of previews. My mom has flown in, my sister, and my best friend, too.
My family who live in the Midwest are all there.
Before the show, I am standing onstage behind the curtain with everyone in the cast—usually we do funny things to get us loose and then circle up.
This night, though, I simply say, “Guys, tonight is really important to me. My whole family is here.” They understand.
Then I’m standing stage right in the wings while the cast does “Big Spender,” one of the few numbers Charity Hope Valentine is not in.
My job is to run out near the end and twirl around a lamppost in the center of the stage.
At some point in the scene, I have to fall into a lake—which is just a big hole in the stage where the stage manager squirts me with water.
I am wearing difficult, clunky shoes, not my dance shoes, because regular dance shoes would get ruined.
I come back up and then go back down again, more water, back up. The secrets of live theater, folks!
I come out onto the stage to do my part, the music starts, I run to the lamppost, take a step, and my heel goes off to the side and…
SNAP!
That is a bone.
Oh my god.
I’m alone on the stage. And my first line?
“You ever have one of those days?”
I look down, and my foot is coming out of the shoe sideways.
My friend Tyler Hanes, who plays Charlie, comes out and I’m dancing around him while internally flipping out.
I know something is seriously wrong. Tyler pushes me into the “lake,” where I find Beverly Jenkins—who is, by the way, one of the few stage managers to ever get an honorary Tony Award—waiting there with the water bottle, ready to drench me.