Although I found myself in high school as a dancer and choreographer, and as a creative, I stumbled before and through college.
Although I kept doggedly pursuing creative interests, I lost the sense of creative community support I had in high school. I struggled to find community, or support, or guidance, or a path into more interesting and expansive opportunities. I let other voices, outside voices, pull me away from the choices that were more directly connected to my creative longings.
My father’s dream had been to spend a year in Paris before college but he was called up to Oxford and I guess in that time and place you didn’t just say “no thanks, how about next year?”. So when I failed to get into my top choice schools (Yale, Harvard – where I was a legacy, and Brown), my parents proposed that I spend a year in Paris and try again the next year. I was only just 17, and they felt I could use another year to mature before starting college.
The truth was that I was feeling lost. Despite good grades and being in the top 10% of my class, I’d failed to get in to a prestigious college. A year in Paris sounded like an exciting thing to tell people I’d done, and I spoke good, if not fluent, French. And I would be fulfilling a dream of my father’s, which probably had a deeper pull on me than I realized, so I said yes.
It’s funny now to consider that my parents thought I was too young to go to college, but old enough to fly six thousand miles away from home and live alone in a foreign country for a year. In hindsight, it would have made more sense for me to spend the year at home, and get an internship at a theater or dance company in San Francisco and see if that was something I wanted to pursue.
But that didn’t fit the family script. My creative interests weren’t what my parents wanted to cultivate or encourage in me. So off to Paris I went.
I had a decent set up in Paris, living in the Latin Quarter with a friend of a friend of a friend of my mother’s. An oncologist who was gone a lot for work and wanted someone else in the house for company for her 16-year old daughter. I took classes most mornings in French Language through the extension of the Sorbonne, where I met tons of young people from other countries doing much the same thing I was.
Paris was beautiful and vibrant in all the ways that have made it the City of Light. But living there was a lonely effort. And a lot of my daily energy went to coping with the particular culture shock of not being able to have deeper conversations with the people I lived with due to my language limitations, and planning enough activity to keep me busy so that the loneliness wasn’t so heavy.
Soon after arriving, I found a dance studio across the River in the Marais. I signed up for ballet classes and tap classes, and probably jazz classes as well. I took as many as 10 classes a week but there was none of the community I had in high school and no opportunities to choreograph or perform. Just showing up to class with students I never got to know and teachers I never really connected with. My ballet teacher pushed me to force my turnout, and I hurt my knees. But I kept dancing because that was what I knew to do and who I knew myself to be.
Every week, I bought a little magazine called Paris Partout, I think, that listed all the cultural events happening throughout Paris that coming week: movies openings, theater, museum exhibits, and concerts.
When I wasn’t in French class in the morning, or dance class in the afternoon, I found free concerts at churches and radio stations and visited all of the museums that tickled my interest. I rode the subway but then more often the buses since I wasn’t in a rush and it helped me learn the layout of the city. I loved seeing old classic American films like Gilda or Casablanca that showed at small theaters in the 5th Arrondissment on little cobbled streets near where I lived.
For comfort, I brought home loaves of warm pain de campagne from the local boulangerie and slathered the slices with butter. I bought the good swiss Nestle’s chocolate.
I didn’t really get along with Edith, the daughter in the apartment I lived in. She had a much older boyfriend who took up a lot of her time. She blasted the Eagles’ Hotel California over and over. We just didn’t have much in common.
I had a good friend Anne who lived outside of Paris who I saw every month or six weeks as she was madly studying for her baccalaureate degree. I made a few friends through my extension classes and we sometimes went to the movies or to a museum exhibit together, but never made a deeper connection. I made friends with a reporter who lived in the tiny former maid’s units on the top floor of our building.
I tried again with college applications and this time got into both Columbia and Barnard (though not Harvard and Yale).
The second half of my year, I sought out an acting class at the American Center, though it was conducted in French. I fumbled my way through a scene from the Importance of Being Earnest. I also took cooking classes at a school for girls from wealthy families and scored invitations from two of the girls to visit their families in Normandy and Bretagne. I learned to make amazing cakes and also less welcome dishes like stewed rabbit. Another family invited me to a week at their home in Provence, where they fed me local delicacies and drove me around to show me the famous sites.
I learned from my friend Anne to be a chic French woman. I traded my American clothes for sleek mini skirts and black pumps with clip on bows on the back, fishnet tops and cropped jackets. I grew my hair long and parted it on the side, and put on heavy makeup. I came home far more glamorous than I left. My French got so good that if I didn’t talk too much, I was sometimes mistaken for being a French woman.
I came home that summer a weird mix of triumphant about my new look, proud to talk about my glamorous year abroad, and anxious and depressed and afraid about what was next.
Though deeply uninspiring, my French dance classes left me at the top of my game. While home for the summer, I sank back into classes with my high school teacher Elvia, dancing out a song of deep heartbreak to an R&B song.
And then, too suddenly, I was off to New York for my freshman year as part of the first coed class at Columbia.
To be continued…