my very first pointe shoes

Where was I???  Oh yes... I had just turned 15 and my not-the-sharpest-knife-in-the-drawer, friend in World History told me that she could give me her USED pointe shoes---(AKA toe shoes)... now, yes, this is pretty shocking for a myriad of reasons.

One, using someone elses shoes are like... i can't think of an analogy that fits... These days, most professional dancers actually have their shoes custom made with specifications, like: 3/4 shank, extra wide, extra flat, low sides, long vamp... hahahaha... I know... WTF are you talking about Lexie?

esoteric is the word.

But, like everyone's feet are individual, so are the shoes to a great extent. Now, in 1971, the shoes WERE much more limited than they are today. There were Capezios, Freeds and Gambas and that was about it. Today, there are dozens of brands of pointe shoes.

The other reason that this idea is shocking is that in addition to being individually fitted by a professional who understands the needs of a young ballet dancer, the dancer herself, needs to have had a certain amount of training, skill and strength in order to go up on her pointes. The shoes do not really do the work, the strength of the dancer does. 

Of course, I was also 15 yrs old now and not an 8 yr old, so I had an inherent strength as I was quite athletic and even though I had only been taking classes for 6 months, it was more like 2 years now... I felt like I was ready, even if my teacher did not.

So...the next day I waited anxiously for Diana to show up and sit behind me in our history class.. She forgot the fucking shoes. bitch. ;)

However, the next day, I waited for her again, and this time I saw her walk in with a bag and her huge dark brown eyes were wide with anticipation as she presented me her shoes-------- 

which were quite used and had leather on the ends very much like these shoes--

                                      

accompanied by several of these--

lambswool pads for the toes, but not nearly this clean!!!


And a bunch of this stuff

lambswool--- to wrap around the toes...



It was like the fucking holy grail... oh my... i had never seen anything so beautiful in all my life!!!


I couldn't wait to get home and try them on!!!


I came home and stood in front of the full length mirror in my bedroom... I had recently clipped out a photograph from Seventeen magazine of a very young (maybe 16 years old here) Gelsey Kirkland, with her older ballerina sister, Johnna Kirkland... I am getting chills as I'm writing this, because I have kept this photo in a box for the last 40 years and I have never ever seen it published anywhere else, and it certainly looks like it was just thrown into a box, now doesn't it?

Gelsey was my idol back then... I thought she was so adorable and she was taken into the NY City Ballet at age 15--- a veritable prodigy in the ballet world. (She is about 2 years older than I am.) Alas, achingly talented but fraught with for lack of a better word--- issues, she had a very checkered but glorious career and is considered to be one of the very finest ballerinas of the 20th century.  Her sister-- had a reputation for being a druggie-- and left NYCB in the mid 70s and danced in LA for a while...

Here... observe the metamorphose of an adorable teen-aged Gelsey to someone completely unrecognizable as herself, (through quite a bit of plastic surgery, most noticeably done to her very pretty mouth, for some inexplicable reason) just a few years later-- and then here-- with a weight loss, that was thoroughly unnecessary and for which she battled an obvious eating disorder for years, which actually lost her the part of Emma, in the glorious film, The Turning Point. 

I read that she was down to 70 something pounds and at about 5'3" that was at least 25 lbs. underweight, even by extremely thin ballet standards and she was "skeletal" and not "unuseable" for the film.  very sad. (however, I loved Leslie Browne in that part!) In the first pic, I would say that she weighed about 107, and here, at about 85 lbs-- for comparison. Today, she is the director of a successful ballet studio in NYC, that is one block away from Predator's apartment... Yes, I know... total sync world!


But, back to 1971... I put on my new/old beat up pointe shoes, that were really waaaayyy too big, and with two of the toe pads in each foot, I carefully pointed my toes... just like Gelsey and Johnna did and to my amazement, my foot looked quite a bit like that! Now, to actually go up... I held on tight to, what, I have no idea and managed to get on top of the shoes-- sur la pointe, we call it.


Five days later, I had my next ballet class and I told my teacher Ann Nolan that I had a pair of used pointe shoes to wear.


She looked at me in abject horror and told me that I was not at all ready for pointe shoes!!!


haha! I'm sure that she was right, but what 15 yr old bound and determined young woman ever listens to something like that?