Broche Banter #21 -- Denise
Today on the show, I chat with Denise. Ballet has been in her heart for decades, since the age of 6. Flat feet, pigeon toes, a stroke, a horseback riding accident, and a tornado have all kept her away from the barre, until now. And she couldn’t be happier dancing the days away.
Enjoy Denise’s fascinating story of how she’s finally found her way to the barre.
““If I could make people know and feel that ballet is not unapproachable, because I thought it was so select little clique and you had to have this qualification that qualification. I think now it’s really embraced the public and anyone can get involved. I don’t know how far you may go if you don’t have the passion or the interest. But I think it’s really need that anybody can get involved in it if they want to. Um, I hope I can inspire others by saying that they don’t have to be physically perfect. Because I’m far from it. And I think you should go out and take that chance and see if it’s for you. Because it’s very important for your whole your whole mindset and your whole life.
And just to remember a few little steps or routines and just, you know, be cleaning or outside doing something and just break into a little three -step-center dance that you taught us is really rewarding for me.””
Julie: Denise, welcome to the show. I am thrilled to have you on today to hear about your story. It is quite the story. So we are going to get into it. So welcome.
Denise: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Julie: So Denise, you dance in our online studio. I met you very early on quarantine. You were one of our first members who joined who wasn't with us in Denver. And you've been in almost all of the classes ever since then. Except for the ones that are past bedtime. Tell me about when you started ballet because it wasn't with me. It was a little bit before.
Denise: Well, I can go way back to when I was six years old.
Julie: Did you like it when you were six? Did you do a little bit when you're six.
Denise: And I have a picture of me doing my first arabesque at age 6.
Julie: Oh Isn't that adorable?
Denise: And I still have my first ballet shoes.
Julie: Oh that’s so cute!
Denise: Anyway, I took a few ballet lessons and got hooked at an early age. Then my love of ponies took over. My parents bought a farm and we moved out of town. But all through my life, my parents were really fond of music. And there was always music in our house, which kind of plays into it too. My mother would sit at the piano and play Gershwin, Irving Berlin songs. My father would be over in the corner, tap dancing and imitating Louis Armstrong. And he had this move or he kicked his leg up at the back of the chair to show you how agile fit he was, and it really is reminiscent of the grand battement. And he had a little soft shoe routines, and my parents made a big impression on me with music and dance and they took me to every Broadway musical that they could find. I really enjoyed watching the performers I knew that I couldn't do that because I grew up with some foot and leg problems, namely flat feet, pigeon toes, which grew into great big bunions and all these horrible things and had to wear orthopedic shoes in the seventh grade. In the seventh grade when you want to dress cool and wear the cool clothes, I was wearing these saddle shoes, black and white saddle shoes with a great big, thick heels. So that kind of ruined my ballet dream for me. So we bought a farm and we moved a little south and I got into horses, of course, boys came into the picture.
And I always wanted to get back into ballet, but I was very shy about it because of my feet. They've even been called flippers. So I've never really take that step.
So when I finally got back into ballet, I was in my early 30s. And I found a lady down here who had a studio in her home. And I took a few lessons with her and I was really excited.
Next thing, you know, I became pregnant. And in those days you didn't exercise when you were pregnant. It was too risky. So I stopped ballet.
And then I wanted to get back into it, after the children were grown, and I was just so busy with three of them three boys, that I put that off.
And then things fell apart. I got a divorce and had to re enter the workforce after 22 years at home.
So to do that, I was a teacher and I had to go back and get re-certified, and then I had to learn to operate computers. I had to take computer classes, recertification classes and work full time. So again, no time for ballet.
Julie: Around what time was what year was that when you were reentering the workforce?
Denise: 1994
Julie: Okay, so computers were still in their earlier form kind of clunky and not not to operate.
Denise: Yeah, yeah. So and then you had to continue learning of course to use them in the classroom and be able to do things with them.
Julie: What age did you teach at that point?
Denise: First grade. And then later, I moved out of the classroom and became a gifted education resource teacher, which is kindergarten through fifth. So I keep on training myself, keep on learning. So in the midst of all this one day in my classroom, I totally came back from lunch. my lunch tray fell out of my hand. I didn't know what was happening. I ran to the teacher next door, frantically waving my hands trying to get her attention and found out I was having a stroke. So, I actually had my stroke in my classroom in 2002.
Julie: Wow.
Denise: And that was a life changer.
Julie: Yeah, I bet.
Denise: It was terrifying. I was helicoptered to Georgetown. I could not speak I lost my voice. And my whole right side was paralyzed. So I was scared to death. So after months of rehab and physical therapy, I finally could walk again after learning to walk on a walker, but I did have residual effects from the stroke.
Julie: [Denise takes a drink] Oh, look at your mug, that's our that's our studio mug! Cute.
Were you remarried at that point. Were you going solo through all of this?
Denise: I was going solo.
Julie: Wow. And what were your kids nearby? Or were you really just kind of on your own trying to figure out?
Denise: They were living were with me. And they were all in middle school. So it was a really rough time for all of us.
Julie: Oh, so they weren't grown yet? You were taking care of them while this was going on?
Denise: No, they were in middle school and beginning high school. But somehow I survived all that. And when all that was over with, I again trying to get back into ballet but there was nothing in this area except Community College. So I enrolled in those classes took two semesters actually and found myself dancing with 18 and 19 year olds who were dance majors.
Julie: Oh, boy, that must be intimidating.
Denise: It was intimidating.
Julie: At that point had you had you entirely rehab from the stroke like you had most of your function back or was your right side having trouble or how were you feeling?
Denise: It took a while but I eventually got my right side back. And let me back up. Before I started taking ballet I had a horseback riding accident. I’d been riding since I was 10 years old, my whole life, and had a freak accident while fox hunting, I came out of the saddle backwards and sideways and landed right on the top of my humerus, which shattered. The doctor said they couldn't operate, it was too broken up, to shattered and there would be too many pins too many places. And if they operated the whole humerus may collapse. So there were no guarantees. So their advice was to let it heal naturally. So I was in a sling, and my shoulder froze. my elbow froze. It was so horrendously painful.
But before that I had been doing ballet to this tape. I don't know if you've heard of her Elise Gulan on I've been doing it's actually ballet conditioning exercises, I was doing that still dreaming getting back. But after the riding accident thought this is over. This is the end.
Julie: Yeah, that's terrifying.
Denise: I did give up horses. But anyway, my shoulder did heal naturally but it healed attaching itself to the scapula. So the scapula the shoulder move is one unit and don't move very well. I can’t raise my arm, although sometimes you'll see me try to go. It's just because I have to do it because it looks so fun and feels so good. But anyway, I took so much physical therapy — years and years of physical therapy — and it would improve slightly but I could never raise it again. I ended up rupturing my bicep, and being taken to the emergency room for that.
Julie: Wow. How did you rupture it?
Denise: I was on a machine. Almost like a rowing machine where you pull your whole weight up with your arms. I was doing really well. They told me it was a very high level exercise. And I was almost ready to graduate physical therapy. And evidently it just pulled the bicep so hard that it ruptured.
Julie: Wow. To add insult to injury, geez.
Denise: Just can't win.
Julie: No. How do you How are you? How are you feeling at that point? Was that pretty? Was that? Were you discouraged? I mean, how was your emotional state?
Denise: I was devastated.
Julie: Yeah, yes.
Denise: Yeah, it was a long haul.
Julie: So you're going through all of that. I mean, obviously you you are telling us the tale today, so you made it through… how did you do it? How did you get through it? What did you have something you told yourself? Did you have something that you would go to to get you through that time? How in the world that you make it through that much mental and physical anguish?
Denise: Probably my husband gets all the credit. Very positive person and kept encouraging me.
Julie: Yeah, that would be really, really hard to get through.
Denise: Yeah.
Julie: So how many how many years ago was that now.
Denise: That was in 2013.
Julie: Okay. so like six/seven years ago, okay.
Denise: Yeah. And I always thought I'd get back to riding but now I'm taking blood thinners and of course doctors say no horses and blood thinners they don't mix.
Julie: Oh, okay. Well, yeah. Good to know.
Julie: So were you still working at that point teaching or when did that?
Denise: Yeah. Shortly after that, I retired, my handwriting was affected. I had a visual impairment from a stroke. And I couldn't write on the board. I could barely lug my laptop around. So it just all became too much. So, I retired
Julie: And are you right handed?
Denise: Yes.
Julie: So all this time with your right arm being out of commission must have been very challenging.
Denise: Yeah, I've trained myself to use the mouse with my left hand. So that’s pretty good.
Julie: Oh, wow. That sounds complicated.
Julie: Well, okay, so you have you started ballet again, at some point. Did you start? You started again before you found me in the most recent past.
Denise: That was about two years before when I took the classes at the college and the senior center.
Julie: I see.
Denise: Then the pandemic. I thought, “Oh, no, everything's closed. I'm not going to get back to ballet.” And I'd been perusing your website shortly before the pandemic and I thought, “gee, this sounds really neat. But do I really have the nerve to take the introductory lesson?” I was scared to death of that. Then I saw you were going online, I was trying to figure out how to get to Denver. But that wasn't gonna work either. When you went online, I went, “Wow, this is really neat. I can do this. If she accepts me,”
Julie: Well, you made it to the introductory lesson and we had a good time kind of talking through your arm and what we could do instead of having to raise it. And then you've basically I mean, you've you've been, I mean, I don't know, maybe 5/6 months, you've been coming multiple times a week to to keep learning and you've got a little dance floor and a little barre set up.
Denise: Yeah, I'm really obsessed with it. I just love the music. I love that. Just the movement. I even love the technical aspect of it. It's very hard. It's difficult. But I enjoy learning. So it's, it's good for me.
Julie: I know you still have residual challenges with your shoulder. But do you still have residual challenges from from the stroke when you're when you're learning the body movements and kind of trying to learn these really precise things?
Denise: Yes, I have a visual loss in my left eye of 25%. So if I look up, all I see it's a black spot and they told me that's where the clot escaped from a carotid artery into the visual artery. And nothing can be done about that. Thankfully, it's in the upper right quadrant so I can still drive. It doesn’t affect me too terribly much. And then I've got a visual loss in my right eye from the horse accident, called a vitreous detachment. So you have floaters and flashes going on all the time. But other than that, thankfully, all my damage is on the right side with the shoulder and stroke. And I have difficulty, as you can probably tell, I'm moving my legs and arms quickly, like during fast numbers, I just can't keep up. I'm doing better. Because when I first started, I couldn't keep up at all. I'm doing better. Sometimes I know my legs and arms are flailing, so I just can't get the control of them at the same time on my right side.
Just like you said, just keep on smiling and keep on dancing.
Thankfully, I don't have mirrors in my practice area and you don't have mirrors in the studio that I can see. So
Julie: yeah, no, I don't have mirrors in here. When I when we have the studios in Denver, there were mirrors in the studios but you know, it's interesting, you bring up mirrors, so many people mirrors are such a staple of a dance studio, right you think of a quintessential studio and there's walls and walls of but so much debate happens around mirrors actually in the recent past. If you as a dancer when you train with mirrors, and then you try to go and dance on stage where there's no mirrors, if you haven't actually been practicing balancing without seeing yourself, it's actually pretty hard to balance without the mirror. So if you've learned balance only by looking in the mirror to see your alignment, you won't feel it in your own body. So it's actually really interesting. When I had seen many, many dancers in the Denver studio, then we all went online and then I saw them in person again, for a brief period of time, everyone's balance had gotten better because they weren't looking in a mirror for three months, and they were feeling it inside their body. As you know, I haven't encouraged any of our dancers to get mirrors at home because I'm curious to continue the experiment and see how it goes without mirrors.
Denise: That's interesting because but I thought that I definitely needed one. So I snuck a little one, which is about as wide as this iPad. But the position I have everything I can't see but one foot in it sometimes, right and I'm watching you with my left eye and trying to watch myself with my right eye. It just doesn't work at all.
Julie: That’s a lot, a lot.
Denise: Using mirrors. When I went in the senior center, they have a beautiful studio mirrors on all four walls and a dance floor. And I was really shy about using those and I got adapted to them. And they were very helpful. And now of course, there are too many other things to watch. But I'm constantly wondering if I'm doing it right, if I'm balancing it, I feel like I'm leaning way over this side. I'm wondering if you need to look sometimes.
Julie: Right? It is definitely helpful. It's helpful to see if you That teacher tells you your hips aren't square but you believe they are and then you look in the mirror and you're like, oh, okay, they're not squares don't always feel that way.
Denise: But it's like it's like trying to look at you giving instruction and trying to look out at your arm. You know doing tendus is like, wow. A little challenging.
Julie: So you also survived a tornado. What is that about?
Denise: The tornado struck our town the day I was released from the hospital from the stroke. And we drove home a two hour drive and the winds are whipping up, the sky was getting dark. Nobody thought a lot of it because the last tornado here was in 1926. I went in the house of my walker and sat on the sofa my husband pulled all the shades, so I wouldn't see the baseball sized hail balls falling down, shut everything so I wouldn't hear the train roar that you'd customarily hear. And the tornado struck and totally devastated our entire town. And the house I used to live it before this one. So it was it was terrible. It's been 18 years now since the stroke in the tornado. But, you know, the power went out. The next day, my husband tried to go into town to get some milk at the 7/11 and there wasn't one. It was just the town was gone.
-> Check out the tornado online. Also Photo Source.
Julie: There wasn't a 7/11?
Denise: There was just no one. It was destroyed for miles and miles.
Julie: Wow, so your house is okay. But the entire like the whole when you go into town it was all just gone.
Denise: Our house was on a small hill. And I think that saved us. Yeah. The houses in my neighborhood. Now by that time the children were pretty much on their own. But it was it was. It was unbelievable. I didn't have any phone service for about two weeks. It was awful.
Julie: And meanwhile you're you had just gotten back from the hospital from the stroke.
Denise: Yeah.
Julie: Wow. So is okay. So obviously we're going through this pandemic, compared with everything else that's happened in your life. Is this like peanuts, or is this also still challenging?
Denise: Just one more thing. Just one more thing. I don't like it. But I think I can get through it. Because there's no place I'd really rather be than quarantined at my home, because I'm a real homebody and everything I want in need is here, my animals, we've got some acreage, I can get outside and do what I want. Things I miss are the people and going shopping going to a restaurant, but, you know, I thought this would be a two week stint, and now it's going into six months. That's getting a little hard.
Julie: Right with really no end in sight either six months
Denise: I know, very worried.
Julie: Right? Well, you've been through so much already, as you said. I mean, it's just add it on.
Denise: My husband says ballet has saved his life because I haven't killed him yet because he's in the other room to tele-working every single day.
Julie: So, um, two more questions for you today. Ballet’s been in your heart for your whole life, right. So why, Why do you Why do you love it so much?
Denise: It just makes me happy. It's just I guess it's my way of performing, but not in front of an audience. It's my way of stress release. It's my way of expressing creativity. I just love the ballet, and the music and I love the new remastered music that a couple of the artists have made. I don't know. It's been like a virus, you know, lying dormant in my system and every now pops out.
“It just makes me happy. It’s just I guess it’s my way of performing, but not in front of an audience. It’s my way of stress release. It’s my way of expressing creativity. I just love the ballet, and the music and I love the new remastered music that a couple of the artists have made. I don’t know. It’s been like a virus, you know, lying dormant in my system and every now pops out.”
Julie: Everyone once in a while, it gets enough strength and it comes out.
Denise: Yeah. Yeah.
Julie: What really captures your attention when you're in class? What do you find to be like the most exciting part or, or fun part about being in a class?
Denise: I think I'm concentrating on all the technique that I'm learning and you're teaching I mean I find it fascinating. I just thought you go in and move your legs and arms and that was it. But I mean a tendu looks simple, but all the steps to make that time to happen are unbelievably difficult. Controlling your foot and these tiny muscles and understanding those muscles and how they work together. I find it fascinating. And stretch classes and different muscles that work together that we work on in there and I love how they're tailored to the ballet movements. Because I tried yoga, I tried exercise classes but they weren't really what I wanted or needed. And I think it's really neat that I can see my body changing. I can feel my abs or what I have of them actually firming up in my little, little tiny calves. My husband used to say the wrestlers got them. I didn't have any, And now I'm not self conscious about wearing short skirts anymore because I see little tiny calves forming.
And I love the ballet clothes. That's an adventure, just putting this outfits together.
And that’s really neat being able to move both sides of my body, which are not always in sync, but at least they can both move now. So it’s very rewarding for me.
Julie: That's, that's really that's really sweet. I think that ballet is really all encompassing with the mind and the body and it is kind of the ultimate connection of mind and body. Right, mind body and music. I guess you can add that component in there too.
Denise: I never knew it was so, so difficult. Then how much you're out. Like the eight body positions. Oh my gosh, I have a book about those. And so far I've gotten three halfway committed to memory. I think it's fascinating how intense it is. And how performers have to know all that and retain all that and remember it. It's just mind boggling to me.
Julie: And then how it’s taught too, right? so so much of it is the oral tradition, right? So much of class is just telling you what I know and I got it from someone telling me what they know and there's some books and some you can fill in with written form but so much of it is just passed down.
Denise: And of course being another language also, I had one year of French in high school they didn't teach us ballet terminology.
Julie: Well, I think even if you know French, you're you don't understand, right? You won't know that the the horse step is the, you know, the movement of the foot.
Denise: Now should be really good at because I did it my whole life.
Julie: Pas de cheval.
Denise: Used to play horses as a little girl.
Julie: That's the one way where blood thinners and horses go together, is pas de cheval
Denise: Yes.
Julie: Okay, so you've been through you've been through so much, but somehow through all of it, you've always found your way back to ballet. What? What advice do you have for anyone listening to us today about life or ballet or anything you want to say that to the to the world
Denise: Oh, gee.
If I could make people know and feel that ballet is not unapproachable, because I thought it was so select little clique and you had to have this qualification that qualification. I think now it's really embraced the public and anyone can get involved. I don’t know how far you may go if you don't have the passion or the interest. But I think it's really need that anybody can get involved in it if they want to. Um, I hope I can inspire others by saying that they don't have to be physically perfect. Because I'm far from it. And I think you should go out and take that chance and see if it's for you. Because it's very important for your whole your whole mindset and your whole life.
And just to remember a few little steps or routines and just, you know, be cleaning or outside doing something and just break into a little three -step-center dance that you taught us is really rewarding for me.
“If I could make people know and feel that ballet is not unapproachable, because I thought it was so select little clique and you had to have this qualification that qualification. I think now it’s really embraced the public and anyone can get involved. I don’t know how far you may go if you don’t have the passion or the interest. But I think it’s really need that anybody can get involved in it if they want to. Um, I hope I can inspire others by saying that they don’t have to be physically perfect. Because I’m far from it. And I think you should go out and take that chance and see if it’s for you. Because it’s very important for your whole your whole mindset and your whole life.
And just to remember a few little steps or routines and just, you know, be cleaning or outside doing something and just break into a little three -step-center dance that you taught us is really rewarding for me.”
Julie: That's awesome. I love That so much. And I know people will be inspired by your story and you know how, how far you've come from all the things that life has thrown at you to still continue following your dream this whole entire time and now making the most of this crazy situation that we're all in by just diving in headfirst and really going for it.
Denise: Well, thank you.
Julie: Thank you, Denise. This was so much fun. I loved hearing your story.
Denise: It's been a pleasure to be on the show.
