NYC Mixtape Volume 2: Tap Shoes (1993)

This is the second of 3 pieces about my time as a student in New York City (the first one is here, and the third is here).

An artist’s path is strange and beautiful, vibrating with its own intelligence and insight that can’t be forced, only received. In the Spring of 1993 I am climbing up the grimy subway steps in Times Square with my friend Marie*, a fellow Canadian, and one of few others in our theater school. We’re on our way to the Capezio flagship store on Broadway. New York is emerging from last month’s massive snowstorm and trees are cautiously blossomy, but Marie and I are still wearing our winter coats, although hers is unzipped and flapping. She is from Montreal and cold doesn't phase her, whereas I am from Vancouver and lose my shit anytime the temp drops below 40. We’re aimed at Capezio because I recently learned Marie’s method for wearing skirts in winter, which is two pairs of tights, colors layered over flesh tones, and I want to buy the same brand she uses. I’m also bringing my tap shoes for an adjustment because the straps are feeling loosey-goosey, something that I’ve been warned about by our dance teachers. Your straps should be tight and your taps should be loose, that’s how you get maximum sound on the floor.

As we reach the top of the stairs a sizzling beat streams from an open car window hip hop hoorayyyy hooooh hayyyyy hoooooh and we shake our asses in tribute, grinning at each other with pure joy. Hip Hop is sacred in NYC. The billboards that loom above us are still recovering from the Marky Mark attack that took over the area last year. There were two versions of him in his Calvin Klein boxer briefs, maximum beefcake with a huge package. Yet in both pictures the face was wrong. He scowled in one of them and grinned in the other, but male desire is in the eyes. The eyes are everything, the soft but confident gaze that says If you choose me I will deliver, or die trying. Some men know this, but most boys don’t, they still think scowling and grinning are sexy. Some New York men will give you The Gaze when you pass them on the street, and sometimes that lightning feels like love.

There is a sudden commotion down the block, and as Marie and I turn toward it a man comes tearing by, so close that we can smell the liquor on his breath. He is red-faced and sweating, his eyes and mouth wide open to his fate. There is shouting and shoving in the crowd as two cops chase him through the street with their guns drawn. This is the second time in a year that I’ve seen a gun in the flesh, and it makes me instantly shaky. Marie grabs my arm and steers us to the massive front doors of Capezio, muttering Can you imagine if that happened in Canada, guns in a crowd, it would be on national news! and we’re safe inside the building. 

There is a smell in here that you can’t find anywhere else. It’s from the ballerinas, who shop for satin pointe shoes and pink leotards in sizes so small they look like withered skins. But they are serious athletes, these tiny women, as serious as Marky Mark. Their muscles are real because they work out all day, every day, and they sweat like crazy. They stink so bad that it makes your eyes water if you get too close. Once they're laced into a pair of shoes their inner pulleys yank them up on their tip-toes, their arches so round it looks like a mistake. They whir and leap across the floor, testing each shoe for stability. The soft scent of the shoes, fresh pink leather and resin, lays itself on top of their stink and tones it down to a compelling funk. 

There is also the electricity of big perfumes, Poison and Opium and Georgio, worn by professional Broadway showfolk who peruse the makeup section searching for serious camouflage. Famous people are older up close, their undereyes are purple and their hands are veiny. Stage lights are dazzling but not friendly to people over 40, and these people, mostly women, know what they need to get by, and it’s foundation makeup so thick you have to use oily cold cream to get it off. They buy 6 jars at a time, stuffing them into their oversized velvet totes. They sing along with the store’s soundtrack of big theater songs It’s so easy to leave meeeeee all alone with the memoryyyyy of my days in the sun their huge voices streaming from their mouths like long golden banners

Capezio has two floors that are jam-packed with dancewear of every kind, and some complicated costumes that look like pure Vegas. But what I love best is the huge selection of legwarmers, which never fail to remind me of What a feelin, needs believing and I buy a new pair, along with my Marie-approved tights. My tap shoes will take a few minutes to be adjusted, so we go to the big arched windows and look down over the Square, at the glittering lights proclaiming the industry we are in New York trying to break into. Broadway auditions are vicious like that scene in A Chorus Line, and I’m not a very good dancer so I always get cut right away. I’m strong but not very flexible, and although I move well to music I can never leap as high or split as low as the other hopefuls. Dance was a small part of my training in childhood, but I was in a professional choir and took ten years of private voice lessons, which makes me a valuable singer in my New York school. But although we’re immersed in the musical theater cannon I am only compelled by radio songs, never the ones I’ve been assigned to learn for class. 

I’m actually starting to wonder if I even want to pursue a Broadway career after all. I know that I want to perform on stage, but singing songs about being a woman that are mostly written by men feels more and more ridiculous to someone who was voted Most likely to start a new feminist movement in my high-school yearbook (it was actually meant with disdain, but I fucking loved it and wished I’d been brave enough to wear it on a tshirt). A new awareness is forming in my heart and mind, something that feels like a steel frame under a mattress. I am starting to recognize the power behind the music I love best, the songs of Indigo Girls, Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Annie Lennox, Bonnie Raitt, Janet Jackson and many others. When I sing them to myself I feel powerful in a way that is bigger than all my pain and anxiety, and I want to throw my life on the altar of that power and see where it goes.

Performers get used to transformation. It starts right before you’re about to step onstage, when you’re behind the curtain taking your last breaths of ordinary air. You let go of everything except the task in front of you. You empty your mind of babble and hear your pulse pounding in your ears and then you step out into it, the vast openness of creation where anything is possible, and you feel ferociously alive and infinitely free, and it takes so much courage to do this fucking thing in front of an audience but you make it look easy for them, the crowds eyes on you, expecting your best every single time. It’s a huge fucking responsibility that you wear lightly, and that is a skill that no one can take from you. But it only works if you truly love what you’re doing, the words in your mouth and the heat in the music. Otherwise it’s just another heartless grind. 

In Capezio, surrounded by sequins and glitter, I can finally feel what is happening behind the curtain of my life. More than anything, any Broadway musical or play, I want access to the world of women’s original songs. I want it from the inside: to write and sing in a way that heals, because I am sick of cowering to the childhood trauma that still rules my every move. Writing and singing suddenly feels like a spiritual imperative, something so strong that I don’t even care about building a fan base or getting signed to a record label. I just want to release all my pain, to feel it draining from my being so that other kinds of life experience can enter and show me what is good about love, so I can stop being afraid all the time.

Before we go I strap on my tap shoes, clopping across the large wooden floor where the ballerinas twirl. My feet are huge, and not just compared to theirs. When I dance I have to be mindful of my feet in a way that makes me feel clumsy no matter how well I’ve learned the choreography, but I love the feeling of tapping, each foot a drummer keeping perfect time. I have always moved quickly into rhythm and felt it in my body as a grounding force. Song lyrics flow across beats in a way that I instinctively understand, and as Marie and I walk back to the subway I start freestyling over the sound of our footsteps. Sunlight crashes through the thick cloudbank and lands on our faces, and the light and warmth and my voice in the open air feels like praying.

*name and some details changed for privacy

You can learn more about my job as a Power Voice coach for women HERE.

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