Suddenly my feed shimmers with 50th anniversary tributes to A Chorus Line and I find myself overcome with sobs. The past wraps itself around me and I stand in the breakfast room of my mother’s home, begging with her. I am eight; I am ten; I am twelve. The argument repeats itself. I beg. She shakes her head. I cry. She turns away.

I cannot remember the first moment that I wanted to be a dancer but I can remember the hours that I spent in the sunroom leaping across the floor. Each time, I ended in a heap near the sliding door closet and one of my brothers laughed. When Mother got home from work she would find me huddled on my bed, face jammed into the pillow. I might have cried myself to sleep in a calmer household. Most often, I would be clutching the book about dancers that she had given me, stories of Maria Tallchief and Isadora Duncan. The ink on the pages smeared beneath my tears. Eventually, Mother convinced me that crippled girls could not be ballerinas and I stopped talking about my dream.

I sat in front of the computer tonight watching clip after clip of the flash mob in Lincoln Center performing One and What I did for Love. I remembered my vinyl copy of the Broadway show. I played it so many times that the cardboard wore thin and the album would slip through the outer edge onto the rug if I didn’t take care. I closed my eyes and sang with her, the young woman who did not regret what she did for love. Eventually that number became an anthem for every mistake I made along the way. Fifty years later, I will still sing the damn song to myself, in the shower or as I drive away from any failed encounter.

Overhead, birds softly serenade the breeze the cools them and the last light of the day’s sun that has warmed us all. Behind the trellis walls that my friend Michelle built for me, I sit among the succulents and the bougainvillea. I should be straightening the clutter beneath my laundry unit, the chore I had assigned for the evening. Instead I find myself playing version after version of the anniversary flash mob, taken from various cell phone vantage points in the brightness of a New York summer day. I strain to remember if I ever saw a stage production. Certainly I watched the movie, first in a theatre and many times on tape, at home, in one apartment or another, usually after a particularly nasty break-up — though come to think of it, weren’t they all?

If my life had a soundtrack, it would include songs from the musicals to which my mother introduced me. From Carnival‘s “Who Can I Be?” to “Who Can I Turn To?” from The Roar of the Greasepaint. But none encapsulates the roller coaster of longing and emotion that marred my six decades like the bittersweet and sometimes glorious tunes from the heart-wrenching tale of young people trying to make it on Broadway. My mother was right to steer me instead to academic pursuits. She could not have known that nothing would ever take the place of my unending desire to stand in the wings, wearing tights and silk toe shoes, waiting for my cue.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®