As a girl, one of my favorite activities was Skating In Sun Valley: In The Summer. It’s one of many childhood memories still in my recollection. I skated a lot when I was younger, enjoying the act of getting lost in creative expression, without concern whether the landing or center was good or not. I found other hobbies and put down the skates for a number of years. When I was in college, I bought a used pair of hockey skates. I worked through some of the drills in the hockey book then stopped. I still have both pairs of skates along with a trunkful of photos stored in the basement.
I recently passed my love of skating onto Max and Markus who I like to take with me to the rink and skate with. The practice of seeing where edges fall on the ice is key to skating and ends up helping my teaching too. “Skate More” has been at the top of my Things I Like and Want To Do More. So I found the skates and sharpened them up and checked out two tickets for California.
Skating for anyone who has ever wanted to learn to play hockey or simply skate better, the Gold Coast offers a mix of inspiration, motivation, and doable location. Southwest even lets you check your hockey gear for free to take your bag along with you.
Unchained Melody, the song from the movie Ghost, takes me back to California when I performed in a show in Century City. Scott gave me the opportunity to fly down and choreograph a program with him, three time World and National champion and asked me to move in with him as a way to cleverly have a life and skating partner. I could see that he loved, admired and wanted me to be there with him in his home in Hermosa Beach to transform me into a new woman to work with. The first show we did together, The Mission, he asked me to “strip familiar beliefs of my personal meaning in order to develop new image-making techniques.” Throughout the performance the skater returned to the theme of transforming my personal narratives to create new ways of seeing. My personal photo albums hold many of the great times of my life, including: “love, boyfriends, sickness, death, children, parties, work, money, personal endeavor.” That week long trip concluded with technical impossibilities for keeping my religious beliefs and living with him and this conversation stuck out in particular: “Believing in morals is what attracts me to you. It is actually just as important as your eyes and smile. I hope that no one ever breaks your heart."
The fifth trip in his series of back and forth flights, The Christmas Show, was the last time he came up to visit me. According to Scott, “The belief of our childhood is the one that stays with us our whole life” and I tend to agree with him. I laid out principles for our relationship that read like a quipping manifesto on love and religion: "Temples are for marriages I knew in my head. How I feel when you kiss my lips or brush the inside of my arm are what I feel in my heart.” Most of us have access to a memory that we refer to as before and after to experiment with another set of 2 different outcomes to shift perception. Date # 7, Romatic Dinner, was one of mine, which he asked me to “break with traditional views of temple-worthy events and turn to the matter of what goes on inside the four chambers of your heart” instead.
I’ve been carrying both versions in my heart for 25 years to make me more aware in those in between moments. I tucked several of our snapshots into a scrapbook with a pendant he gave me and skate when I need a break between my heart and my brain. Learning to skate is about putting blade to ice and if you study the past, you’ll likely arrive sooner than expected.
