Getting Your Dream Job Is as Easy as ABT I was twelve when my first dance teachers, Angie and Steve, took me to New York City's famed Lincoln Center to see an American Ballet Theatre performance. It was early spring in 1996. The Twin Towers still stood, the premiere of Sex and the City was on the horizon, and the outrageous gentrification of New York City's grimiest neighborhoods had yet to occur. It was a magical time for the world's most vivaciously vicious city. ABT's spring gala is structured like a "greatest hits" show. It's chock-full of excerpted scenes from the company's most famous ballets: Swan Lake, Don Quixote, and Romeo and Juliet, as well as American classics by Twyla Tharp, Agnes de Mille, Antony Tudor, and Mark Morris. The spring gala is the easiest way to understand why ABT is the most prestigious classical ballet company in the United States and why Congress declared it "America's National Ballet Company." I was struggling with ballet at the time and much preferred my tap and jazz classes. At that age, dancing to Janet Jackson is preferable to dancing to canned piano ballet class music via cassette tape. But my teachers knew I had potential in ballet, so they took me to the show in an attempt to inspire me. In those pre-YouTube days, I had no access to videos of great ballet dancers, nor could I follow my favorite dancers on Instagram. There was no Googling of Rudolf Nureyev or Mikhail Baryshnikov. I was a ballet ignoramus. It was the first time I saw what ballet could be. I watched that ABT gala performance the way a Pop Warner football player watches the Super Bowl. As a child with a flair for the absurdly theatrical, I was struck by the show's obvious glamour. I also witnessed men in tights for the first time. I recall thinking, "What on earth is going on in there?!" Like many of my earliest homosexual inclinations, I mistook my attraction for simple curiosity. I was blown away by the performance: the virtuosity, the music, the costumes, the drama, THE BUTTS! Angie and Steve had an old friend named Kirk Peterson who was an ABT ballet master (a coach), and they took me backstage to say hello. A towering security guard with a clipboard of names let us through to the dressing rooms, where the floor transformed from utilitarian tile to luxurious red carpeting, and the lighting eased into a soft, incandescent ambiance. Next to some red velvet sofas was a small table with dozens of filled champagne flutes, ripe for the picking. Dressers (theater staff who assist with getting artists in and out of very intricate costumes) milled about, hanging costumes to dry and gathering dirty bags of laundry. Ballerinas ghosted around in long silk kimonos and house slippers, talking to each other while taking down their beautifully braided updos. Male dancers laughed and homoerotically jostled each other, wearing nothing but their tights and suspenders; some were even drinking sweaty beers. I think it is still the sexiest place I've ever been. "Where are we?" I asked, with the awe of someone witnessing the rapture. "The Principal Hallway, darling," Angie replied in her British accent. We had successfully infiltrated the sacred dressing grounds of ABT's star dancers. I thought to myself, "This will be my home one day." When youÕre a young ballet student, ÒWhere do you summer?Ó does not mean ÒWhere are your myriad vacation homes?Ó Many dance schools in cities and towns the world over house summer programs. Angie and Steve suggested I audition for ABTÕs Summer Intensive in the year 2000, when I was fifteen. What a time to be a teenager! I auditioned and received a full scholarship to the program. I believe my teachers pulled some strings with their friends at ABT to ensure I could go. My family had zero extra income for summer dance camps, which can cost thousands of dollars. I commuted every day from Fairfield, Connecticut, to Union Square in New York City, where ABT's studios are located, because my mother would not let me live alone in the city for the summer. It was a long commute, but it was perhaps my favorite part of the day. I'd board the Metro-North train with my dance bag, my Discman, a sleeve of CDs, and a notebook. It was never overcrowded in those times and I always found a seat. There are too many goddamned people in the world now. I'd settle into the maroon-and-beige vinyl seats, pop in a Fiona Apple or Ani DiFranco album, and write poetry or journal for an hour and a half, fueled by teenage angst and hormones. Most of my journal entries began with homosexual curiosity and ended in guilt-ridden heterosexual cover-ups. I wrote as though I was sure my journal was going to be discovered and published someday. I've always been a champ at delusion. I was placed in the third-lowest level, Blue, out of ten levels at the ABT Summer Intensive. I quickly became very aware that I was not as refined a dancer as many of the star students. Ballet's young prodigies all went to ABT's summer program in hopes of getting into ABT Studio Company, ABT's apprentice company. There was a performance at the end of the program in which excerpts of various classical ballets were performed for a paying audience. It served as a capitalist scheme (rich parents, bwah-ha-ha!) as well as an audition for the Studio Company. I didn't have a hope in hell. My first year, I danced a crunchy modern piece in culottes-there was no way they'd let me near classical ballet. I was not offered a place in the Studio Company. No surprise there. That first year, I was not yet out of the closet, even though I had been hooking up with my two best friends in Connecticut, Kurt and Jordan, for years. However, I was aware of my attraction to guys. There was a short, fifteen-year-old Latino boy named Julian at ABT who fascinated me. He was a native New Yorker, cussed up a storm, and had a very developed body. I was drawn to his muscled physique and gruff demeanor. Julian defined himself as bisexual. We had a sleepover at his New York apartment, and he talked to me about his girlfriend. "We can't hook up because I'm in a relationship," he whispered, inches from my face, "but we can cuddle." So we cuddled through the night and our boners threatened to spontaneously combust. Throughout the ABT Summer Intensive, I was awed and inspired not only by the dancers of the main company, but also by my fellow students. They were well-trained, disciplined, lithe creatures who barreled through the technically difficult combinations. Each ballet class was a fresh competition in which students tried to prove why they should be a part of the main company. Every glimpse of the elusive artists of American Ballet Theatre incentivized young dancers to reach for the stars and work just that much harder. Paloma Herrera, an Argentine prima ballerina, stalked the hallways icily, always diligently setting to her task of being the consummate professional and artist. Stunned students stood speechless, pressed against the walls of the narrow, grimy halls. Julie Kent, ABT's reigning American prima, sweetly smized in the general direction of aspiring ballerinas, as if to say, "Good luck, girls." I wasn't just smitten with ballet, I was in love with the idea of ABT. After my first year at the Summer Intensive, I went back to my dance school in Fairfield and continued my training with Angie and Steve. They tried their hardest to get me into ABT's Studio Company, driving me into the city multiple times to take class with ABT, to no avail. I must've casually auditioned for Studio Company three or more times! WHY WON'T YOU LOVE ME BACK?!?!?!?!?! The following year, I reauditioned for ABTÕs Summer Intensive and was awarded another full scholarship, I imagine thanks to my teachersÕ having pulled some strings for me again. They had also arranged an apartment in New York City for me, as one of their friends-Kirk Peterson, the coach we had visited backstage at the spring gala four years before-was away for the summer and needed a house sitter. Culturally, the summer of 2001 was incredible. I was sixteen, freshly out of the closet, and living alone at Kirk Peterson's abandoned studio apartment on Seventieth and Broadway. I shuffled around the parquet floors of my apartment to newly released hits by Missy Elliott ("Get Ur Freak On"), *NSYNC ("Pop"), and Alicia Keys ("Fallin'"), and screamed along to my purchased-on-the-street bootleg Moulin Rouge soundtrack. I discovered Harry Potter and read the books with religious fervor. I lived across the street from a twenty-four-hour McDonald's and frequently rode the then 1/9 train with a fistful of french fries. A splendorous time, indeed. Ballet proved to be an elusive muse. Much to my chagrin, I was placed in Blue Level for the second year in a row, while many of my peers from the previous year moved up a few levels, some even to the highest level. Several of my now-contemporaries were in the program with me: Misty Copeland, David Hallberg, and many more. They were of course in the highest level and had already been offered contracts with ABT Studio Company. I couldn't even be jealous . . . they were that much better than me. I befriended two people in particular that year, one in my level and one in the highest level. Blaine Hoven, now an ABT soloist, and I were both in Blue Level for two consecutive years. The two of us were considered jazzerinas, which is a demeaning term for dancers trained predominantly in jazz. At the time, Blaine was a roly-poly, in-the-closet Southern queen from Alabama. We laughed and joked constantly and still do. Our other friend, Simone Messmer, was in the highest level. She was white as snow, bone-thin, smoked like a chimney, and had the maroon dye job of an Eastern European babushka. I found her terribly glamorous; her cutting remarks illuminated my world. She'd often stand outside my building in a large sun hat (she loathed the sun) while balancing on demi-pointe in arabesque, puffing away at a Marlboro Light 100, her vampire-burgundy lipstick staining the filter. Blaine, Simone, and I were inseparable. I recall very little of my actual ballet training that summer. The social frontiers were too vast to allocate brain space to it. Post-coming-out, I began to dress like some sort of homosexual rebel, with glitter-embedded JNCO jeans and crop tops. I wore my hair gelled into eight to ten spikes and had my tongue pierced with a royal-blue marble barbell. I enjoyed the cystic acne of youth and went through puberty in earnest. I was rather revolting. Regardless, my social life was booming. One night I had a fabulous party at my (Kirk's) apartment, where I invited loads of other dancers over to drink copious amounts of mixed liquors. There was gin, vodka, sangria, champagne, beer, and Mike's Hard Lemonade. There was also no shortage of marijuana. I fancied myself a stoner at the time. I don't know where we got all the booze from, as we were all surely under twenty-one, but it was there nevertheless. We got hammered and danced all night. We danced on the bed, which was actually just a pull-out sofa, to Missy Elliott's "4 My People." As we jumped up and down shouting the lyrics, we heard a loud crack and fell through the iron frame of the sofa bed, which had bent and twisted like there'd been an earthquake. In the middle of the night, we decided to go to Times Square. We picked up six-packs of beer and stopped at the Forty-Second Street McDonald's. A dozen wasted teenagers, belligerently ordering cheeseburgers at three a.m. before going to Central Park to smoke blunts and drink champagne straight from the bottle. Beautiful and horrible. I don't know who funded this whole excursion, but it sure wasn't me. The park was dark and terrifying, but we were oblivious and very lucky. We encountered no one-mugger, police, or otherwise. Someone had brought a friend along, a gay student from a city college. He was tall, with a nerdy posture that said, "I love my Yahoo! email address!!!" His hair had frosted tips, and he wore a white button-down with an ashy-green knit sweater vest on top and thick, black-rimmed, rectangular glasses. He was vaguely attractive, and I was a drunk, horny teenager. The two of us left the park and went back to the now-broken sofa bed in my apartment, where I proceeded to drunkenly bat his half-hard penis around like a cat lazily swatting at a paralyzed mouse. I never told Kirk that I destroyed his sofa bed. The Summer Intensive again came to a close with a performance. For the second year in a row, I was not allowed to do classical ballet, and was made instead to do a flamenco dance that was essentially a competition jazz number. I watched from the sidelines as Misty Copeland and David Hallberg danced their classical repertoire. They were elegant and serious, or at least appeared so. Their technical proficiency and finesse were miles away from anything I was capable of, making me feel like a bedazzled turd. Why couldn't I be like them, taking the obvious next steps to achieve their dreams? There were two options here: pity myself or do better. That night was a turning point for me. It was a breezy New York City summer night, and Simone and I were perched on the roof of my brick apartment building like angsty teenage gargoyles. As I performatively smoked a Marlboro Light 100, my first-ever cigarette, I vowed to improve at ballet-to become one of the Misty Copelands or David Hallbergs of the world. "Good luck, honey," Simone chuckled, her witchy, pointed face and my pockmarked, fuzzy cheeks illuminated by a hazy Gotham City moon. I knew I needed to improve in ballet, and by that point, I truly wanted to. I had languished in Blue Level for two years and had been cut after the first of three rounds in the Youth America Grand Prix finals in New York City. I had some catching up to do. My childhood friend Kurt went to a boarding school called North Carolina School of the Arts and suggested I send audition materials. I tried, but didn't get in. Many people had suggested I audition for New York City Ballet's School of American Ballet, but I had heard that many of the dancers were wayward souls like me, and I was trying to reform myself from an apathetic jazzerina pothead to a focused, studious bunhead. Finally, I sent my audition materials to another Southern school called Virginia School of the Arts and was accepted with a full scholarship. Excerpted from Center Center: A Funny, Sexy, Sad Almost-Memoir of a Boy in Ballet by James Whiteside All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
