Crash Into Me_ A Survivor's Search for Justice - Liz Seccuro [10]
I had had a happy childhood. I was born to a Long Island teenager on December 23, 1966, but was given up for adoption to the New York Foundling Hospital by my birth mother, a student at New York University. My birth father was married to another woman, and this girl wasn’t ready to have a child on her own. I was adopted by my parents, Barbara and Bob Schimpf, four days shy of my first birthday. They brought me home as an early Christmas gift to themselves, and I got a new birth certificate: I was named Elizabeth Anne Schimpf.
My family was modest in means, but rich in personality. We lived in an airy, sprawling apartment in the Fleetwood section of Mount Vernon, New York, in Westchester County, a heavily Italian American blue-collar bedroom community of New York City. My dad was a transit worker with the MTA, first as a bus driver, then a dispatcher, then as a major accident investigator. He was a self-made man and had worked since he was a child, when he sold peanuts at Yankee Stadium; his mother and grandmother laundered the players’ uniforms. My mom was beautiful and stylish, with a sarcastic and biting wit. As the eldest of four children raised in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, she had been largely responsible for raising her younger siblings, for my grandmother was agoraphobic and an alcoholic. My mother never drank, although she did work—ironically, as an executive assistant at the Seagram Company.
My early years are a blur of good memories—summer trips to the Jersey Shore, vacations at Disney World in Florida, parties at my parents’ house and their friends’ houses where the kids would all fall asleep in piles of coats while our parents danced the nights away in double-knit polyester bell bottoms and jumpsuits. (This may have been the seed of my career as an event planner, as I was pressed into service to pass hors d’oeuvres at my parents’ parties.) On nights when my parents left me with trusted babysitters, I would beg them to let me stay up late, so I could practice the dance moves from Dance Fever and Solid Gold, both big hits on television at the time, the era of disco. I was already taking dance lessons by then, too. When I was three years old, a doctor had noticed unevenness in my gait and a certain clumsiness, so he literally prescribed ballet lessons.
I eventually became more serious about dance, practicing every day after school and on Saturdays. Dance gave me a great deal of confidence. Always a fairly shy child, through ballet I learned to hold my head high. There were gorgeous costumes, makeup, flowers at performances, and curtsies at curtain calls. I made great friends, and backstage we would giggle until we cried and tell each other ghost stories in the dark dressing rooms. And, most important, I was good at dance. I had “the line,” as the late ballet master George Balanchine would say: that alignment of the neck, the spine, the legs, the turnout of the hips, even the hands and toes, that was everything in dance. I pushed myself extra hard, trying to develop perfect technique to go along with the perfect line. When I was thirteen, my teacher recommended me for a summer of study at the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow. The Bolshoi was the best company on earth. But soon after preparations were made, my trip was canceled. The United States was boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and it was considered too dangerous for me as an American to go to Moscow. This was a great disappointment. I started to lose my interest in dance, which now seemed like less of a dream and more of a chore. I had hit puberty, and I began to gain two or three pounds every few months. A knee injury sidelined me at fourteen. I knew I would never become a