• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 271 0

My father was also a dancer. He had danced as a boy in Crete and continued to dance in a Cretan troupe long after his arrival in America. As part of traditional Greek dance, we wore the traditional Greek costume: bloomer-style long wool pants, a wraparound sash about twenty feet long, and a long-sleeved, baggy white shirt. I had my own costume for these performances, but it was my father’s costume for which I had been begging him half of my life. Greek dance was so important to my father that he commissioned a portrait of himself in his full dance costume. It still hangs in my mother’s dining room.

On one occasion, when I was twelve years old, our dance troupe was invited to a church bazaar that would be four days long. We prepared feverishly. All went according to plan on the first three days of the festival. My father, as usual, was there watching his son with pride.

On the fourth day, we dancers had a special agenda. Unbeknownst to her, we planned to bring Mrs. Sopasis onto the stage to dance with us, present her with flowers, and acknowledge all of her hard work and dedication. I was very excited, as were the other dancers. Our energy was palpable, and the air felt like it was resonating with our adrenaline-pumped anticipation.

It was a shock to all of us then when the priest suddenly and casually canceled our performance. It wasn’t his fault, really. He didn’t know that we had a special program planned. There was no way for him to know how much work, love, and devotion we had tied up in this, the last performance of the festival.

The blow, however, was tremendous. I ran off and in my fury and frustration I punched a cinder-block wall. I then proceeded to chug wine, one bottle after another. As I stumbled around, my cousin took me to the bathroom, propped me against a wall, and started beating on me, just to keep me conscious.

I remember my friends around me. Some of them, including my best friend, Alex, were crying as I was strapped to a stretcher and taken away in an ambulance. In addition to breaking my hand, I had to have my stomach pumped. My father, president of the church and upstanding member of the Greek community, had to watch his son very publicly rushed off to the hospital, siren wailing.

It can be difficult to look back on your life and see a mistake you’ve made that was not only painful to yourself but to others too. It’s amazing, though, that despite my behavior, my father seemed to understand my actions. He too knew the passion of dance, the intersection of wine and spirits, the sacrifice and commitment to become an accomplished dancer. To him, my behavior was a gross embarrassment, but still he understood it—he understood me.

I was about thirteen years old when Mrs. Sopasis asked me to join the Minos dance troupe in Astoria, Queens. The dancers at Minos were on an entirely different level than my peers at Greek school. My passion for Greek dance had grown, and even at Minos I was determined to be the best. Every day after school I would run home and my mother would rush me over to the church or to Queens so I could practice, for hours, the dances that Mrs. Sopasis was teaching us.

When I wasn’t practicing under Mrs. Sopasis’s direction, I was practicing on my own. I became obsessed with learning how to do figoures—tricks like jumps, twists, and turns. But the one figoure that consumed me was one that only a rare few could execute. I wanted to learn how to do the figoure in which, while dancing, the dancer jumps onto a bottle and balances himself on its mouth.

I worked alone in my basement for hours, standing on a rickety card table so I could hang from the rafters in order to lower myself onto a bottle. I fell again and again, sometimes to the floor, other times falling on the card table and toppling the table and glass bottle along with me. I worked tirelessly, first trying to balance myself on the bottle and, once I had mastered that, trying to jump off the bottle and into the air, slap my hands to my feet, and then land back on the mouth of the bottle again. I worked on this for weeks and