I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [2]
Prologue
In my early twenties, I was approached to write a book about my life as a dancer. I thought, “Ridiculous! I haven’t lived yet.” However, over the next fifty years, I kept diaries, collected materials, and occasionally dabbled, writing little essays of an autobiographical nature. Ingredients were being stored for future use.
In 1999, I took close to seven months off to backpack the length of the Appalachian Trail with my son George. It was an exhilarating adventure. The first six weeks (Maine and New Hampshire) were brutal, but soon we became walking machines, easily knocking off twenty miles a day, while lugging a backpack up and down the rocky terrain. From north to south, through the fourteen states we traversed, and staged forty dance events. I invented an Appalachian hiking dance for those events, teaching more than fifteen thousand people. During the more than five million steps it takes to hike the Appalachian Trail, I spent a lot of time listening to voices in my head. A recurring one urged, “Jacques, stop delaying! Finish your hike and finish your book! It’s ready to be baked!” Well, it took over a decade to prepare and serve these pages.
Anecdotal and episodic, this book is a buffet of stories about the experiences and relationships that shaped me as a person, dancer, and teacher. Seasoned with tales of friendships and collaborations with great artists, celebrities, and individuals, these stories weave a tapestry. I trust you will read them and as a result come to believe, as I do, in the importance of the arts and their value to the development of our humanity and culture. Who am I? I’m a man, an American, a father, a teacher, but most of all, I am a person who knows how the arts can change lives, because they transformed mine. I was a dancer.
I Was a Dancer
The Boss
My father would tell us, “She thinks she’s Sarah Bernhardt, the queen of the theater, putting on airs.” My mother relished the comparison, ignoring the slur Pop intended. She did resemble photographs of the great actress, and acted the part as well. “She’s so bossy, we should call her the Boss!” The family agreed and adopted the nickname, but soon transformed it into a term of affection. When that happened, my father went back to calling her Georgiana.
Christened Georgiana d’Amboise, she grew up to be a determined woman—tiny (four foot nine), sturdy, shapely, and volcanic with energy. Her hair was thick, chocolate brown, and her matching eyes danced. “Oh, I had such hair,” she boasted, “hanging down below my knees!” I imagined her as a young girl in Canada with her mother and four sisters singing French Canadian folk songs, lined up in a row as they rhythmically combed one another’s hair—the feminine version of a line of paddling canoers.
Pop claimed 1900 as the year of his birth. My mother claimed the same year, though when asked, she declared, with her irrefutable logic, “Your father’s a year older than me.”
Georgiana’s father, David Bergeron d’Amboise, married Marie Pelletier, and I believe that out of the children born to them, nine survived. Their farm was in Île Vert, in the province of Quebec.
In Canada, winters were brutal. One of my mother’s chores sent her out into the freezing cold with an ice pick to chip frozen herring from the barrels stored outside their farmhouse. “Those fish kept us alive,” she would announce dramatically. After chores were done, the family played board games, and Marie read to them by the light of oil lamps and the fireplace. “We read them all, the French books—Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Voltaire—Camille! Oh, how I loved Camille!—and books describing the life of the French court, l’histoire de France, and Château d’Amboise!” They read stories from the Bible and tales from the lives of saints, wallowing in the gory deaths of Christian martyrs, replete with miracles and sacrifices. Nothing subtle about the way my mother retold and embellished her favorites: “Oh, poor Saint Bernadette Soubirous,1 she had tuberculosis