By Kaylee Johnson
Campus News
There is a pair of nude character heels that have been sitting on my vanity bench for two months, and I swear, they have grown dark judgmental eyes. It would make sense, as they have led me into the darkest days of my life; we waltzed and jitterbugged into rejection, lunacy, and delusion gracefully, and always together. Those shoes would have led me off the bridge that separates my house from the icy Hudson if I let them.
Three weeks before my twentieth birthday, after spending the summer teaching ballet to children, I bought myself a pair of character shoes to audition for the Radio City Rockettes. I was a size 16 and an inch too short, but the mania was overpowering, and I spent five hours a day for two weeks practicing my kicks. A few days before the open call I woke up sober, sore, and restless and I knew that I couldn’t handle the rejection that I would face in a room full of polished, thin women.
But, a week later I found myself in an elite audition room for a touring production of “The Nutcracker”, and just as I originally suspected on that one sober morning, I was body shamed, overlooked, and humiliated. I left the audition halfway through and walked to my car in the pouring rain, listening to the heels tap against the sidewalk harmoniously.
I tried to tuck the shoes away after that, as they served as a reminder of my insecurities and failures, but they were expensive and I wanted to get use out of them, so I wore them to teach as a part of my Elementary Education fieldwork every Wednesday of the Fall Semester, which also happened to be the night of my acting class.
Out of every college class I have ever taken, acting has left the biggest impression on me. Not because of the material I learned; the professor was unsober, burned out, and sexually suggestive. But I finally cracked on that stage, and my classmates got to marvel at the intricacies of my psyche.
My first scene partner, Holden, turned out to my first college crush, and I spent many hours studying him in those shoes; listening to him tell me how he wanted to be a broke Broadway actor living off bread and milk in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, while publishing his manuscripts. I dreamt of a life where we would drive across the country together, writing about the people we’d meet along the way; a hippie lifestyle that tasted so nonsensical and alluring.
During one of our rehearsals, I put my elbows on the piano, closed my eyes, and listened to him sing to me. These moments were tantalizing and led me into a cavern of enigmas that I have yet to understand.
That same day, while we were alone in the theater, Holden started dancing while I was reading The New York Times. I looked at him and laughed. “You could be worse,” I said smiling coyly. He continued to dance and rehearse for his role in the school musical for an hour while I listened to the sound of my head pound while trying to read a single blurb in the paper.
The scene I curated was anomalous and emotional. Somehow, I convinced Holden play a man on death row getting electrocuted. I played the mother of the victim he brutally raped and killed screaming at him through the glass. He just wanted to perform a proposal gone wrong like the rest of the students, but I was never meant to blend in, and he knew that the moment he heard me talk about my distaste for people who read Nora Roberts and consider themselves literate during icebreakers on the first night of classes.
The shoes became a symbol of my youth; by day I taught children how to read in them, and by night I rendezvoused with a man who would never romantically like me for reasons that were completely out of my control.
On the day of our scene, I wore red lipstick, a tan pea coat that was purchased for my Uncle’s funeral, cat eye sunglasses, twisted my newly charcoaled hair into a French twist, and those goddam character heels. When Holden saw this, he said “Wow, I am loving your look.” Maybe he didn’t see that underneath the sunglasses I was spiraling into an abyss of broken glass and bloody saliva. And all because he made me feel what I should have felt after every exhausting ballet performance I wasted fifteen years of my life on. He made me feel exhilarated and my age, twenty.
So, I spent the rest of the semester harboring all my emotions in those heels, watching them grow muddier and more weather-beaten every week. Dance shoes aren’t meant to be worn in snowstorms, you know. The left shoe was constantly at war with the right; left wanted me to jitterbug in the theater with Holden and let my guard down, while right was pulling me toward the basement of my campus library to write poetry in seclusion. Left always won, and the excuse I made when I neglected all other parts of life to embrace love was that I would be able to write about my experience someday.
When I went to watch Holden perform in the school musical, I sat in the front row of the dingy campus theater with twenty-year-old enthusiasm and an all-consuming migraine. For three hours I focused my gaze on him and tried to piece together all the unanswered questions that would not stop echoing in my ears. And while I lacked mental clarity during that turbulent time, I was certain that I was rooting for Holden; a soft-spoken dreamer with an angelic voice and idealistic lens. After the show, he wrapped his arm around me and expressed his gratitude, and I nearly vomited on the sidewalk from the rocky motion of all the emotions stirring inside of my heart.
The weeks that followed the show were rough, and eventually those shoes led me into foreign darkness. My theater class got to see a side of me that I did not know existed; as I threw off my black velvet shawl, snorted powdered sugar meant to look like cocaine, and spent seven hours styling my hair and crying in the mirror of the makeshift dressing room.
After finals, I spent a lot of time exploring the West Coast, and for the most part I was able to forget about the fractures that Holden left me with. But in one moment, while I was standing on a vacant Arizona Route 66 road, I remembered him telling me how he wants to drive across the country and waltz with all the nuances of life. And, I realized that the man who had innocently flirted with me will linger in my writing for years to come; he unintentionally caused me to have a creative renaissance. I hope he gets to travel those picturesque roads someday with an untamed heart and the same idealism I saw in his twenty-one-year-old eyes.
Maybe the curtains will open at St. James Theatre in New York City decades from now and I will lock eyes with the man who added color to my bland college experience. The audience will obliterate, and we will both be young and passionate again. But for now, I must decide what to do with the nude character shoes that can see into my abstract psyche.
Kaylee Johnson is a junior Education/English major.
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