you know that super smart brother of mine?

He's helping to lead the IBM team now at work on this revolutionary technology in the Cognitive Environments Laboratory. When Jeff describes this to me, he asks me if I remember the film Minority Report, the technologies for which were conjured a decade ago by fifteen scientific researchers during a three-day, Spielberg-assembled think tank.

From the Yahoo Finance article where the video above appears:

Using the capabilities of IBM's pioneering Cognitive Environments Laboratory (CEL), Repsol and IBM researchers will work together to jointly develop and apply new prototype cognitive tools for real-world use cases in the oil and gas industry. Cognitive computing software agents and technologies will be designed to collaborate with human experts in more natural ways, learn through interaction, and enable individuals and teams to make better decisions by overcoming cognitive limitations posed by big data.

Scientists in the CEL will also be able to experiment with a combination of traditional and new interfaces based upon spoken dialog, gesture, robotics and advanced visualization and navigation techniques. Through these modalities, they will be able to learn and leverage sophisticated models of human characteristics, preferences and biases that may be present in the decision-making process.

Jeff, who was inducted into the IEEE two years ago (and whose children respectively dance and race the Rubik's Cube clock), possesses a mind that seems capable of the impossible. He has to dial his intellect down several notches so that he can communicate with ordinary people like me. He has spent many years at IBM doing various fascinating things—and many nights working until 3 AM or later (on concepts, on coding, on new ideas, on computer screens) to be ready for his team the next day.

If you watch this video, you'll see my brother beginning at minute 2:20 in a blue shirt at a long table, thinking. He has blue eyes, light hair, and a brain that is also seemingly unrelated to me.

Thanks to Donna, Jeff's wife, for sharing the article and video, and to my father who was on this news early today.

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my niece dances the tango, at Yale University

I could talk about how she is a physicist, a math genius, a girl who could solve most quantitative puzzles somebody smarter than me would toss her way, from a very young age. A girl who was the named the top girl scientist in the state of New York when she graduated from high school. A girl who spent a summer in California calculating stars.

But this is what makes me happiest about my niece, now a sophomore at Yale University. She has found something she genuinely loves. And it's dance. And she's so good at it.

Here she is, dancing the tango, at the spring show.

And here, below, is the team captain. Something else, right?

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reflecting on my ballroom dance "career" in today's Inquirer

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer I yearn toward dance, mourn my countless non-capabilities, and conclude, well — read on.  The story begins like this, below, and can be found in its entirety here.

How I stood, how I sat, how I walked into a room and didn't possess it - these were concerns. Also: the untamed wilderness of my hair, but we would get to that. In addition: the way I hid behind my clothes and failed their easy angles. Most troubling, perhaps: my tendency to rush, my feverish impatience with myself, my heretofore undiagnosed problem with the art of being led.

So I thought I could dance.

So I imagined the ballroom instructors leaning in to say - first rumba or perhaps the second - "You've got a knack for this."

What knack? What had I done? Why had I not realized that dancing in the dark alone to Bruce Springsteen does not qualify anyone for the cha-cha? That grace is not necessarily an elevated pointer finger? That how they do it on TV is how they do it on TV? That just because you love to dance does not a dancer make you?

So many thanks to Avery Rome for making room for the piece, and to DanceSport Academy in Ardmore—and all my teachers—for making room for me.  Thanks, too, to a certain Moira.  She knows who she is.

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this one's for you, Little Miss M.

I write from time to time on this blog about the Glorious Miss M., who thrills us all at DanceSport Academy with her talent, her commitment, and her kindness.  We've watched her grow up from this little girl, snapped by my camera nearly three years ago, to the young lady who joins us adults on Thursday evenings in the intermediate group classes—not to learn (she knows this stuff already), but to help us find our dancing ways.  She gets a little look in her eye, as you can see.  It's not mischief, exactly.  It's, well, let's call it The Miss M. Sparkle Elixir.

Yesterday evening, while we sat on the couch together waiting for our lesson, Miss M. asked me about our time away in Beach Haven.  I began to speak of dolphins and sun.  "Oh, yes," she interrupted (however politely).  "I read that on your blog."  (How boring can one person be, I thought of myself at the time.)  Miss M. then proceeded to explain how, every day when she comes home from school, she heads to the computer to find out what I blogged.  She was smiling when she said it.  There might have been some irony there.  Still, just in case she's reading today, this one is for you, Miss M.

Miss M. is competing this weekend at the Philadelphia Festival DanceSport Championships.  I'm sending her all of my love.  If the judges know what's right and fair, she'll come home bedazzled with blue ribbons.

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Jan and Lana Dance Jive at 30th Street Station

I've written about Jan and Lana so often on this blog that I don't need to introduce them (do I?).  They are the dancing stars, the soon-to-be movie stars, the team that keeps me honest in a Norah Jones waltz, the instruction that burns but lasts.

Here they are, dancing at Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station.

Because that's how good they are.

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in which Matthew Quick's novel brings my ballroom dance friends to the silver screen

A few years ago, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto introduced me to Matthew Quick, a novelist whose The Silver Linings Playbook had recently been optioned for film.  Many books get optioned; far fewer films get made.  Far, far fewer films have director David Russell at the helm and Bradley Cooper, Julia Stiles, and Robert De Niro cast as leads.

The story is quirky, funny, and moving.  It also features a crazy dance contest, and since the movie was being filmed locally, local dancers were invited to audition as extras.

My friend and dance teacher, Jan Paulovich (DanceSport Academy), and his partner, Lana Roosiparg, were among those who showed up for opportunity.  They had, they say, no expectations, were simply hoping to have some fun.  One month later, they were on the set with De Niro and others—not just dancing, but acting.  They had been told two days of filming would be required.  In the end, their dancing—and their charisma—changed David Russell's plans for the dance scene...and required five on-set days for Jan and Lana.

A few weeks ago, Jan asked me to write this story for a local ballroom dance publication.  It gave me the excuse to get back in touch with Matthew Quick and to ask him how it has felt to watch his novel make its way to the silver screen (it will debut this November).  Here's an extract from the story:

Raised in a blue-collar neighborhood by stern—and conservative—Protestant parents, dance was never part of (Matthew's) world; indeed, he said in a recent interview, “the thought of any man or boy dancing—especially someone I knew personally—was absurd.”

Thus, when Matthew first conjured the dance scene in his novel about a man just released from a mental hospital and desperate to reconcile with his ex-wife, he was, in his words “going for laughs.”

“Pat (Peoples) dancing was my fish out of water,” says Matthew. “Lots of jokes were instantly born. The outfits Pat and Tiffany wear during the dance competition and Tiffany's choreography are equally bizarre and over-the-top. Hilarious, in a sad, quirky, and hopefully endearing way. But as I wrote the scenes I began to see that dancing was not only healthy for Pat but therapeutic. In many ways, the ridiculous way Pat felt while dancing—expressing his emotions through movement—was akin to the way I felt when I started writing seriously and telling people that I was a fiction writer. Mostly I imagined Pat and Tiffany as emotionally vulnerable--maybe for the first time--while dancing. Art saves!”

Dance, too, I keep learning, saves. And life is full of crazy, lovely collisions.

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you know how much I love to dance

(of course you do).

You can therefore imagine my distinct happiness when I learned that our son has chosen—the final course he will choose at a university he has loved—to take a ballroom dancing class.  Just a little one-credit something to cap a remarkable four years.

The photo above is not of my son, but it is of a boy whom I adored back in the days when I was volunteering as a judge and photographer for Dancing Classrooms.  A video montage from that experience (with words and music) can be found here. 

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This Happened

The weather (for it is raining here) will not beat me on this day. 

This happened.

I went to the dance studio after a day of crazy pressures.  I went with my hair weather fizzy, my pants gutter splashed, my toe nails unpainted, my T-shirt too short (thank you, aggressive dryer cycle).  I just went, and I was me, and you are getting the picture.

I have danced for four years now, something like that.  I have worked hard, and I have yearned, but every lesson is a reminder of how much I do not know, how great is the list of things I cannot perfectly do.

Today, in the middle of a lesson, sweaty by now with the humidity of the place, listening to the music, dancing rumba, Jan said, "Beth.  You have become a good dancer."

All right. That's it.  It happened.  I put it here.  It may not happen again for a very long time.  

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Perhaps I am not a woman after all

Why is it (why?) that most women who take up the ballroom dancing thing love everything about it—the dance, sure, but also the sparkle and get-up, the false lashes, the fake tans, the glitter cheeks (not those kind of cheeks), the form-fitting spandex, the low-plunging neck lines, the high-cutting thigh lines, the razzle, did I mention the shoes?, did I talk about the spotlight?—and I personally cannot summon enthusiasm for anything but the dancing itself?

About which I am plenty enthused.

Another way of putting this:  I'm supposed to dance in a showcase on Sunday, this coming Sunday, and I still don't have anything to wear.  So that there I sit, in a studio abuzz with talk about tailor-made dresses, hand-stoned dresses, new satin shoes, fine hair, sequined headbands, items that require tape measures and pins, thinking:  I haven't even been to the mall (which is not, by the way, where the fine ballroom dresses are known to live).

I didn't grow up thinking about beauty the way most girls did.  I grew up wondering how hard I could kick the ball, how fast I could run the race, how well I could rhyme my poems.  I am, therefore, at a deficit.  And perhaps am no woman after all.

To the mall I go.  You can picture me there.  And I don't want to hear a thing come Sunday about the ruthless wild country that is my hair.  There's only so far I am willing to go and besides, my clients need me to stay right here, near the desk, on this side of invisible, where clothes don't matter one bit.

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When I dance

it all falls away—the web of bruises that I wear on the inside, the lacerations of my own self-doubt, the stutter and stall of anxiety.  I'm just there, at the studio, working with John on the tango's speed and pop, watching Kyle and Moira weave elegantly by, throwing my arms around Miss Cristina. Dance is the hardest, most frustrating, and most happy thing that I do, and even if I slide past my stops, even if I lose the pelvic angle, even if rise where I'm to have fallen, I am moving, and therefore alive—outside the reach of harm, ignorant (for a spell) of anything unright, everything cruel.

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Brain training through ballroom dance

I've been a big Sharon Begley fan for years now, and so when I saw that she had written a feature Newsweek story titled "Can You Build a Better Brain?" (January 10 and 17, 2011) I flipped the pages and settled in.

After reviewing all the things that don't have any proven tie to enhanced brain intelligence (those vitamins, the Mediterranean diet, statins, ibuprofen), Begley begins to center in on things that are known to help—exercise, meditation, and complex videogames.  You have to read the whole article to get the complete and utter gist, but I'm going to quote from the paragraph that made me happiest of all:

... taking up a new, cognitively demanding activity—ballroom dancing, a foreign language—is more likely to boost processing speed, strengthen synapses, and expand or create functioning networks.

Ballroom dancing—did you see that folks?  It ain't just about the glitter and the gloves.

Speaking, however, of glitter and gloves, that gorgeous woman in the photograph here is our own Cristina, of DanceSport Academy, whose little Eva is turning two this month.  If learning the rumba doesn't keep us young, this wondrous sprite of a child is bound to do the trick.

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In one gigantic act of bravery

I decide (will I regret this later? I'll probably regret this later) to upload a clip from a dance practice session.  John (my instructor) and I are dancing to Natalie Merchant's wonderful rendition of "The Janitor's Boy."  We're not yet ready for showcase prime time (we have a few weeks more before the event) and Scott, who is recording this for us so that I can see all the things I have to fix (which would be plenty), is explaining to a passerby that this is a "campy" foxtrot.  Campy?  Me?  Really?

Whatever it is.  Whatever it may be.  I dance because it frees me from my own head, which is, at times, not the most eloquent or elegant place to be. 

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The Sun Rain

Just now, coming home from a ballroom lesson with John (Where is the dance? I asked him; It's in the balance we create between each other, he said) I drove through sunlit rain.  Half the sky clear and the other full of gray shout. 

Like dance, I thought.

Like time.

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In the end, what does it mean?

The thing about making yourself vulnerable in a discipline you'll never own is that you don't go out and do it alone. When you dance, for example, before a few hundred people on a Sunday afternoon on a stage, it's not the steps that matter in the end, not really. It's Annika and Monika, who arrive early, with all their enthusiasms, and love. It's those who stand on the margins of the stage, calling your name as you whisk by. It's your Broadway partner, Jean, who looks you in the eyes as you dance and laughs off a mistake and texts you later, "I enjoyed our show a lot. It was very alive." It's your husband, Bill, who worked so hard to make the tango right and who, at the end of the journey, said, "You did great." It's your father, who comes in his best suit; it's your friends, John and Andra, with whom you later share dinner; it's Mike, Aideen's Mike, who says, "I had no idea you had that jive thing in you;" it's Magda and her sweet Polish-flavored encouragements; it's Tim, who says, "Yes, you danced it well, and you danced it together;" it's Jim, the quiet choreographer of the very few words, who says, "Your dances were good."

I have no illusions. I don't pretend. I am not headed toward world championship titles, I am not the show-closing star, I am still (and will always be) fussing with the way I stand and move, I will never be "the one." I dance because I love to and I dance in shows like these because my friends are there. Because in the end what does it mean, save that we cheer each other on.

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Some of Each, in a Rain Storm

Throughout the long pour-down of yesterday's rain, I travel. First, in the dark of pre-dawn, I travel a dreamscape, write to page 246 of this new novel. It's a number bearing no actual significance, save that there, within page 245, are the seeds of the novel's ending, a turning toward, a knowing that, someday, I'll finish this—a fact I would not have bet on until yesterday's strum-beat of rain. Mid-morning Body Pump at the gym with friends is a journey away from me, my mind. Later, back at home, the windows streaking, the laundry room leaking, I slip inside the work of my Penn students, who have responded, with heartbreaking skill, to this call:

Choose an event from your own life about which you now have some distance, some accumulated wisdom. Tell the story of what happened. Enrich it with your understanding of what it meant then, of what it means now, of how time has shifted both the event and its meaning. Consider Ginzburg's dictate about poetic beauty, Dillard's consuming wish to notice everything, Hampl's suggestion that true memoir is written in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.

In the early afternoon, my husband and I eat under a canopy at a local dive, watch the canvas pucker beneath the force of rain. At the gym, beneath the pounding down of storm on rooftops, we practice our tango. Inside the ceaseless wash, we drive home, and again I read the work of my students, then read (for the fourth time) "Hotels Rwanda," authored by my friend Jay Kirk, a best travel essay originally appearing in GQ. Jay will join our class on Monday, talk about how narrative nonfiction gets done, about how one hunts for story, then finds its heart, then gives it shape and purpose. Jay will come, and because he knows and charms and bushwhacks and waits, we'll all be smarter for it.

Late afternoon, our son calls and we talk for a long time about the things he has learned, the conversations he has started, the words his teachers write across his papers. Night, the rain still falling, we watch the movie, "Seven Pounds." I cannot sleep afterward.

Today, this much-discussed ballroom dance showcase will take place. A tango. A Broadway quickstep jive. No matter what, then, that chapter will be written, complete. That is life, the sum total: the anticipation, the afterward.

I just wish I slept more.

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Posturing for Beauty

Magda, the champion dancer, talks about posture. She says, "Imagine that you have a coat, a heavy coat, and that you have filled its every pocket with stones. Now imagine that you are wearing that coat, that your shoulders bear its weight. There is no tension in your neck, no hunch around your ears, because the coat that you are wearing keeps your shoulders in their place and your arms proper in their sockets. You reach high, but always from an anchored place. Your neck is strong. Your head sits right."

She talks and I watch her move, I watch her glide across the room—this gorgeous creature. I think how easy it seems—standing straight, shoulders back, life in repose. I think of how, from the earliest days on frozen ponds and ice skating rinks, I had all the inner joy and all the speed and all the height, but I lacked posture. I lacked the courage to present myself to the world, to come out from behind myself and say, Here, at last, am I. That has carried forward. Writing, for example, is myself once removed. It is me, behind words, inside them.

Is it too late, at my age, to finally stand tall?

No. Because I want this. I want beauty.

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Stand Tall

In about two weeks I'll be standing on a stage, hopefully blinded by the lights, dancing a tango in Act One and that much-feared Broadway number in Act Two—all as part of the DanceSport showcase. It's always about now in these scenarios that I ask myself, And what, Beth, were you thinking? When I wake from a dream (I mean to say nightmare) purely certain that there's an elephant turning a pirouette on my chest.

Graceful beasts, those elephants. And so heavy.

Every time I think about getting out there with those jumps and lifts, that impossible Quickstep, that prickly tele-spin, those many cortes, I remember my final ice skating competition, when all I wanted was to be perfect. By the time I took the ice however, I was so clutched and crunched with fear that when the music started my legs were ungreased tins. The rink seemed huge and the audience vast, but most of all I was aware of my parents in the stands—deeply cognizant of their generous investment (time and money) in my ice skating career. I needed, I thought, to skate for their sakes. I needed to be lovely.

I fell on the first jump. I skated tall after that. I brought speed and height into my jumps, kick into the footwork, patience and lean to the spread eagle. I lost, in the end, to my rival, Holly Archinal. But I had skated, I had, and that's what I hope for in two weeks—to find a way past the inevitable errors and to finish tall.

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Where Beauty Runs Deep

Probably in this case the title says it all, for this is Magda, a world champion ballroom dancer who comes to Dancesport a few days a week and gives to others what she knows. She does it without temper or stomp, without conceit. She dances for you and with you, so that you might align, however briefly, with the slip light of her grace. She raises her arm and her hands are liquid, and for a fraction of an instant you are liquid, too—seeing possibility, hearing song, finding new religion in the uninterrupted, the continuous. Choreography is made up of parts; Magda weaves the parts into a whole. Dance is made alive by the slow abbreviated by the fast; she shows you how.

And when she says, Put your hands on the small of my back so that you can see what I am saying about the spine, you are reminded of how weightless beauty is.

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Asking for the Truth

Every once in a while, you just want the truth. You need it. So that today, which began with a pre-dawn, sleep-deprived Zumba at the gym, advanced into corporate work, fell toward housework, slipped into a panic, and somehow spun toward a dance lesson, honesty was required.

"I feel as if I'm doing something wrong, and that no one will tell me what that is," I told Jean, during a quickstep lesson. "It's like everybody knows, except for me."

"Well," he answered, looking me straight in the eyes, not pausing, not beating around the bush, not acting as if I hadn't stepped forward with the question. "It's about posture. It's about confidence. It's about the way you plant your feet on the floor. When you think about it, you get it right. But when you don't, you fall back into your old way of dancing. You look as if you are looking for something. You don't stand perfectly straight."

And of course I wish that I did it all better. Of course I wish that I had dancerly wings. But today, this day, I was glad most of all that someone had not pushed me off, had simply said: I will tell you the truth.

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Reflected Out

Her kind of beauty I could live with. The wide open canvas of her eyes, the words she already holds to herself, the liberal adornments of pink: I am a girl, I am to be seen, I will not tell you everything. Earrings in a drawer somewhere, or hanging on a tree. The polishing of soul.

An hour ago, at the dance studio, I became too aware of mirrors, of me in mirrors, of life passing. I became too aware, and I stopped—unable, really, to keep on dancing, to make a pretense of it. I wanted more than I was just then. I wanted more time.

Home alone now, I remember this child. How she turned so freely, did not blink.

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