Harvey soon found a job through the family. Meanwhile, I hunted for a position as a dance teacher, finally hooking up with a good school in Fairmont. I taught there right up until the Ring of Fire, some twenty-one years.
Early on, Harvey converted a shed into a studio where I could practice. Needless to say, I taught all four of my children to dance. Staci and Melanie, as girls, had no trouble sticking to dance. Joel, and Joseph, my baby, being males, came under intense peer pressure to quit such unmanly activities, especially as they entered their teens. But they had been caught young and were able to resist. Both boys were comfortable in the company of girls, a benefit of years of exposure to girls in dance classes. This translated into social confidence around the opposite sex at a time when their peers were interested in girls, but lacked confidence around them. I played on this to suggest that peer pressure to quit was mostly envy.
The Ring of Fire was a shocker, a really traumatic event. Those first few months were lost in the struggle to survive. Everyone had to help, doing "important" things. There wasn't time for formal ballet lessons, nor the spare resources to pay. However, we, my family, all went religiously into the studio every day to do the exercises. Even Harvey joined in. I think it was one thing that kept us sane during that period. As the year progressed things gradually became easier. The starvation we had all feared didn't occur. There was sufficient food for everyone, and nobody who was able to work, and did so, went hungry.
As we went into 1632, GV Biogas and Methane Corporation, a new start-up business, drew me from the pool of available workers. Don't ask me what it is they do. All I do is shuffle paper all day. Needless to say, I still had an itch to dance. So I looked into the prospects of teaching dance at the school. I needed something, anything that would get me back to my first love.
I lucked out when Sherrilyn Maddox, the PE teacher at the high school, arranged for me to teach a couple of classes after work, "Ballet for Beginners" targeting children, and "Dance for Fitness" for adults. Initially I found a lot of my adult students were down-time females coming in for the dance classes, hoping to make themselves more attractive to uptime males. However, over time I started to collect a number of down-time males. Soon I was in that most enviable position of all for ballet teachers. I had as many males as females.
The students paid the school a small fee to attend my classes, and in turn the school paid my assistant instructors and me a flat hourly rate. I noticed that my dutiful sons, Joel and Joseph, had no qualms about unmanly activities when there was money to be had.
This took us through that year. The only blot on the otherwise pleasant landscape was when a horde of horrid horsemen attacked the town and school. There were anguished moments when we first heard about the school being attacked, but they were soon alleviated when we heard that all students were alive and well.
Because of the massive amount of construction going on and the call of the military, not all students could attend regular lessons. That meant most of my students were unable to progress as quickly as I would have liked. The lack of progress meant that for only the second time since I was five, I missed a live performance of Nutcracker.
Quite frankly, I lacked the competent company needed to put on a performance. We did put on a recital made up of various parts from several ballets for students' families though. There were a few simple pieces for the youngsters and the less experienced adults. However, the pièce de résistance was a new ballet that I wrote and choreographed. It was based on the stories circulating about Flo Richards and Brillo, her "favorite" ram.
Part of the fun was that Flo was ambushed. We managed to get her to the recital without revealing the content of the principal performance. Nothing was actually said, but everyone there had heard about the antics of Brillo and his harem of ewes. The whole performance was greeted with howls of laughter, with Flo joining in.
We grabbed and held the audience from the beginning when our "Flo" stood between Brillo and her ewes, protecting them from the horrible nasty underbred Ram, while the ewes looked at Brillo with interest. The attention held right through to the last scene where Flo, brandishing a big knife, gives Brillo a verbal warning after finding him asleep in the same paddock as the ewes.
Carl Schockley danced Brillo. He was an out-of-towner in Grantville, part of the construction crew building a new high-tech factory of some sort. He first came to my notice a few months before the Ring of Fire, when he turned up at the dance school in Fairmont asking about classes to maintain condition. When my son Joel, who was originally cast as Brillo, was called away for military maneuvers shortly before the recital I had been desperate. Then Melanie, my youngest girl, casually mentioned having seen Carl on a Kelly Construction building site.