I’m answering questions so you boys will know me a little better.
Question: What is an experience you wish you had as a child?
There are two:
First, I wished I’d never taken piano lessons and had started ballet classes sooner. Piano lessons were my dad’s idea–he dreamed of me playing the piano in church. So for eight very long years, I took lessons. Eight years! And I barely learned how to play a chord! Lessons were torture, though I loved spending time with my piano teacher’s son, Jeff. We played Battleship or played outside before each lesson. Practicing was horrible. It was boring, and I would do just about anything else than sit down and play.
And I loved ballet. Virginia Meldrum (Galloway) took me to her ballet class one day and I fell in love with it! The costumes and storytelling! But my parents were dead set against it. I finally made a bargain with them. I would stay in piano one more year and if I still wanted to try ballet, they would enroll me at the Marietta School of Ballet (now the Georgia Ballet.) I made it through yet another horrible year of piano lessons, then started ballet when I was eleven. Over the next four years, I dedicated myself to dancing and loved every minute of it. When I quit, I was in Company 2 and taking lessons with the 1st company. I’d been offered a job in dance, asked to try out for the Atlanta Ballet, and given the opportunity to study in London with the London Ballet. If I’d started earlier with Iris Hensley, I believe I would have ended up with the Atlanta Ballet. Starting classes at eleven put me at a disadvantage.
Secondly, I wished we’d traveled to different places more as a family. It seemed like we only went to Gatlinburg, and while that was nice, it got a little boring. It was more like a family reunion than a vacation, and while that was fun at times, it got old. It would have been fun to go to the beach or up to New England or out West.
The few trips we did go on, like to Myrtle Beach or Washington, DC were wonderful, though I wished we’d had more time to visit the museums or hang out at the beach.
