Like literally, on a ball, for a living, and do the same for other people? I'm about to find out.
File this under distractions on the home front.
So as I move forward (roll forward?), I’ve been staying crazy busy (prompting me to ask myself repeatedly how I ever did all this while working at the paper, too). Canopy rehearsals are in full swing (pun maybe or maybe not intended) — a trio bungee piece and a duet on Spanish web, for the show, Oct. 21-23 — and I’m back teaching at Canopy, three classes a week, plus some privates. In between, I’ve met with Lauren to test-out, go over test results and talk at length to get a better feel of how things work at Studio.
On Saturday, I co-taught a workshop with Lauren, which leads to my first official class there, 10 a.m. Saturdays starting this week. (Please sign up via email if you’re interested, julieannephillips@yahoo.com )
And then there’s the above distraction — taking classes at Leap High Flying Trapeze School, which just opened last month. My friends Shain and Kara, with whom I performed a few years back for Canopy’s cabaret show, moved to Boston where they started classes at New York Trapeze School (they had flown previously, which is how they met, performing and teaching at a Club Med). They became friends with another couple, Kaz and Larissa Stouffer there, and talked them into moving back to Athens with them to open a school (there’s more to it than that, but that’s the gist). I was nervous and anxious to try, and now I’m hooked. I won’t lie, when I’m standing on that platform about to jump off hanging onto the trapeze, I’m white-knuckle scared. But it’s getting better. I’ve “flown” as they say, three times now and have signed up for a weekly class, which started last night. I’m not exactly sure why I want to do this, but I love it. So here we go.
On the upside (pun probably intended), maybe it’ll earn me some clients.
For anyone visiting from that link at Flagpole, I’ll be working at Studio in Athens, in the Leathers Building on Pulaski Street, under the guidance of my awesome teacher, Lauren O’Grady, who runs the studio. More about Yamuna Body Rolling, which I’m certifying in, here.
Thank You: I’d like to take some time here to give a huge shout-out and thank you to longtime Athens music journalist Julie Phillips. She’s best known in the music scene as the features/arts and entertainment editor for the Athens Banner-Herald, but she amicably left that position last week to focus on a new career. Phillips began writing for the ABH in 1996, and her first interview was with Vic Chesnutt. At that time the paper didn’t have a music editor, so she quickly became, in her words, “the de-facto entertainment editor.” She adds, “That was such an honor—being able to meet so many great musicians and, even beyond the music, just great people.” Phillips was keen to cover every aspect of Athens music and her enthusiasm for the task never seemed to wane. She has her own band, too, with Kyle Dawkins, called Maps & Transit. Last year she established the Athens Music & Arts blog(www.athensmusicandarts.tumblr.com), which she plans to keep running. She has been an aerial skills and dance instructor as well as a member of the performing company at Canopy Studio for a long time, and her new career is kind of an offshoot of that experience. She has been in New York training in the therapeutic exercise known as body rolling and says: “I knew that if I left the paper I didn’t want to go straight back to work behind a desk. I wanted to be able to use my experience with Canopy and help people that were in pain.” She has started documenting her journey over atwww.bodyrolling.tumblr.com. Although she may not be covering the music scene for the ABH anymore, she’s not leaving Athens. “There’s nowhere else I’d want to live,” she says. You can check out her own music via www.mapsandtransit.com. So, thank you, Julie, for always being such an ardent and tireless supporter of Athens arts culture. Your reporting will be missed, but we’ll see ya ‘round town.
Home.
It’s a different view. I missed it, and the sound of the crickets in the morning, and the smell of the fresh-cut grass. All of it.
Today will focus on studying for my test-out with Lauren at 10 a.m. tomorrow, so I can get my certification and get rolling.
Fingers crossed.
P.S. Lauren and I will be co-teaching a workshop on Sept. 10, noon-5 p.m. Anyone interested can contact the studio at (706) 206-0101. I will begin teaching a Saturday class at 10:30 a.m. Sept. 17, as well.
Kyle made me a Welcome Home gift — pickles from our abundant okra … yummmmm!
Last day: Rotem, from Israel, me, and Zeynep, from Turkey.
Last day, mixed emotions.
So ready to be home again — like unbelievably ready. New York is a great city, but I’ve been homesick pretty much every day; I just powered through it and embraced the experience. And it has been completely fulfilling.
The people I’ve met in my classes are, in a word, inspiring. Zeynep, from Turkey, who is a physical therapist and has what I call magic hands, learned English watching television. It’s excellent, and so is she. In all the partnering opportunities I’ve had with her in the hands-on assists, she’s been able to get my body into positions that achieve much better results than I’ve gotten myself. I know her patients at home must love her. She found body rolling on the Internet, she said, and read stories about it. Those made sense to her and how she knows the body to work and adjust, but still, she wasn’t sure it would live up to the hype. I shared some good things that have come out of our studio, and she was relieved to hear them. She will bring this work back to help her patients even more.
Rotem, from Israel, has three beautiful little girls waiting for her back at home, ages 5, 3 1/2 and 1 1/2. She took classes in Israel with Yamuna when she did workshops there (she does them in Israel pretty regularly, I think, and has a following there). Like Zeynep, Rotem is a physical therapist, and shared the work she learned from Yamuna with her mother, who suffered from back pain. It was the first thing that actually helped her, she said. Rotem has a theory about why body rolling works so well, she told me. And it has to do partly with the self-application. With injuries, we can be afraid of being touched or moved in the injured place, but rolling puts the person in charge of his own healing. The brain adjusts to the new sensation of this, and rather than fear, begins to understand this language of restoration. Rotem said in Israel, physical therapists aren’t likely to accept Yamuna coming in and telling them that what they’re doing can be done better with the balls. But if Rotem, a physical therapist, is sharing it, then they might be more likely to listen to her, their peer. She is looking forward to more training, and becoming a teacher-trainer (like our teacher here) in Israel.
Also in our class is a man who’ll be the first certified body rolling teacher in the Czech Republic, a woman from Portugal, a woman from Singapore and a woman from Australia among a bunch of Americans from California to Chicago to Birmingham, Ala. Nearly all of us have spent the last 10 days together in this work, and I’m most amazed by those who’ve had to do the practice teaching — and learning, for that matter — in their non-native language.
My first practice teaching was yesterday, when I led a roll up the center line of the body, from the pubic bone to navel, then from the sternum to the clavicle. It went well; I didn’t get too many critiques except that I needed to talk more about the potential for discomfort in doing the abdomen (heh, and there is that!) and that in the clavicle roll, I forgot to have the class turn their necks to the opposite direction as we were working our way out from the sternum. Today I have to do a pretty easy one, black balls (they’re small) for calf release. I don’t have to do cross-fibering (going from side to side, which peels the muscles apart and is pretty intense — aka painful).
My friend Yelena, who lives in California, stopped me on the walk from class yesterday and asked if I thought it was appropriate for her to bring cake today to celebrate. YES! I said, BRING CAKE! I might not be there for it, since I have to leave early, but a celebration most certainly is in order.
I think that’s one of those sweet little memories I’ll hold onto. The air is already starting to turn here, and the sky was so blue yesterday afternoon when we stopped on that pretty West Village street corner, feeling good about being nearly done, and having had the opportunity to work with such a great group of people, led by equally great instructors.
So, as I said, mixed feelings about this, our last day. The memory of this time is one I will cherish.
The above photo is one I took yesterday morning. It’s the 9/11 memorial tiles attached to a fence on Mulry Square, which I walk past each day. (Details here.) With the 10th anniversary of 9/11 so close, seeing how this city thrives gives me a nice feeling of hope, I think. I mean, there are many things in the world that still need to change, and sometimes I think we’re fast bringing about our own extinction.
But that people from all over the world can come together and study work that is meant to help others is a very good thing. And I’ve felt lucky to be a part of it.
And this is the view. There’s a building directly across the street from Abby’s, but just to its left there’s this. That’s the Brooklyn Bridge, and the view of New York City and Brooklyn as seen from some 300 feet above the ground.
It’s pretty amazing to think the World Trade Center Towers were more than three times this high. (The towers were 110 stories; Abby’s building is 32.)
Tonight’s the last night in my home away from home. Here’s where I’ve been sleeping, in Abby’s big bed. I’ve poetically left out the messier parts of the room, taken up by my suitcase and various ball-rolling accoutrements. Also, in honor of Abby, I did not make the bed today, as she says, “Why make the bed when it’s only going to get messed up again?”
Fortunately, she does not follow this line of thinking when it comes to personal hygiene.
Here’s what I’m talking about re: the Spider-Man-on-the-train photo. These are my trapezin’ sisters Melissa and Ann on what looks to be a bridge in Budapest. They were there a week or so ago, visiting our fellow Canopy sister Christy Fogarino whilst her husband was on tour there with his band, Interpol. You just never know what Canopy girls will do when it comes to acrobatics on the spot.
Even when it’s not about Abby, it’s about Abby
It’s a saying she likes (though at least she doesn’t use the third person). And I have to admit, in this case, it’s true.
An 11-night stay in NYC never would’ve been possible for me without the help and hospitality of my baby sister. As I told my parents, say what you will about her housekeeping skills, she’s an excellent hostess.
That said, she left me Saturday to go home to Va. Beach to check on Dad (Facebook photos of her peach daquiri-painted toes stretched into the pool offer a hint that this trip was not without its benefits). Dad is doing well, she reported to me via text the minute she got there. It made me cry again. I needed that. Familial love runs so deep, and any thought of something happening to my dad or mom … well, let’s just say I try not to think about it.
On the note of familial love, though, I missed her the minute she left. She’s a little ray of sunshine; dumb cliche, but she is. Sitting here in her sunny room overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, 30 stories above Manhattan, it’s too quiet. New York is missing something.
Of course I’ll see her again soon, but this trip has been enriched in ways it never would’ve been without sharing it with her and seeing a bit of her life. I leave her knowing that, now that she’s finished school, something better awaits.
And while I know her better now as an adult, I don’t think I’ll ever quite shake the image of her in the photo below; nor do I want to. I like to keep her in my memory this way — a 3-year-old with a belly full of Yoohoos and chocolate pudding cups, ready to charm the world.
