The Business of Dance

I grew up in Gardena, Callifornia in a lower middle class neighborhood with a mixture of a motels, apartments, and houses. My mother always believed that too much free time on a child's hands would lead to trouble, so I did everything from playing the trombone to acting. But I fell in love with dance, and there was one person to blame for that: Michael Jackson. MTV was just starting. We barely got cable television and all MTV would feature was rock groups. That changed when Michael performed the "Thriller" music video. MTV marketed the video as a world premiere, something new at that time, and my sisters, mother and I sat on the fold-out couch in the living room and watched "Thriller" and the "Making Of" behind-the-scenes video. I loved the video, but what hooked me was the behind the scenes work that choreographer Michael Peters put Michael and the dancers through. That behind the scenes video still resonates with me today. It was after watching "Thriller" that I started dancing around the house. I was Michael, and I made my twin sisters be the zombies. We recorded the video on VHS, watched it over and over again facing the television, and learned every step by heart. Of course, the fact that we learned the video facing the television meant that we learned the whole thing backwards. But we knew all the steps, so it didn''t matter to us. My mother was so proud, and did not hesitate to call neighbors over to watch her kids dance. But I wasn''t used to performing in front of others, and truth be told, I felt that her gloating over her kids was sort of like bragging, and I hated bragging. She gathered an eager audience ready to watch her "babies"; I would explain that I didn't want to dance. She would threaten that I would immediately have to wash the sink full of dishes, and so, crying, I would perform "Thriller" with those famous shoulder shrugs. "Thriller" was just the beginning. My sisters and I caught the performing bug, and we would choreograph routi