Shirley MacLaine - Dancing in the Light

Bantam Books by Shirley MacLaine
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DONT FALL OFF THE MOUNTAIN
OUT ON A LIMB

Shirley MacLaine was born and raised in Virginia. She began her career as a Broadway dancer and singer, then progressed to feature performer and award-winning actress of television and films. She traveled extensively on her own all over the world. Her experiences in Africa, India, the Far East, and Hollywood formed the basis for her first book, Dont Fall Off the Mountain, which became a national bestseller, as did her subsequent books. You Can Get There From Here and Out on a Limb.

O n the morning of April 24, 1984, I woke up in my New York apartment to realize I was going to be fifty years old at 3:57 that afternoon. I felt there was some kind of dramatic flair to reaching the midcentury mark in 1984 and of course I couldnt, anymore, accept the synchronicity of my personal event as merely accidental. As I had told everybody I knew, I no longer believed there was any such thing as accident. Everything that happened was a result of some form of cause and effect and therefore had an underlying reason.

For example, the slight headache I now had. I knew it was from the prebirthday bash the night before.

My friend, the lyricist Christopher Adler, had thrown a party for a few thousand of my closest friends. Since I had to work the night of the twenty-fourth, we pretended my birthday was the twenty-third. Chris had decorated the Limelight with white and crystal. The invitations required white dress, and a few people came in jogging togs and sheets because white was not part of their city wardrobe.

The Limelight was an old church done over into a hot, Fellini-like disco. After the church owners had moved out, it had become a drug rehabilitation center for a while, and it was the Limelight people who prevented the building from being torn down. Due to my spiritual proclivities, I thought it very fitting that my birthday party was being thrown in a rescued church. Perhaps we could help add a new dimension to its original purpose. To dance in a church seemed to be as good an idea as praying. In fact, they were the same thing to me. As I remembered, it seemed to me no dancing was allowed in the basement of the Baptist church in Virginia where I grew up. My Catholic friends, on the other hand, could dance and even drink beer in their church basements. It was a sort of double standard both ways. The Baptist church was informal upstairs, and formal downstairs. The Catholic church was the other way around. But my so-called Baptist background (which was actually negligible) never really influenced me. After my first church picnic, I opted for necking on hayrides instead. So my religious propensities were determined more by my libido than my higher self. But then everything depends on how you look at it.

However, my disco prebirthday party was an event, religious or otherwise, in anybodys language. Each guest was met at the door by a white-clad escort (some decorated with sequins or crystals) who then ushered us through the passageways from rectory to library to meeting rooms all bowered in white flowers. There was laughter, warmth and joy ringing through the rooms where crystals hung from eight-foot floral arrangements of white lilies, white roses and white freesias, while clouds of white balloons drifted about the ceiling, rippling in the air currents. The walls were draped with crystal studded white silk. Eighteenth-century chamber music reverently accompanied us into the cocktail reception room. I privately wondered how long it would take before the night cut loose into what, I was sure, would be a full-blown exercise in la dolce vita.

I turned over in bed, stretched my legs, massaged the place on my right foot where some overly religious photographer had dropped his camera. I thought of Elizabeth Taylors description of her experience at Mike Todds funeral. She told me there had been people eating their lunch off the gray slabs of tombstones while waiting to get pictures of the grieving widow. There had been a hot, ghoulish reeling of excitementthe same kind of excitement that is generated by bad accidents. Accidents? Was Mikes death in a plane crash an accident? Oh dear, tell the one whos left alive it isnt. What possible good could death play? I wished I had known then what I knew now. Perhaps I could have been more help to Elizabeth.

I gazed out my bedroom window across the East River. Images of the night before still skipped in my mind the friends who had come in from various parts of the world to help me celebrate being half a century old, the toasts of endearment they had offered me as, shyly, they stood to declare what they thought of me. It was one of those nights when you are faced with whether or not you have the grace to accept compliments without self-judgment, without false deprecation, and without embarrassment. But my daughter Sachi really did it to me. As only children, who basically speak from feelings and not from intellect, always can, she brought the tears fully spilling from my eyes when she stood up and said, all in a breath, Happy birthday to my mother whom I love more than I can say and she is also my role model.

Mercifully, Christopher wheeled in the birthday cake (I had asked for carrotmy favorite), and as I blew out the candles I found myself struggling with how to thank everyone. I stared down at the cake for some time. The room was silent. I was deeply touched by the tributes of these, my dearest friends and colleagues, and was having trouble clearing my throat. Also I wanted very much to say something meaningful, for this was indeed a special occasion, a special time for me, a special outpouring of love. Then I got a picture in my mind and spoke it out loudafter I blew my nose. Friendship is like a ship on the horizon, I said. You see it etched against the sky, and then as it moves on, the ship dips out of your vision, but that doesnt mean its not there. Friendship is not linear. It moves in all directions, teaching us about ourselves and each other.

Thats why, over the period of long friendships, as with most of the people in this room, we are there for each other, even if we are not always seen. I wanted to say more, but choked up and so came to a stop. And discovered I was very hungry as we all plowed into white asparagus in pastry shells, roast veal, green vegetables I had never heard of, morel mushrooms, and mixed salad with herbs only a health food store would recognize, all topped off with that divine carrot cake.

Dinner over, we repaired to the public rooms to join a cast of apparently thousands thronging the nave of the ex-church. From a floodlit balcony overlooking the milling, shouting, cheering, singing audience we watched delightedly as a roster of extraordinary entertainers joyfully tore the night apart.

I definitely was treated to a coruscating birthday in a Love and Light temple out of one of my old Atlantean lifetimes!

I gazed out at Welfare Island as I thought about the night before, wondering what other peoples perceptions of the party had been. I always loved to speculate on whether others were seeing through their eyes what I was seeing through mine. Truth and reality were so relative, I mused, residing only in the minds eye. I wondered how others felt about being fifty. Did they look back and inward as much as I, wondering how life to that point had happened? Did others also speculate on lives they might have led before which brought them to the life they were leading now?

I rolled over and lifted my legs out of bedmy dancers legsmy two-shows-a-day-on-the-weekend legsmy twenty-five-years-apiece legs. I knew the reality of these legs in this life, this morning, all right. They were killing me. They needed a hot shower to make a transition into a less painful reality.