The Red Shoes, or Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn

When I remember things that happened a long time ago, I can usually figure out what year they took place by running a kind of mental audio track and trying to remember what songs we were listening to on the radio. In 1973, it was the song "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder. I was thirteen, and I learned to dance to it in the schoolyard across the street from the Woodward School. Marshmallow platforms were in style, I didn't have anything so glamorous, but I had a pair of Kork-Ease wedge sandals, flared faded jeans, and a soft snug-fitting cotton flower-print shirt that, when out of sight of my dad, I would tuck under so it showed an inch or two of my belly. We all wanted to be as sophisticated as the eighth grade girls, and copied their styles slavishly.  My hair was long, straight, and parted in the middle, like every other white girl's hair in our class; most of the black girls by this time had Afros of varying degrees of impressiveness. We wore a little clear Yardley's Pot o' Gloss or Bonne Bell on our lips, if we dared, and no other makeup. Our idea of perfume was something called Love's Fresh Lemon that smelled, well, like a lemon. Smelling like lemons seemed a desirable thing; our mothers smelled like flowery perfume, it was hopelessly old fashioned.  We were dizzy with the newness of the world. Everything was exciting: the music, the politics, love, the world, lemons, hot pants, it was 1973 and we were  twelve and thirteen, becoming women.

All of us stood in a circle near the hopscotch squares painted on the cracked pavement, the building that housed the girl's bathroom shielding us from our gym teacher's eyes as he timed the boys running. (What passed for a track was more cracked pavement encircling a fenced-in area of towering plane trees and garbage-strewn ivy.) One of the neighborhood girls, with all of whom we were forbidden to associate, was teaching us the funky chicken while we practiced smoking and tried to look nonchalant about it. I kept a crumpled pack of Benson and Hedges in my Indian print  cotton bag, but I was still a novice and the smoke rushed to my head, making me dizzy and nauseous, but I tried to pretend I was enjoying it while I tried not to barf. "Very superstitious'...." wailed Stevie. "wash your face and hands..." the bass beat and we were like the ballerina in "the Red Shoes," our feet flew and we were helpless to stop them. Our booties shook and swayed, we turned, swooped, shimmied. All the music was so fresh, there was James Brown singing "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", and oldie but we loved James, and again, we couldn't help ourselves. 

There were some boys hanging around by now, staring at us, and Marvin Gaye singing "Trouble Man".  "I come up hard, babe, but that's OK, trouble man, he don't get in my way" and we swayed and the boys were joining in. We girls had been playing Double Dutch for years, clapping and stamping complicated rhythms, but the boys followed our movements more awkwardly, new to these moves but captivated by the music. The cooler boys from our class were dancing but the other boys were from the neighborhood, a struggling formerly genteel area sandwiched in between Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy, and we girls knew that any minute our teacher Jerry would come over and break it up, chasing off the locals and herding us back into the rambling brownstone building, a former convent, that housed the school. Later in class, as we sat behind our desks with our books open, our feet in their Kork-Ease and marshmallow stompers were still twitching, remembering the music.