Today, I chat with Mic, a long-time piano teacher and professional musician who recently started ballet.

2020 was a really hard year for musicians, but Mic is so happy that it gave her the opportunity to pursue her love of ballet.

We connect on so many topics including why art matters, the learning process of a technical artform like ballet and piano, and why we love ballet. Her kind and warm heart will surely leave you smiling.

Enjoy!

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Being a professional musician in 2020

Julie: Welcome to the show, Mic. I'm so excited to get to chat with you today.

Michelle: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much for asking.

Julie: It's going to be a great show. We met really during quarantine, like many of us did online when the whole world exploded. And we suddenly had all this time on our hands. You are musician, which is a difficult place to be during the pandemic. How has your life changed this year?

Mic: Well, it's really weird because as I've told you, I sang professionally in a chorus for 22 years. And early in February, I decided this was going to be the year I was going to quit my chorus job. And I was going to get back into my own music do more of my own piano and my own bass playing. I play for the Pops Orchestra here too. And I literally had a meeting with our conductor a week before March 13. So the week of the Friday before. The Tuesday of the week of March 13 I announced it at our at our rehearsal. And then Friday, March 13 happen. And everything got canceled. And I never got to have my season closer with all the goodbyes, the last concert, all that and it was really quite stressful. And then my Pops Orchestra schedule also got completely canceled. In fact, now I will not have another rehearsal with the orchestra till probably next October.

Julie: October 2021. Oh my gosh,

Mic: Yeah. Because our seasons run from October through May. So this year is done. It's done.

Julie: Wow. Oh my gosh.

Mic: That was pretty stressful. And I was really grateful that I do have a private piano studio. Immediately, well we were on spring break the week after March 13. And I spent that week trying to get it together and figure out how in the world am I going to do this? And after we got back from Spring Break I've been teaching online the whole time. Some students have come back in person. But we have a big serious protocol in the studio. We have several pianos downstairs so we can stay far apart. But yeah, it's been a stressful year.

Julie: Absolutely. I mean, it's so hard to be in an environment and in a field that requires close proximity to create something.

Mic: Yeah, especially singing like, that is literally the worst thing you could be doing right now.

Julie: You're right. Yeah.

Mic: And audiences, you know. But ballet came out of it, though. So that was my silver lining for 2020.

Julie: How did you bridge that gap between that darkness and finding the silver lining? I mean, now looking back, obviously, it's nice to see the silver lining, but in that process that can be pretty intense.

Mic: Yeah, I didn't handle it the best!

Julie: I didn't either. I didn't either for the record, so we're there.

Mic: I wasn’t like “woohoo” all this time, you know, I never had that moment at all. It wasn't till recently where I started going, “Okay, what did come out of 2020 that I can be thankful for.” And it was getting to do ballet all the time. But it's just so weird because I spent the first two months of this year going, “I wish I had all this extra time to work on my music.” And it's like, I swear it wasn't my fault. But then when I had all that time, I was just so depressed for a while that you know everything. Kind of just fell out, so it’s taken a while to find my “Joie de vivre” again. So yeah.

Julie: And I think that was part of the depressing irony of all of it was that everyone wanted their life to change a little bit, and then their life changed a lot. And they were like, “Whoa, like, that's not what I meant, oh my gosh, that's not at all what I meant. I didn't want that kind of time.” And then it was stressful, because you sort of got what you wished for in some ways, but then you couldn't take advantage of it. I think that that had another meta layer of mental weight, that you're sort of like, almost beating yourself up for not taking advantage of that time, but unable to take advantage of that time, at the same time.

Mic: Yeah, we were just doing well, just to get through each week, not freaking out that one of us was gonna get sick, or you know, I mean, it's just, everybody, we all wanted the same thing. I mean, globally, we all went to the same emotions, I'm sure.

Julie: Yeah. Very intense. Very intense. We've all grown up a few years.

Mic: A few grey hairs later.

Julie: 2020’s been real.

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Starting Ballet

Julie:So ballet came out of it. So you started ballet this year? Or did you start before and this was when you really got to dive in? How did this ballet thing come about in your life?

Mic: Yeah, I started before. So just a brief background. I had loved to dance my whole life. Nothing like ballet or anything structured, just dancing in general for the love of it. And in, gosh, what year would that have been… 1989 I actually worked as a dance instructor for Arthur Murray ballroom dancing. I loved dancing so much. I only did that for a little while while I was going back to school.

But then I didn't do any kind of dancing for a really long time. And then our chorus did these great collaborations with Sarasota ballet, where the chorus, if you can imagine I have to send you a picture. The chorus is in the back of the stage. And then the ballet is all happening in front.

Julie: Fun!

We did some great work some beautiful pieces by Lauridsen. And there was this one piece we did, and it was all about light, eternal light. And so there were a couple choreographers that we worked with from the Sarasota ballet, and they've just choreographed these beautiful pieces. And we sang the backdrop. We were part of that tableau. And it was just amazing.

So in 2016, I started dabbling into the idea, you know, I wonder if adults even do ballet, and I just started doing research. And I found some of the DVDs by Finis Jhung from New York.

Julie: Yeah, he’s awesome!

Mic: Got a barre, got some shoes had no idea what I was doing. And I just followed his DVDs, but his DVDs are excellent. They're so thorough. And then a couple months after that, I fell in our driveway and really hurt my right ankle. Really bad. So I could even walk normally for six months to eight months, and ballet, just kind of, you know… then a couple years, I got into it again. And then I got really busy. My schedule up until March 13, my schedule was crazy. I even entertained the idea of finding adult ballet classes. But my schedules never mixed. All the beginner adult was when I either had rehearsals at night, or I was teaching late.

And so then once 2020 happened, I thought “This is it. Okay, I'm gonna finally do this.” And so that's when I really now I'm like full-in. It's done. I'm not ever going to not do it again.

Julie: No turning back at this point. What is it about ballet?

Mic: I don't know, what is it about chocolate? It's just like, there's just this thing. It's just the way it makes you feel and being a musician and already loving dance. It's putting all those things together. Just feeling it just how it feels to move. I've always been pretty athletic and liked working out love lifting weights, everything like that. So I love being in my body and moving my body. And just, I don't know, it's beautiful to look at. Until you see yourself doing it, and then it's not so beautiful. But that's another topic. It just feels good and I love the discipline actually. I like the discipline of it and just the meditative practice of doing barre. It’s like meditation.

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“What is it about ballet?”

Mic: “I don’t know, what is it about chocolate? It’s just the way it makes you feel and being a musician and already loving dance. It’s putting all those things together. Just how it feels to move.”

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Julie: Is playing the piano like meditation in that way, or is it different?

Mic: Definitely. Definitely, yeah, it depends on what kind of music you're playing, of course. So if you're playing something really fast and loud, that requires a lot of focus on octaves going everywhere or whatever, y