But Teddy was right. I loved the studio, and I needed more. Theandin that sentence was key.
I’d been thinking about it as abut. I loved my studio,butI wanted more.
When really it was: I loved my studio,andI needed more.
A simple switching out of the conjunction in that sentence made all the difference. So I decided to keep Miss Miller’s of Minnetonka going in the strip mall by day and to start a modern dance company by night.
As for the building, Justin and I worked out a rehab budget and a plan that would give prospective buyers an inkling of what the building could be but that didn’t go over the top with high-end finishes. Turned out that with that brief in mind, I wasgreatat picking out floors and fixtures. And toilets.
I netted seventy grand on the sale, and Justin invited me to go in on another reno with him. So we bought a run-downduplex. It’s mostly his money and all his labor, so I’m only getting 25 percent of whatever we end up selling it for, but as passive side hustles go, yeah: real estate investing. Who knew?
My other side hustle was not passive. It was exhausting. And, in some ways, ludicrous. A dance company? Who starts dance companies?
But when you think about it, someone does. Every successful dance company out there was started by some person at some point. So why not me?
So I was back in my strip mall studio by day. And also by night. Because the handy thing about having a dance studio targeted at kids was that it wasn’t occupied late at night.
I wasn’t getting a ton of sleep, but I was loving working on the hole dance. Which had become a trench dance. It was about fighting the patriarchy using a metaphor of a literal World War I–style trench. Was that too heavy-handed? We’d find out. I’d rented a theater for a run of shows in May. It felt like a vanity project, like putting on my own recital, but really, wasn’t that what any performance-based artistic endeavor felt like at the beginning? That’s what I told myself, anyway.
And I was lucky in that I had an army of helpers. Maiv made our website—turns out she used to do web development before painting started paying the bills. Caleb got me a deal on the theater we’re renting. And then there was Marion. She was my patron, I supposed, but I preferred to think of her as the general of my army. She activated her rich-person network to help me get grants—which was not something that had occurred to me to pursue. But she got me applying for a shit ton of them, some of which I got, and assured me she would get butts in seats in May, primarily by hosting an“opening-night gala.” I didn’t really know what that meant, but she told me not to worry about it, so I didn’t. Much.
I wasn’t paying my dancers—the grants were nowhere near enough for that—but we would be sharing the box office. So if the show went well, I supposed this new enterprise would be less a dance company and more a dance collective.
But the grants turned out to be handy for all kinds of stuff, including building a false stage at the theater so we could have trenches. We tried experimenting with trapdoors, but for my vision to really work, I needed dancers leaping out of trenches. So we were building a second stage to go over the first, like those bathtub liners you stick over your old 1970s seafoam-green tub. Except raised enough over the original height that we could fashion trenches.
Remember how I thought I might want to get into gardening? Turns out what I got into was digging an elaborate series of trenches in my backyard so I could practice. Well, more like directing Teddy doing the digging.
Oh, Teddy.
He was part of the army, too, composing music for the show. Composing! Weird instrumental stuff that went with my admittedly dark show. It was even further from Concrete Temple than the album he was working on. And he was really working on an album—he signed a deal with Columbia Records, which was not Concrete Temple’s label. He had a dealnow, I should say. Before that, he released his first single on his own—the one about the lake that still made me want to cry when I heard it.
It charted. I didn’t know that much about the music business, but apparently it was rare for an independent single to do so well. He had to get into the economics of streaming, whichI gave him shit about because he was definitely using his phone for things that didn’t exist before cell phones. But he broke some Spotify records as everyone lost their shit over the idea of an acoustic song from Teddy Knight.Rolling Stonecalled, and he told them about the composing for my show. Not in a braggy way, but to drum up interest in my company, or collective, or whatever the hell it was going to be. The result was a story called “A New Morning Dawns for Teddy Knight.” He was embarrassed about it, but, I could tell, chuffed.
I sometimes felt guilty. If the show was a success, it would be largely thanks to the interventions of my rich patron and my famous boyfriend. But when I started to fret about it too much, I told myself to shut up. I’d made it all on my own the first time around, and the result of that was that I met all these amazing people who liked and/or believed in me enough to help with round two.
Speaking of Teddy, the bell on the studio door jingled. He was due in from New York, and I’d commanded him to come directly to the studio because I’d missed him so much. And also because I was going to ask him to move in with me and I was so nervous about it, I needed to get it over with. So yeah, I was graduating from baby steps to ginormous steps.
Mind you, he stayed at my place a lot. He was officially splitting his time between New York and Minneapolis. He was hanging out with his sister in New York and “resting,” which was his new thing. When I suggested that maybe sleeping in his bazillion-thread-count sheets wasn’t what Marion had meant by “resting,” he just told me to try it sometime. In Minneapolis, he was working on his album, and Anna’s, and when he was here he was, theoretically, staying with Jack Branksome. He didn’t want to rush me or crowd me. He once told me that hewas treating “courting” me—yes, he used that word; gag me—like approaching a spooked horse. I told him that comparing one’s girlfriend to a horse was gross. But I got his point. I was a tough nut.
I was getting softer, though. Because Teddy was a fantastic boyfriend. When he was in town, he hung out at my house and wrote songs—I’d gotten a keyboard for him—and let me do my thing. One or two of the songs, I suspected, were about me, but he didn’t make a big deal about it. He made me cheese-spread grilled cheese sandwiches. He told me about the therapy that he was doing in parallel with his sister. He hung out with my friends—and helped me babysit my now-seven-month-old goddaughter.
“Let’s take five,” I said to the dancers when I heard the bell, and I ran out to the front desk.
“Hi,” he said, crossing the lobby in a few big strides and pushing me up against the front desk and kissing me.
“Hi,” I said breathlessly when he pulled away.
“Holy shit,” he said, looking me up and down. “You’re a princess.”
I was. Unfortunately. We were running the show this evening in costumes. Our characters were archetypes of women—nuns, princesses, mothers, career women—and we were fighting a literal war. Hence the trenches. You can probably guess that I didn’t want to be the princess. But neither did any of my dancers, and did I mention I wasn’t paying them?
So yeah, I was dressed in a puffy dance version of a princess dress, and I had a tiara pinned in my hair.
He cracked up.
“Thanks a lot.”
He didn’t stop laughing. Seemed like he couldn’t stop.
