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told myself that if I was going to go to the gym at the Boys and Girls Club anyway, I might as well give it a try. I went into the locker room to change and emerged, slightly embarrassed, in blue cotton shorts long enough to scrape my knees, my white T-shirt, and a pair of old gym socks. I willed myself to walk to the center of the basketball court.
    I found a place. I stood up tall, gazed straight ahead, and, for the first time, lay my hand on the barre.

Chapter 2
    I QUIT.
    That’s what I muttered to myself as I walked out of that first class at the Boys and Girls Club, determined that it would also be my last. I’d spent an hour feeling like a broken marionette, twisting my torso, stretching my arms, uncertain all the while of what I was doing.
    Was this even dance? Standing in a line with a dozen girls, spending an hour practicing how to flex your toes, hold your arms, bend your knees? This wasn’t anything like the stomps and jumps I loved on the drill team.
    I scurried past the gym on my way to other activities the next day, the day after, and the day after that. But Cindy wasn’t giving up. About a week after I’d decided I had no interest in continuing, she spotted me.
    “Misty!” she called, “can you come here for a second?”
    Trapped, I reluctantly followed her to the front of her class. This was about as bad as it could get for nervous old me. I’dfelt overwhelmed in that first class; it was too much information coming too fast, and I was way behind the other students. I hated feeling unprepared and confused. And now to have all eyes fixed on me when I didn’t know what I was doing? I was scared to death.
    But Cindy proceeded to gently stretch and mold my body into various positions, using me as an example for the other kids. She lifted my leg to my ear, tugged and flexed my feet. Whatever pose she conjured, I was able to hold. Cindy said that in all her years of dancing, in all her years of teaching, she had never seen anyone quite like me.
    I’m not sure I believed her. But her praise piqued my curiosity, and I sheepishly joined the rest of the students at the barre, deciding to give her classes another try.
    Cynthia Bradley could be very persuasive.
    You knew she was a free spirit from the first time you met her. She wore her flaming red hair in a short, sleek bob; and her big, glittering earrings were so heavy they pulled at her lobes. It almost made me wonder how her thin, long frame didn’t topple over from their weight.
    She would tell me later that from the time she was a little girl and heard “King of the Road” on her parents’ record player, she knew that she wanted to be onstage, singing and dancing in front of an audience much larger than the family members who watched her sing along with Roger Miller in the living room. She studied ballet as a child and got a chance to dance professionally when she was seventeen, performing with the Virginia Ballet Company and Louisville Ballet, among others. But she suffered an injury soon after and had to give up her career before it really had the chance to blossom.
    So she switched from dance to music. She renamed herself “Cindy Vodo” and started a punk band called the Wigs that became a little bit of a big deal in the San Pedro punk scene. They had hits like “Stiff Me” that got a lot of radio play in the 1980s. But Cindy still relied on ballet to pay the rent. She started a school in Palos Verdes, an upscale pocket of Southern California not far from San Pedro, so she could teach ballet on the side. She eventually even married one of her dance students, Patrick Bradley, who, I would later learn, was as steady and serene as Cindy was flighty and dramatic.
    The Wigs wound up settling in San Pedro because it was close to the heart of the L.A. music business, and also near Laguna Niguel, where most of the members worked their day jobs. Cindy, likewise, moved her teaching there, starting the San Pedro Ballet School with Patrick.
    Cindy