Happy Monday, Framers!
Confessions of an MFA: Day 2 – The Magic Word
For most people, we hear the phrase what’s the magic word and immediately think of childhood. Of course I remember robotically adding please to every question I posed, just in the hopes of avoiding the inevitable question that was sure to come if I didn’t say it. As I get older, though, and continue to explore this crazy world of dance, I am starting to think that perhaps my mom was actually mistaken. Please isn’t the magic word. It’s a great word and one that should certainly stay in everyone’s vocabulary. But the word that actually carries magic for me is one that is much shorter, yet so much harder to say. No.
I have always been the queen of yes, especially when it comes to dance. It has never been uncommon to find me, Sunday afternoon, in a princess dress, teaching the two year old birthday girl how to do a plié, and absolutely emitting bitterness that I didn’t have the ability to say no. I feel like it is engrained in me to say yes first, think later. It’s certainly a personality flaw – although, I have to say, I don’t think the years of being drilled with the rules of dance class etiquette helped any. Every dancer I know is a yes person. How else would post modern have come to be? Respect it though I do, can you imagine the first meeting with your choreographer describing the piece?
Moving out to a new city and looking for new teaching positions, this yes tendency of mine has been in full effect. Being the overly organized personality type that I am, I decided the only way to solve this problem was to create a no checklist based on all of the clues I should have paid attention to in the past when talking with potential employers. If an offer had a “no” answer to any of the questions, I gave myself permission to say that magic little word. Here is a section from my “Not For Me Checklist,” as I titled it