Die With A Smile

Re-Learning How to Dance
“A dancer dies twice—once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.” - Martha Graham
For nearly 30 years, I was a dancer and a choreographer. Not Broadway, not touring companies, nothing you’d recognize from a marquee—but I lived on stages that mattered to me. Community theater. High school auditoriums packed with nervous parents. College productions where the stakes felt enormous, even if the audience only held several hundred people. I created routines for a nationally recognized exercise team. I trained show choirs long before Glee made that world look glossy and cool. And year after year, we went to competitions and brought home the awards.
Dance was my language. I could hear a piece of music once and see the entire number—formations, lifts, transitions—fully built in my head. And then I’d take that vision and bring it to life, body by body, count by count. That was the high. Not being the star, but building something that lived and breathed onstage. Watching students take it further than I ever would. Seeing them go on to careers I helped spark.
And then… time does what it does.
Your knees start negotiating instead of cooperating. Your hips don’t lie, they just stop showing up. You move less. You sit more. You gain weight. You watch younger dancers doing things that feel like a different species of human. And somewhere along the way, your identity quietly shifts from I am a dancer to I used to be a dancer.
I look at my old dance friends now—people I once sweated beside, bled beside, created beside—and we’ve all softened. Thick around the middle. Joint braces. A list of ailments longer than our old rehearsal schedules. We laugh about starting a senior dance troupe, and underneath the joke is something real. A little grief. A little longing. A little what if.
And then this invitation arrives.
A dear friend of mine is turning 80. Blue velvet cardstock, copper leaf printing, the kind of invitation that says, this is going to be a celebration like no other, and this matters. And inside, along with the dinner choices, one request:
Name a song that will get you on the dance floor. Dancing is mandatory.
Black tie. Mandatory dancing.
At the time, I had Bad Bunny on my mind from the Super Bowl, and Lady Gaga had just released “Die with a Smile” with a salsa rhythm that hit me in the chest. So I chose that.
And for the past few mornings, while the coffee brews, I’ve been in my kitchen… dancing.
Not performing. Not choreographing. Just moving.
At first, it was awkward. Stiff. Careful. My body felt like it needed permission. But then something started to happen. My hips remembered. Not perfectly, not like before—but they remembered. My arms got a little bigger, a little looser. My breath shortened, my heart picked up, and somewhere in the middle of all of it… I smiled.
A real one. Not polite. Not for anyone else.
It’s strange, the things we think are gone forever. The identities we quietly bury because they don’t fit the body we’re in now. The stories we tell ourselves about who we were, instead of asking who we still are.
Maybe that quote has it half right.
Maybe a dancer doesn’t die when they stop dancing.
Maybe a dancer just… forgets.
For a while.
And then one morning, in a kitchen, with coffee brewing and sunlight barely coming in, the music hits—and something inside says, try again.
Not for the audience.
Not for the awards.
Not to prove anything.
Just to feel alive in your own skin again.
So when I step onto that dance floor at 80 years celebrated—not mine, but close enough—I won’t be trying to recreate who I was. I won’t be chasing the past or competing with the present.
I’ll just be there.
Breathing hard. Moving freely. Laughing if I miss a step.
Because maybe the second life of a dancer isn’t about perfection.
It’s about permission.
Permission to take up space again.
Permission to feel your body instead of critique it.
Permission to move—not like you used to… but like you can.
And maybe that’s not a return.
Maybe that’s a beginning.