Jackie

I met  Jackie at work.  This is her story.

At fifteen  she was part of a ballet company where most of the dancers were in their twenties . She was a cheerleader. She was a drummer.  She tap danced.  She  was an acrobat.  At their school football games she   cart wheeled from one  side of the field to the other for each touchdown their team scored.  A certain private academy  enticed  her  into their program.  Dismayed, her   then school  principal confronted her parents and begged for her to stay.  The principal couldn’t believe he would be saying this  when he said that  their  school will fall apart without her.  Aside from being the main show in the cheerleading team she also starred in the school play and sang in the choir.

She had the same boyfriend  since she was 12. Both their families assumed they will soon be  married and hers felt  safe  having known the  young man practically all his life. 

At nineteen she was in show business with another girl and they toured the United States  dancing “A Mile-a-Minute Tap”. She wanted to  dance and earn money considering   her parents invested tons of them on  dancing lessons  since she was little. It was common for them to do several encores after their number but at one time, when they  tried to go backstage they couldn’t find the opening in the curtains so they turned  onstage and did a few more steps and bowed and went backstage.  They still couldn’t find the opening in the curtains to go inside and onstage they went again and pretended another encore. This kept happening. Jackie thought of crawling under the curtain just to get backstage.  The audience finally caught on  and were roaring with laughter.  Later she was told that the show was wonderful because they were so funny and Jackie  thought it was ridiculous. She  wanted the audience to applaud, not to laugh.  In retrospect she realized  that people watch a show to  forget their troubles and the fact that people laughed at that time shouldn’t have appalled her as it did then.  Laughter  is a good thing and if laughing is what people want give it to them.  

On one of their tours in Syracuse, New York she met a guy named Lester, the scion of a well known and wealthy family there.  Within months she was engaged with a diamond ring the size of “a horse’s eye”.  Lester had this incredible voice and intentionally out sang every singer in every  club they would go to. As a matter of fact, Lester’s voice was so good he once had a concert in Carnegie Hall. 

Jackie’s old  boyfriend  was in the Navy and she hadn’t told him anything  about Lester. He went home without her knowing and they met in town.  When he saw and pointed out the ring to Jackie she said:  “Oh, I got engaged.”

Lester’s parents went to see her family in Philadelphia and decided that they should get married since Lester spent all his time writing letters instead of attending to the  family businesses.   They were married in her hometown.  During her wedding, her longtime boyfriend  went to see her  to talk her out  of marrying this guy who she barely knew.  After the wedding she moved to her husband’s town.  Lester made her promise not to tell anyone in the town that she was in show business because  folks thought all girls who were in that business were whores.  She thought it was a shame because she was proud of her craft and had worked so hard for it all her life.

She lived  in a large house with her own housekeeper and the housekeeper was the one who  would wake up and feed the babies at night. She was taught how  to play golf, ride horses and what not.   Lester bought her a mink coat to wear in town.  She was so tiny inside the mink coat  she thought it was ridiculous. Everywhere she went people in the town knew she was Lester’s wife she was so amazed by it.  She preferred going around town in  jeans and a shirt but Lester wanted her to wear a nice dress and high heeled shoes because she was his wife. 

I don’t know what happened exactly but she did mention that Lester started looking somewhere else.

Jackie  was also  a  juggler.  She  taught her son how to juggle and   they did an act together and at 14, her son was the youngest professional juggler in the U.S. at that time,( excluding Europe which had kids juggling early in life).

Later in her life her sister urged her to take drawing lessons which she thought was ridiculous since she “could barely draw a straight line.” She learned to paint  and now several of her paintings are in all four levels of the Pembroke Pines City Hall. (She showed me a tiny cut out picture of one of her paintings which was of a pretty cottage in the country with a small stream on the side and a bridge and I could see at the bottom of it her initials J.P. so this is not  just one made up story). 

And so after many, many years, she found herself in  a night job   at the post office   filing letters : a job that  “bored her to death considering how she had been in show business”.  So she would file letters  and tell stories  to her  co workers whenever she can.

She  now lives alone with her dog and cat and her garden where she has fruit trees.

She is  83.

Meet Jackie.