Love Letters to Your Younger Self
The following prose and poetry were submitted by participants in the virtual workshop Love Letters to Your Younger Self, presented by 7 Stages Theatre in collaboration with GA Center for the Book and Decatur Library.
In conjunction with Valentine’s Day 2021, host Theresa Davis led the workshop with a prompt to peek back in time–to reach out to a younger version of yourself.
Here are their stories:
Look@U being U
Belinda Dapreis
Look at you being you
Look at you doing everything you have wanted to do.
Look at you being you
Look at you being new
Look at all the things you’re going to do
Look what you have accomplished without the slightest gripe
Fight baby Fight
Keep fighting the good fight
Make good trouble against all the odds
Stay strong when times are hard
Look at you being you
I’m so proud of you
Keep living everyday like its new
Dagmar Epsten
Liebe Dagmar,
Remember nineteen-sixty-two when Papa paced the living room,
saying there will be another war.
He had lived through two wars in Germany
and he said there will be another war,
pacing the living room in Germany in front of the
new black and white tee-vee,
talking about Cu-bah,
Soviet Union, Oo-Es-Ah.
You, not knowing what he was talking about,
but I am sure you remember it
like I do,
like yesterday.
Your mother, in the meantime,
planning to send you to school
as early as possible, at five,
worried that you would not
pass the test for underage enrollment,
her ticket to more freedom.
You, soon looking dapper
in your bright-red new school outfit,
clashing with the pink first-day-of-school
chocolate-and-candy-filled cone,
the German equivalent of a piñata,
not realizing that
subsequent days
would be more serious.
But, let me fill you in,
now, in twenty-twenty-one, any first day of school
is rare excitement,
relief from home confinement.
Deine Dagmar
Dagmar Epsten 02-23-2021
Gelia Dolcimascolo
THE CUT: 1961
I was thirteen, living in Queens, New York. I’d been growing my fine, super-straight light-brown hair since elementary school, so I could braid it and roll it up into the required bun for ballet girls. I was going to try out for Performing Arts High School in Manhattan.
I got into P.A. – and danced my heart out for the next four years. Sadly, I was not happy there: you had to be on top of the totem pole to be noticed in the Dance Department. Still, my hair, the longest in our grade, was my identity; my girlfriends loved it. Of course, in dance classes, it had to be UP, so I became a certified bunhead.
Leap forward to senior year. A modern dance major by then (the Department switched me after freshman year), I auditioned barefoot for Julliard, allowing my tresses to fall unbound to the stage floor as I arched back to the sounds of “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” by Claude Debussy.
I made it!
But – I didn’t get a scholarship. No money, no Juilliard.
Shortly after that audition, a week before graduation day, I made an appointment at a “beauty shop” close to home. “Can you give me a ‘flip’?” I asked the hairdresser. Within an hour, my identity landed in her trashcan.
On graduation day, my friends wept, but I grinned.
The hard truth, though, was my straight hair didn’t “flip.” Thus began both my liberation from four years of intense dance competition to sleeping on foam rollers. My day life became studio-hopping, sales jobs, and more auditions.
A dance buddy suggested we take classes at a new studio at the “Y” on Eighth Avenue in the Fifties at Clark Center for the Performing Arts. A guy named Alvin Ailey and his company taught there.
“Let’s try Jimmie Truitte’s class,” she said. We did. I got myself a work-study spot and took modern classes four times a week with Jimmie, who made me fall in love with dance all over again. Along with a new life, came a new friend, Sonja. An “older” gal (twenty!), Sonja had the shortest, darkest hair of any girl I’d known. She led me to her Broadway hairdresser, and I did it. No more rollers. No more braids: A pixie cut.
For the first time, construction workers were whistling at me. They never bothered me. At least I was noticed.
Gelia Dolcimascolo
THE GIRL WITH THE FLAXEN HAIR*
auditioned for Juilliard
back in the Sixties.
Her locks swayed below her knees
as she spiraled and spun;
she wished they’d covered
her insignificant face,
hid her imperfect body,
whose heels
did not quite connect
with her coccyx
when they asked her to crouch
profile on the stage.
Though the strains
of Debussy
allowed her entry,
she’d hoped
for a scholarship
she never received,
and budgets dictated
a different stage.
* Title of a composition by Claude Debussy
