This story is included in my book Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe  

San Francisco 1974 

I thought the crunchy, nibbling noises were rats between the floorboards. 

Then, in the silence of night, I heard my roommate Renée retch. I descended the loft ladder to check. Hunched over the toilet as small as a pale rabbit, Renée vomited—her thin rib cage heaving like an overworked accordion. I slipped my hands under her armpits, lifted her away from the porcelain rim, scooped her up, and carried her to the futon in our living room dance studio. Renée weighed nothing; she was bulimic. I did not know about eating disorders.

Crumpled on the kitchen floor was a family-size box of Rice Krispies. Empty. Renée was the rat, living on desiccated breakfast cereal. In the shadowed light drifting in from the streetlamp in the dark of night it occurred to me that in the entire week I’d been living there, I’d never seen her eat during the day. The refrigerator was empty. The cupboards were bare. Now I understood why—she only ate Rice Krispies.

Chinese takeout was my sustenance. We lived in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown on Clay Street. I dined on glistening tea-smoked duck, emerald-green steamed broccoli, succulent shrimp balls wrapped in rice noodles, cashew chicken in gravy with fresh peas, carrots, and crisp water chestnuts. An affordable feast surrounded our neighborhood. Heaven for a voraciously hungry 21-year-old on a scant budget. Shopping in Chinatown was a zoology lesson—I’d avert my eyes at the tubs of live turtles and frogs trying to escape their inevitable end in the soup pot. Writhing eels occasionally flipped their slimy, speckled bodies out of the barrel and slithered between shoppers’ legs, heading toward the tourists waiting for the cable car. The out-of-towners squawked and scattered like alarmed seagulls. 

Late at night, walking through the empty streets of Chinatown after dancing in clubs, Renée showed me how to steal cabbage from the overflowing produce trucks parked along Stockton Street. The football-shaped cabbages were easier to tug out from between the wooden slats than the broccoli—and we’d only take one. Just one. I ate the frilly yellow-green leaves raw. 

Living in this Asian warren—where we were the only resident Caucasians—cost literally nothing. Rent was free due to an unusual agreement Renée had with the eccentric landlord. I was scraping together funds for a two-year journey to South America, and needed to save every penny from my job at Warner Electra Atlantic. 

Dancing didn’t pay. Well, sometimes it did. Renée would regularly get peculiar performance contracts and included me in the deal. One Saturday afternoon, I hopped into her borrowed clunker. She wouldn’t tell me where we were going. We drove across the Bay Bridge and exited at the Alameda tunnel. 

“What? Where is this job?” I asked, beginning to wonder about her latest escapade. Usually we got gigs dancing at wild parties for coked-up rock stars in swanky Marin County homes.

Renée ignored my question and said, “We each get $50 to dance for an hour.” That quelled my concern. It would cover a third of my airfare to South America. 

Did you know that men still yell, “Take it off!” in strip clubs? But this wasn’t a strip club—it was the Alameda naval base officers club, where I assumed men had manners. The manager said he hired us specifically because we didn’t dance naked. “The last gals got fired because they couldn’t keep their clothes on. No matter what these guys offer you, do not strip!”

I wasn’t planning to but the men at the bar, all in officer uniforms, were disappointed as I dipped and spun to the 45s on the jukebox. They started hooting and waving dollar bills like testosterone-fueled baboons, thumping their fists on the bar and commanding, “Take it off!” I couldn’t wait to get out of there. 

“What a bunch of pigs!” I told Renée an hour later, after we collected our payment and scurried back out into the dim, fog-lit afternoon.

Dancing did meet our basic monetary needs, but not doing so for a bunch of goons. Renée had a patron who kept a fatherly eye on her: Tony Serra—a civil rights lawyer for Black Panther leader Huey Newton. A highly controversial figure, he didn’t pay taxes, had spent time in jail, and only represented rebels, pro bono. They even made a movie about him—True Believer,starring James Wood. 

Tony not only paid our rent, he occasionally took me out to dinner. Renée never joined us due to her late-night cereal binges. He inducted me into the exotic world of sushi and wasabi, where he practically snorted the fiery green horseradish along with other drugs of the white powder variety—right at the sushi bar. Both substances made his eyebrows wiggle like hairy caterpillars, his eyeballs cross, and a zany grin spread across his gypsy mug. This guy really is a rebel with a cause…albeit missing some teeth, I thought as I watched him process the green stuff. Then I tried the wasabi and whoa! My eyes watered, my nostrils burned. My brain was on fire.

“This is food—not gun powder?” I asked Tony.

Instead of an answer, he handed me a rolled-up dollar bill and pointed to the inch-long line of cocaine he’d chopped on the counter. I declined. I was still a naive drug virgin and that powered Japanese condiment was mind-blowing enough. 

Once or twice a week, Tony brought his entourage over to our studio—probably famous people I would have recognized if I’d been paying attention. The men sat on cushions spread out around a low coffee table, smoking hookah pipes, and drinking tea while they discussed politics. I’d hear snippets: “Russell Little, Hells Angels, Bill Graham, SDS, blah blah blah.” It meant nothing to me. I was a globetrotter—not an activist. 

In between heated discussions, they’d watch us frolic across the wood floor. Tony had endowed us with a record player and vinyl collection. We were not expected to get sexy or be alluring—just do an etheric dance to hippie tunes: “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues, “Dancing in the Moonlight” by Van Morrison, “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Starship, “Fly Like an Eagle” by Steve Miller Band. Our audience smiled and nodded approval; not a lecherous grin in the group. It was all very innocent. Except for the bong, I guess…

As they puffed, Renée and I channeled Isadora Duncan. Renée was a contortionist, so her moves included yogic backbends. While I fluttered about tamely in my diaphanous nymph outfit, flitting a silk scarf in arcs over my head, she’d bend backward in a horizontal position from the waist up, still dancing and moving gracefully, seemingly defying the laws of gravity. It was a hypnotic, almost otherworldly thing to witness. 

Sometimes, I’d stop and stare in awe at her latest improbable maneuver. There was no sense of competition as we both knew scarf-waving was my specialty. I could barely bend forward to touch my toes, but we shared a sincere love of dance. With our long blonde hair, we looked like sisters, except I was six inches taller and twenty-five pounds heavier than the waif that was Renée. She was a sprite; I was a filly. 

I first encountered Renée at the record company where I worked—Warner Electra Atlantic in the Cannery. 

It was lunchtime. I was the only one in the office, when a gossamer girl waltzed in. “Is Paul here?” she asked, standing in front of my desk. Paul was the Atlantic Records PR guy.

“Nope. He’s drinking martinis in his swimming pool in Marin County while I do his work for him.”

She hooted, slapped her thigh, and said, “That figures! They call me the San Francisco Dance Lady—Paul knows who I am. I’m looking for a gig. He represents some of the bands I’ve danced onstage with.” 

She walked out the door. Two minutes later, she was back, hands on her hips.

“Since you’re doing his PR work, do you want to see me dance?”

I was bored sitting in the empty, air-conditioned office. And I was curious about her style. How was she going to dance without music? “Sure! I’m a dancer, too. Sort of. I don’t perform.”

Renée flipped her hair back and raised her alabaster arms. She was an angel lifted upward, a heron taking flight, one of Rodin’s sculptures come to life. She collapsed dramatically on the rug, then rose like Icarus. She darted about as fast as a hummingbird. She was the size of a hummingbird. This was the best entertainment I’d seen in months and I’d been to a zillion concerts for my job managing backstage passes. I racked my brain. There was something familiar about her and her unique dancing style, but I couldn’t place what it was.

She leapt like a tiger, responding to some inner inspiration. When she stopped and bowed, I took her contact info to give to Paul. He took looooong lunches, but I was stoked to promote her. Those bands needed some choreographic spice onstage.

Leaving work later that day, walking through the courtyard at the Cannery, I heard sobbing.

There, in a lake of tears, shoulders heaving, hair fanned out around her like limp seaweed, was the San Francisco Dance Lady, collapsed in a pile on the cold concrete.

Tourists passed by as if she were a ghost.

I rushed over. “What’s wrong?”

She looked up imploringly, an empty tip basket at her feet, and said, “No one likes my dancing. No one is watching me.” Her voice was saturated in despair. 

“I like your dancing.” I crouched down and placed my hand on her birdlike wrist. She was so tragic, it broke my heart. A street artist in the throes of rejection. Just two hours ago, she’d been expressive and assertive as she danced in the high-ceilinged, plush-carpeted offices of the largest record promotion company in the United States. And now she’d morphed into a deflated balloon, a kicked puppy whipped by her own pain.

“You do?” Renée looked up from the hard pavement with wet-lashed child eyes, searching for approval. 

It was chilly and she shivered in her sleeveless white chiffon dress and bare feet. I placed my sweater over her shoulders and lifted her off the sidewalk.  

Still whimpering, she leaned against me.

“Where do you live?” I asked, not quite knowing what to do with her. She was attached to my arm like a barnacle.

“The cable car men know. Come with me.” 

Holding a steaming cup of coffee at the cable car turnaround, the burly conductor looked concerned. “Hey Renée! You look terrible. Going home?” He motioned us onto the trolley and waved away my attempt to pay the fare. 

As we barreled downhill on Washington Street, the gripman clanged the bell, pulled the brake lever up hard, and came to a screeching stop at the corner of Mason Street. 

“Here ya go, Princess.” He bowed and helped her down the steps. He nodded at me and said, “You take good care of this little dancing lady, okay?”

She led me to the doorway of what looked like an abandoned storefront. The windows exhibited a sad display of scraggly cactus draped in dusty spider webs.

The door was unlocked and opened into a large room with barely any furniture, a tiny kitchen, and a loft. The pungent vapors of medicinal Chinese herbs and roots swirled in the dim light seeping through the dingy windows. All of Chinatown smelled like this. 

I made her chamomile tea. 

We chatted for a while about the bands she’d danced with and where she’d gone on tour. Just as I was about to ask why she lived in Chinatown, Renée blurted out, “Do you want to live with me? If you dance, it’s free.”

It seemed she had just anointed me her new best friend. She was not concerned that I might not dance at all. In her worldview everyone would, could, and should dance. 

As I processed this left-field offer, staring into her sea glass eyes, a memory arose. I’d seen her when I was in high school, onstage with the Grateful Dead in Golden Gate Park, dancing in a white Grecian goddess dress. Her long, blonde hair flying like a matador’s cape around her head. Backbending until her palms touched the ground behind her. Spinning like a Dervish. A blur of movement. An ecstatic. That’s why she’d seemed familiar this morning! I think she had been wearing that same white dress—or maybe she had a closet-full?

I moved in that evening, enticed by the free rent and the surreal environment of living with this bohemian dancer in Chinatown.

When I wasn’t working my 9-to-5, we’d wander the city or go to dance gigs. Whatever I did with Renée involved dance. Anywhere. Anytime. She egged me on to join her in the strangest places: supermarket aisles, in the frigid waves at Ocean Beach, on our apartment house roof under the gaze of the Fairmont Hotel that towered over our building. We’d dance nude—much to the delight of businessmen leering from their suites, mouths agape. We didn’t care. They were encased in a high-rise and if Renée felt the urge to dance naked, well, she did. 

Out in public, Renée always wore those white Grecian dresses—rarely a coat or shoes, even on the foggiest of freezing August days.

In the complete abandon of dancing her way across San Francisco, she would swing from exuberant joy to wretched agony in a heartbeat. I lifted her off sidewalks and bathroom floors more than once. This threw me—even-keeled and normal—off at first. I’d never been around anyone who suffered from eating disorders and overt mental illness. 

All I could do was hug her tight until “happy Renée” returned. I was entranced by her magical dance world, but as our friendship deepened and trust grew, I got more glimpses into her damaged psyche. It was a crash course in what happens to many abused children: they grow up to abuse themselves.  

She was in love with a teenage prostitute, a runaway like herself. He was effeminate—a beautiful boy—and she was completely taken with him. Perhaps it was their street bond. He ignored her, yet she pined for him. Rejection brought out the worst: the bulimia, the depression. I don’t know where she got the energy to dance, but it was her lifeline. For me dance was bliss that filled my spirit and body. For Renée it was resurrection, lifting her out of the misery of her mind and the scars of her body.

I was raised with love and nourishment. My mother’s refrigerator was always full and we ate well—everything home-cooked. I was hugged a lot. This nurturing lifestyle flavored who I became. While Mom shelled peas and cored apples, as juicy legs of lamb and sprigs of rosemary roasted in the oven, peppering the rooms in salivating aromas, I sewed. I wrote. I danced. I read. Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast turned my compass toward Paris. 

I’m pretty sure Renée did not eat home-cooked meals. All of her teeth had rotted from malnutrition and bulimia. She’d had them extracted in Amsterdam when she was there on tour with the Grateful Dead. She spent a lot of time avoiding her mother, who had beat her with a hot iron. Renée had the scars to prove it. At 15 she ran away, into the arms of Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love. I left home at 18 and moved to Paris. But I wasn’t running away from my family—I was running toward a Technicolor life.

Renée’s compass arm had been bent, broken, perhaps literally. She danced her way through the perils of street life and found she could live in the spaces between the music and create a way to hold fast and reinvent herself.

I admired her. But I couldn’t tolerate her neediness and temper tantrums. Her self-absorption.  Her freaky friends. The dancing held us together, though, in a creatively dynamic relationship.  

The heaviness of Renée’s mood swings permeated the Chinese-storefront-turned-dance-studio. The crunchy, nibbling noises of her late-night foraging kept me awake. After living there for three months and a lot of scarf-waving for Tony and his friends, I was getting tired of them and their hookah pipe haze. I had saved all the money I needed for my trip, and looked forward to flying away from all these crazy-eyed people and commencing my South American adventure: climbing volcanoes, canoeing down the Amazon to Carnival in Brazil, prancing to pan pipes in the Andes. For I knew wherever I went, I would dance—samba at sunrise in Machu Picchu, polka with peasants in the hull of a cattle boat in Patagonia, waltz in a priest’s home in the bone-dry Atacama Desert. Dance is a universal language, and Renée had launched my desire to experience life through improvisational movement.

As I left to take the bus to the airport for my Aero Condor flight to Colombia on a crisp September morning, Renée ran into the street and called my name. 

“Wait, I have a present for you.”

The small package lay in her palm, wrapped in newspaper. Inside was a full denture set clamped around a bouquet of silk rosebuds. 

“I made you a corsage pin from my teeth so you will never forget me!” Renée said. “I have a new, whiter pair coming soon from the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. I really wanted to give you something special.”

I stared at the bizarre gift and then looked down at her. Renée’s face was sunken below the cheekbones and her lips rounded over her gums. She broke into a huge, toothless smile, and said, “You really like it—don’t you?”

Stunned, I nodded my head, and stuttered, “It is fabulous…”

Just when the Golden Gate transit bus pulled to a stop, she pinned the corsage to my coat lapel. I wondered how I would explain my accessory to the immigration officials. “Wear your heart on your sleeve” had morphed into “Wear your friend’s teeth on your lapel.”

The real gift Renée bequeathed me was the empowerment to dance wherever and whenever, with music or without. Over the years, I have passed this passion on to my dance students, my family, and my friends. To total strangers who just need the example and permission to cut loose and cut a rug.

Renée is still imprinted on my heart—dancing at Ocean Beach, her hair arcing in the same swoops and curves as the breaking waves. Vulnerable and powerful, transparent and weighty. I’m forever grateful that the magic of the San Francisco Dance Lady has rubbed off on me. 

And I despise Rice Krispies.

EPILOGUE:

Somehow, Renée survived her bulimic phase and many other hellacious chapters to get to where she is now, 45 years later: a mom, a wife, a teacher, a cat lover. A rather normal person.  

Tony Serra is also alive. A father and grandfather—and still a rebel.

The denture corsage survived as well and occupies a special place in my memento box.