As we were working on the Turning Room of Mirrors, we came across so many fascinating stories that we didn't have time for in the final series, So today's episode will sound a little different. I asked each of our team members to bring a tidbit or story that they stumbled across and working on the series that fascinated them or surprised them, and to share it with the group.
So today we're all here to talk. We have Emily Foreman, our editor, James Trout or JT who sound designed the series, and Ailan Lance Lesser, who co wrote and reported the series with me. You may remember she's also my sister. You've heard from her before. So Ailen, what did you bring today? What's been on your mind?
So I don't know. As we were researching the world of Ballet, one little piece that stuck out to me was something that actually Chloe Angel talked a lot about when we spoke with her, and that she also wrote about in her book, and it's point shoes. When I think of Ballet, one of the first images that comes
to mind is point shoes. One could even argue that they're part of the mystery and the mystique and actually they were first developed in the eighteen thirties when a bunch of choreographers were interested in getting dancers to look like they're floating. But what's interesting to me is over time since then, well over one hundred years, point shoes
really haven't changed that much. Obviously they've changed to some degree, but ultimately most point shoes are still being made out of the same materials and that's fabric, glue, and paper. They're very uncomfortable, like it's not fun to be a point shoe. They can also lead to a bunch of stress fractures in your feet and toes. They can lead to ankle injuries, they can lead to horrible blisters and bunions.
And also when you're walking around day to day, usually you put about thirty percent of your body weight on your big toe. That's you know, normal day to day walking around. But when you're on a point shoe and you're on point, you're putting all of your body weight right on your big toe and also specifically on the joint next to your big toe, and that joint isn't used to that, so it's very painful and it really
can lead to a lot of injury. For dancers, which first of all affects their careers or it could affect them long term, even just day to day living moving around the world.
I've heard this many times. Pointes are made of fabric, glue and pater yeat. I just don't understand where the sport comes from. It sounds like a paper mache project to me.
I think that's what's kind of shocking about it. They're not using up to date materials.
Usually at least they are like really hard paper and cloth sounds not hard, but the glue turns it into this very hard thing.
Dancers are often you know, whacking their point shoes on the wall or on the ground, even using hammers to try to get them softer. And then also what can happen is you finally get your shoes to the place where they're perfect, where they're just the right amount of firmness and flexibility, but then they start to go too far, they're too worn in, and then you have to get a new pair. So also a lot of dancers go through point shoes very quickly.
At its best, when your point shoe is broken in, what does it feel like.
The shank is bending with your arch and helping to support you, which is why it's so important that you have shoes that are not dead are overbroken in.
Also, they need to be firm enough because the box on some level helps protect the joint by keeping it stiff. But if it's too stiff, that's also a problem because then it's harder to move.
So like seemingly there's like another material that could just be that.
Stiffness exactly JT. And it's funny that you say that, because I think if you contrast what's happened with ballet equipment against what has happened in sporting gear, I mean, it's really shocking to contrast those two. So take something like soccer. You think of shin guards back in the day.
Initially they were just kind of like padding, and then over time they developed all kinds of new materials to the point where today as a player, you can pick how heavy your shin guards are, how hard they are, how they fit you, how big they are, all these different things. Or even cleats, they've changed a lot, and when turf was invented, cleats totally changed to help protect
players against turf injuries. Or you think about American football helmets and how obviously those are very important for protection. But football helmets are lab tested and the NFL actually requires players to wear certain helmets that don't fall under this not recommended category by these lab tests, and it's constantly changing year to year, whereas in ballet it really isn't changing that much. Now, there have been some changes, some companies have tried playing around with material it's not
like no one has tried it. For example, there's a company called Gainer Mindon that in the nineties came out with a point shoe that had a box and a shank of malleable plastic. So basically where the toes go in the shoe and kind of the sole or the base of the shoe are made of this plastic that can adjust. And the nice thing about these shoes is that they also last longer because they're built with these materials that don't wear down as quickly. They're built to
last at a very specific level of flexibility. That sounds good, It does sound good, but weirdly, they just didn't really take off. I mean, there's still an existence, but they're just not popular. And actually ballet schools across the country, many of them do not allow dancers who are learning to dance on point to use Gainer Minten's. The argument is that these shoes actually make it easier to pop up on point, so some teachers argue that you're not
building the muscles correctly. But the thing about these shoes is that they are much more comfortable and they're supposed to be way safer. According to the founder of the shoe company, Gainer Minden, they are quote the first and the only point shoe that was ever designed with dancers health and safety in mind. And so while there are some dancers who use these shoes, ultimately they're just not popular.
And Chloe Angel argues that point shoes could be made even safer than Gainer Minden's with the technology we have today, for example, if they made the shoes straighter and more wide up until the tip of the toe. But they're just not made safer or more comfortable. What it comes down to, most likely is the ballet world's concerned with the line and the esthetic that the shoe needs to look a very specific way, and even i mean going back to balanching, he had a very specific preference on
point shoe. He preferred freeds, like the old school point shoes that you typically see.
I remember one of my classmates got a pair of Gainer Mendens. I remember, you're like, oh, my god, wouldn't it be cool to have comfier point shoes. But also I did feel like there is a little bit of stigma of oh, they're more comfortable, and so there's like maybe some kind of weakness if you choose to wear Gainer Mindons. So I didn't try them for that reason. And now looking back, I'm like, Erico, why wouldn't you
just try them? I mean, my guess is it's not like there's been some in depth clinical study on the anatomy of the foot during ballet steps and how much the muscle is being used in these different types of shoes. I do wonder to what extent that's based on, like some scientific truths versus a fear of changing the norm. I think you do have to take a risk to try something new, to try to be safer.
It's like a fine line between like this idea that it's just not it hasn't been embraced. It's kind of like suffering is a necessary part of the leadism involved, otherwise it's not ballet. It's like a fine line between that versus what I'm hearing you're saying of, Oh, you're not going to build this foundation that you need, You're not going to build the muscles that you need to do this thing. But what does that actually mean? Are
they thinking about like long term outcomes? What is implied in this not being embraced.
Chloe also makes that point that teachers across the country do think of it as sort of a cheat, and it is not just implicitly but kind of explicitly look down upon, and even some celebrity teachers, so teachers that are like well known in the field have kind of come out against it, and one even said, ballet isn't about health. It's an art form. And that's true. You know, ballet is an art form, but that doesn't mean you can't consider health.
In that it reminds me of hockey players who refuse to wear helmets when they'd made the rule change and they like literally grandfathered in certain people that were like, I refuse to wear a helmet while I play hockey. You look back in you're life, like, one, those guys
are crazy. They're playing an insanely physical game like that, And also two, I think in the same way that ballet has like it's changed over time, right, we demand more, The game is faster, the athletes train harder, just like with ballet, and I think if we're going to continue to push the speed and the style that we want, then you're going to have to make some changes to the footwear or the equipment or whatever it is. I think that's just progress.
That's such a good point, JT. Because you're totally right that the technical expectations are constantly increasing for dancers. Every generation of dancers is like you're expected to be able to have your leg higher, do more piroetes at once. So it does make sense that the gear would change with that, you know, greater level of force et cetera that you're putting on the shoes.
It does, I think all come back to culture. Why is that the world doesn't want to be open to these types of changes. Yeah, it's interesting how certain cultures are maybe that much more resistant to change.
When we come back Tchaikovsky's Lost Potada and more stories from our team, stay tuned. I'm curious, JT, what's been on your mind coming into this conversation.
So in the series, we mentioned this ballet called the Tchaikovsky PoTA Da basically this famous piece that bouncing choreographed to music by the Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky, and I realized that there's all this history behind the music for the Poda Da. I kind of went down this rabbit hole waiting between edits. So I was trying to find the specific one that Balanchine used, and I was frustrated because I was like, oh, I'm seeing that, like this
might have come from Swan Lake. But then I was kind of like, why would Balanchine take a section of Swan Lake and just use it? And what I found was, actually, it is a section of Swan Lake that we have probably never heard before or seen before Balanchine used it. The story is very complex and has a lot of really complicated Russian names in it. So here we go,
I'm gonna try to say them all. In eighteen seventy ish eighteen seventies, let's say Tchaikowsky gets commissioned to write his ballet and at the time, ballet music was pretty much like crap. If you were a composer in the ilk of Tchaikovsky at the time, you were like, this is just kind of repetitive garbage, right, Like you don't go to the ballet for the music essentially, So he gets this thing. He's like, yeah, cool, like I could use the money. Also, yeah, ballet is great. He starts
writing Swan Lake. He writes a lot of it pretty fast, and then he sort of gets stuck on the instrumentation. Blah blah blah blah. He takes the score that he has written so far to the choreographer, Julius Rasinger, who is like this kind of like mid, like super mid choreographer. He this is like, this is like this is just what I've been reading. I'm sure he was a very nice guy. He's like, this is crazy complicated. The dancers complain about the music in the rehearsal. They're like, well,
we can't chore to this and the other thing. At the time, choreographers and dancers actually had a majority stake in the control and sort of like composers were like not again, because the music was like very repetitive and kind of easier to dance to, right, It was like it was an afterthing, you know. So these dancers are like, you're making this sort of complex thing that's really fast. We can't dance to this, we can't do our normal stuff.
So they don't like it. So this choreographer racinger starts chopping it. I read somewhere it's like they cut like a third of the original score out just because it was like too much. Meanwhile, this like other drama, starts happening, where the dancer that basically this whole thing has been choreographed for who's playing the lead. This name is insanely complicated. I'm going to drop it in the chat just so
you can see what I'm trying to pronounce. This Prima Ballerina by Anna Sobi Shanksky, Basically, they choreographed the majority of Swan like for her then drama, she's kind of seeing this Russian aligarch who gives her a bunch of jewels. But then it's like, I'm not going to marry you. He's like see you later, my right, So they premiere the ballet with her second and everyone hates it. Right, They like there had have been a bunch of stuff
that it leaked that the dancers didn't like the music. Obviously, with the change of the main ballerina. Basically, the reviews were like, this is crap. Like the music is terrible, Like we don't get it. I imagine that if you make like a really complicated score and then the choreography is struggling to keep up, like it only accentuates how different the score is, do you know what I mean? Like, so, I'm sure people were just like, what is this like
hot garbage that we're watching? So somehow Anna, yes, she comes back. There's some some sort of amends are made, Like a month later, they're like, we're going to go to Moscow, and she's like, well, I got to change this really specific section in Act three. I don't like the patata that's there that was originally written. So I'm going to go to Moscow and have this ringer ballet composer Ludwig Minkus rewrite a section of Act three, which.
Is understandable if you come back to this production and has terrible reviews and they're like, now we're going to go on tour and you're going to be the star of this trash production that no one likes.
So Tchaikowsky gets win that this is happening, and he's like, no, I should write all the music for my composition. They'd already rechoreographed all this stuff for this new Patada that had been written into Act three. So Tchaikovsky is like, cool, I'll just write a score so you don't have to change the choreography, but like, I want to mess with like all of the notation and orchestration of the piece.
So he goes in and he changes it. They do like another run of shows that's longer, and people are like, yeah, this is fine whatever, but then it goes away like it's just done. They drop it from the Balshoi. They're like, we're not going to do Swan Lake anymore, which is bizarre. Right when we started this podcast, I was like, what ballets do I know? The Nutcracker and Swan Lake both Tdchaikovsky works also, which is funny. Tchaikowski dies, so I
think there's like probably some generally in his work. So they pick it back up, but they get a new choreographer hit. Actually, Tchaikowsky's brother rewrites a lot of the story of Swan Lake. They pull the Act one music back in to this Act three Potada and remake Swan Lake, and like that's the swan Lake everyone Ben falls in love with. That's like the dance of the Black Swan, right, Like that's the return of the of the original Act one music comes back in and like that's what we know?
Is that? So basically there's this whole section, this section that Tchaikowsky had rewritten in Act three that wasn't included in the original score. So it wasn't until nineteen fifty three when a balshroy arkivist finds these pages that he rewrote, and that's what balancing hears, and he's like, I have to do something with this. He makes what's now known
as the Tchaikowsky Potida, which premieres in nineteen sixty. It's like this lost piece that was kind of put aside because it was way too ahead of its time in the ballet composition world. Then you have this choreographer who is changing ballet and he gravitates to this piece. It was almost like Tchaikowsky was waiting for someone like a choreographer like balanching, to create this kind of thing.
That's the same piece that Sophie saw decades later and was so inspired by the big movement she saw and then decided I want to dance balanching from that piece. It's just funny to think how like the legacy of one piece continues to change people's lives.
The general plot of Swan Lake, like over the course of history has been like the end of Swan Lake has change so many times depending on who's putting it on, Like it seems like there's at least fifteen different endings or different sections, and people cut stuff and move stuff. You would just assume that it's such a classic that it would never be touched, especially like coming off our whole series where we're talking about how ballet doesn't want
to change anything. Yeah, and like, look at this piece that had so many changes.
I love hearing stories like this something that now is considered like the greatest of the great and then you go back to like when it first came out and people were like, this is crap, no one likes it. Or Tchaikovsky wrote all this amazing ballet music, but the first one he writes, the dancers are mad at him
because they're like, we can't dance to this. I just find that so encouraging to not always follow the norm of what's always been done in whatever art form that you're in love it, Okay, Emily, how about you?
Okay? So something I've been thinking about a lot since our series Rap is the dancer Holly Howard. So we talked about Holly in our mus episode. She's one of Balancine's first American muses around the time when he first debuted sarahnd around nineteen thirty four. She was among that first class of dancers. And what we discussed about her in the series is that she and Balanchine were what it seemed like, romantically involved, and she got four abortions
by Balanchine. This is from Cursine's diaries, and we kind of leave her story there, and for us, that was like a moving anecdote that illustrates this pattern that we were noticing in lots of historians of notice in how Balanchine treated his muses. He'd fall in love, maybe get romantically involved, and then he'd inevitably sort of move on
from them to his next muse. So that's where we left Holly, and I was just kind of curious what happened to her and her career and if I could glean anything more about her, and that was quite difficult to do. I think we were trying to find out if she was even still alive. That was hard to do. There's no obituaries or anything like that about Holly Howard, but yet she was one of these iconic muses in Balanchine's life. So wow, I decided to take a crack at it, just to retrace my steps a little bit.
The first thing we did was enlist a friend of the podcast who happens to be a private investigator. Now that sounds a little creepy, it's not what you think it was. Basically, he directed us to ancestry dot com, which is a very commonly used resource that we should use pro tip pro tip, something we learned in recording this series. And then I also found some additional information in this book Mister b. George balan Jean's Twentieth Century by Jennifer Homans, there's a little bit more on Holly.
So basically, here's what I can tell you about Holly. She was born in nineteen eighteen in Virginia. She had a twin brother named Kent. The Howards they were this big military family. Their father was a general it looks like under Patent and Eisenhower, and she sort of grew up wherever he was stationed, which was mostly in the Philippines anyway, so Holly got involved in ballet from a very young age, and I know that she spent some
time training with a woman named Catherine Littlefield. And this would be years before Balanjan would show up in America. It feels like often the way we talk about Balancine's debut in this country, it's almost as if he sort of descended upon the US and just like collected this motley crew of dancers that didn't know any better, and just like delivered ballet to the people.
There was this.
New Yorker description of an event that they did talking about Sarah Nod where they say, quote, he was a ballet choreographer and almost nobody in the United States could dance back. He opened a school, but to judge from the photos, the young women he was able to collect were mostly rather plump and bewildered. Burn Okay, I know it's kind of exulting, and the truth was that really ballet was here. This is a point that Teresa Ruth Howard makes. We talked to Teresa Ruth Howard in one
of our episodes. You have many examples of this, as early as eighteen forty six. There's George Washington Smith. There's this guy from Philadelphia. He was doing his thing. He's believed to be a mixed race man, and he danced in the premiere of Giselle. Here in the US, there's Dorothy Alexander, who founded a school in Atlanta in nineteen twenty nine that would later become the Atlanta Ballet. So, yeah, lots of examples of people doing ballet here, teaching people
ballet here before balancing came. And so then you have Catherine Littlefield. Catherine Littlefield had this school in Philly, and Ballan Sheen when he was starting his company, recruited a bunch of dancers from her school, and one of those dancers was Holly Howard. So then at this point, I believe Holly's parents are divorced and Lois, Holly's mother moves Holly and her twin brother Kent to New York, where Holly ends up in Balancine's school, and Lois devotes a
ton of time to her daughter's career. I talked to Holly's niece, who told me a little bit about her aunt and has fond memories of her.
That's amazing nice sleuthing Emily to find her. Wow.
I did call six of her nieces and nephews. These would be Kent's children. So her niece told me that basically her grandmother, Lois, Holly's mother, devoted a ton of time to Holly's career and was essentially the company cheferone. This is also backed up by Lincoln Kirstine's diaries that Lois was Holly's escort and probably spent a lot of time with Balancing.
Two.
It seems like Holly and Balanching were in a relationship for over a year. Her niece did mention once that Balancing wanted to marry Holly. I don't know what to make of that. This is where we hear the sort of abortion rumor. It was maybe a fourth or fifth abortion, and I was curious to a little bit about the context of what that would have been like to sort of get an abortion. In the nineteen thirties in New York, it wasn't an uncommon use of birth control. Obviously it
was illegal. There were like safe hygienic options through midwives that you could get where the outcome could go well. But at the same time, because it's illegal, there's lots of like underground, dangerous options too. We don't really know the conditions that Holly dealt with or the form that those abortions took. I mean, she's also dancing all of the time and exerting her body in these ways, so I kind of wonder how that came into play too.
Then Holmans writes about this other point about Holly's mother, how she blamed George for ruining her young daughter, and she threatened to have him deported.
Whoa ruining because they had this romantic relationship.
And yeah, and it seemed like, based on comments made by dancers, people knew about the abortions, people knew about this relationship. She felt it ruined her daughter's reputation. And I'm even hesitant to repeat this, but there is a really troubling footnote from this guy, John Terrorist. He was a former balancing dancer, and he said, they say no proof Holly is running a whorehouse in Boston. Everybody said she became a whore and it was because of him.
When we come back, we'll have more on Holly Howard's life, plus we get final reactions from our team on this season. Stay tuned. So what's your takeaway about what we do know about Holly Howard?
I don't know. I don't know what to make of this. It sounds very messy. You have Lois potentially trying to get Balanchine deported. There is some evidence to show that an immigration agent came to question Balanchine, but ultimately like nothing came of it. And it's kind of where we left Holly in our story, which was we don't really know what happened to her career.
That feels just like such a move that I wish I could say like we've outgrown as a society, but I feel like that happens all the time. If you leave some organization negatively, they're going to do whatever they can to erase you from their records.
Right, Yeah, it does feel like she's been erased. And that's not the case with all of the dancers of the time. You know, there is documentation of dancers and the careers that they had. And the niece said, because I asked her if did Holly keep a diary or anything, and the niece said, my mother was a protective person and was not a chatty kathy. She if there was such a thing, may have decided it would be better
to not see the light of day. And I understand to an extent like, you know, what is the value
in continuing to talk about these details. At the same time, we're sort of left at this cliff, this precipice where the abortion comment is the last thing we've heard, and it is kind of told as this like moment of I don't know, shame or tragedy or like ending of a career, a rature of her life as a dancer, And I mean the niece sort of admitted like, on the other hand, that means we don't know what happened to her. We don't know some of these details on
me what we want to know. It might be a different story, it might be a different story of agency, but we can't know. But we don't know actually how Holly felt about it, like how much choice that she felt she had. And I kind of crave those details because I crave a document of that time and like how people we're thinking about that choice just to see her as more of an independent person.
I'm so curious what she was like as a person and what their relationship felt like, like what was their relationship dynamic? And of course there are some power structures at play, because Balancine was her boss when they were together. But yeah, I feel like I don't I still don't know. I don't know her, you know, I feel like I still don't know her.
And also I just kind of wonder about her personal life after Balanchine. Did she have other partners? You know, how much did her relationship with Balancine also impact her personal life from there on out?
She never married, she never had kids of her own. Who's around fifty years old when she died. She died of cancer. The niece has some at least recollection or image of her, having been surrounded by a lot of friends. The niece's take on her aunt, it's like, well, she was just Aunt Holly to me. We loved her, she loved us. It seemed like she poured a lot of
affection into her nieces and nephews. She remembers her teaching dance, and she recalls one visit somewhere along the line of like visiting Holly, and she says that I remember I had learned a dance step someplace in our travels, and I was so proud to show it to her. I thought I had it just right. And she looked at me and smiled and said, no, that's not the way
it goes and then she performed it for me. Oh and I'm sure with exact precision, and I couldn't quite see the difference between what I had done and she had done.
I love that.
I don't know, that's it.
I've been reflecting a little bit on this whole series, and one thing that's really struck me has been some of the responses from listeners. And we've gotten some really long emails and letters from listeners sharing their stories that have just been incredibly moving. And they've been from people with all kinds of dance backgrounds, including long term professional dancers at elite companies, as well as people who just
studied a little ballet as a kid. But I think one of the things that really surprised me actually was that the episode that got the most active vocal response from listeners was episode six. And that's the episode in which Ayleen and I talk about our lives and my experience with ballet. And this is an episode that I was really nervous to put out there. I think we were not sure if we should publish it at all.
When we recorded it, we were like, we probably won't even use this, but let's just record a conversation and see what happens, but we decided to include it, and we just immediately got so many notes from people who listened, who wrote their life stories in these emails and talked about crying as they listened. It was very moving. I've never gotten such a wave of response to an episode, and I think it was actually a life lesson for me.
There's a lot of media there, movies or TV shows and storybooks about professional dancers, and I think for a lot of people who study ballet, it's like you feel
close to it. You're like, this was a big part of my life years ago, but at the same time, you don't feel like you're part of it, and you don't think you can claim it as your own, and so you end up in this weird limbo of kind of having your history invalidated and erased because actually, like most people who interact with ballet, their story is much more similar to my story than to all of these professional dancers have often felt like a weird, lone person
who it's like, ballet was a big part of my life and then I totally left it and there's no one like me. But actually there are tons of people like me. We just don't talk about it, so that blew my mind a little bit.
Yeah, it was exciting to hear from people and then to hear that they connected with it. And I feel like that feeling is so relatable beyond ballet, Like I feel like we all have a part of our past where we didn't see something through fully, or maybe we actually kind of did, but we don't perceive it that way, and then we just close that part of our stories. I just think that's like a human thing, And in a way, I think it was nice for you, Erica, too,
to almost be validated by these listeners. I think you did have a lot of imposter syndrome going into that episode, and you did feel uncomfortable, But I think hearing that from listeners and then actually hearing their stories was impactful for you on a personal level.
So one thing on that universality point that really stood out to me was this one letter from one of our listeners, and I'm just going to read a section of it. She says, this episode helped me acknowledge that I'm not as alone in choosing a path away from my true love as I thought. My passion was music. I entered the local music school at age five and By the time I entered high school, I had been playing several instruments, writing music, and singing in choirs for
almost eleven years. Becoming a professional musician and or composer was my goal. It was my whole life, just like ballet was for Erica. When I turned sick, my mother took all the money out of a savings account she'd opened for me when I was ten and bought me my own instrument. Since it's a local specialty instrument and not as common as violins, flutes, etc. Every single one has to be handmade. We waited almost a whole year, and finally I got it. No more renting from the school,
and then I burned out. I had been pursuing music for fourteen years and was about to choose a university. I've been planning to go to the National Music Academy to become professional, but it all went poof. I used to find unimaginable freedom when playing, and now all I felt was dread, fear, and loss of identity. I mean, I knew I didn't want to do this anymore, but I had no idea who I was without music, the structure, the lessons, the daily practices. Now I had so much
free time but nothing to do with it. Erico was spot on when she said, so what is me because I'm me? And what is me because of Ballet? I still feel the same exact way when I think about the relationship I had with music. I think I've finally started to find me again. But oh boy, has it been difficult. I still have my instrument, but it's been about three years since I touched it. Maybe someday I'll
pick it up again, I'm not sure. So I thought that that was pretty incredible that this person wanted to reach out because something had resonated so true to her and what she heard in your experience.
Yeah, it's really interesting. I was talking to a really good friend of mine the other day on the phone, and she had listened to the podcast. She was my college roommate, and she said a line that really struck her from that episode between Aileen and me was how we had said that it sometimes felt like Ballet was my one true love. And then Allen came back in the conversation and said, you know, I think that's how
you perceive it, Erica. In other words, that it might not have actually been like my quote unquote one true love. But that's sometimes how I feel about it, and that's
when I get emotional about it. And my friend pointed out that that perception might also be based in this all or nothing attitude that you have as a kid, where you have to give everything, and it's almost like when you're an abusive relationship, and the highs and lows of the abusive relationship and the way it kind of takes over your life can make you feel like it's the most intense version of love that exists and just like keeps you in the relationship and makes you feel
like it's this great love. And I'm not saying that Ballet was like an abusive relationship, but I do think that the intensity of it and the requirement that it's a big commitment at a young age, you get caught up in it and it can turn it into something that makes the loss of it even greater and just intensifies all of your emotions around it.
Yeah, And as humans, it's like the intense things, whatever they are, sometimes feel good, but that doesn't mean they're the only thing that can make you happy absolutely or the only worthwhile thing.
The Turning is a production of Rococo Punch and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and produced by Alan Lance, Lesser and Me. Our story editor is Emily Foreman. Mixing and sound designed by James Trout. Jessica Carisa is our assistant producer, Andrea Assuage is our digital producer. Our executive producers are John Parratti and Jessica Alpert at Rococo Punch. I get Trina
Norbel and Nikki Etour at iHeart Podcasts. For photos and more details on the series, follow us on Instagram at Rococo Punch, and you can reach out via email The Turning at Rococo punch dot com. I'm Erica Lance. Thanks for listening.