The Grace is in the Transitions...

Judith Rock

You answer that all-or-nothing call to be a dancer when you’re young. And you pour everything into it: every cell, muscle, joint, every curiosity. You turn forty or so, and you understand from your DNA—not only how to do everything you’ve ever done—but what it is, what it means, how to set it on fire and change the world! Or at least the life of someone in the audience.
And right about then, maybe you can’t do it any more.
The NYPD has a radio code for that situation: 90 Z. In the cop alphabet, that’s 90 Zebra. It means ‘Gone On Arrival’. You get a call, you arrive—and what was happening, isn’t.
[Speak into shoulder mike] ‘Uh, this dance thing, Central, it’s gonna be a 90 Zebra. It’s a 90 Zebra, Central...’
—Response Time, Part I

ONE of my first modern dance teachers used to say, “The dance is in the transitions!” He meant that what matters is not the photogenic pose, the beautiful place you’ve arrived at; what matters is how you’re getting from where you’ve been to where you’re going. That’s the dance; that’s where the dancer lives, he would say. We, his students, were young, and none of us were thinking of the big transition that awaited us years in the future. For most dancers, especially modern dancers and ballet dancers, there comes a time when the knees have done all the pliés they intend to do, a time when, for one reason or another, it’s over. When that happens, then what? When you’ve spent years flying through the air, jamming with time and space, playing “gotcha” with gravity, apparently exempt from the physical laws governing the locomotion of ordinary mortals, then what? When you fall from “grace” like an overripe apple losing its grip on the tree, then what?

Many dancers decide to teach, direct, choreograph. Others open restaurants. Some become physical therapists, personal trainers, go to law school. With a doctorate in theology and art, I was lucky enough to be offered a teaching job in a college dance department. I accepted the offer thankfully. But my vocational heart—performing—was not in it.

Shortly before leaving New York City for the new job, I had made a foray into completely new territory. I had become an auxiliary police officer for the NYPD, discovering that what cops do is almost as exciting as what dancers do. Adrenaline, lights, crowds, a costume! Lots of physical skills to master. And, most important of all, doing it! I liked it so much that I applied to be a regular NYPD officer. They told me I was too old.

I took the Academy entrance exam anyway, refusing to put my age on the test form. I went to see the Police Commissioner to tell him he was missing out on a lot of savvy middle-aged people who not only liked action, but had the life experience, the people experience, to make great cops. He was polite but unenthusiastic, and I went off to the midwest to teach.

Before I’d been there a month, I had joined the reserve unit of the local police department. By Christmas, I was stopping by the Chief’s office every few weeks, telling him why the department should sponsor me for a newly vacated part-time police officer position. By August, I had passed the state exam and sat in the sergeant’s office, struggling to thread all that stuff cops wear around their middles onto my brand-new and very stiff leather gun belt. I remember looking up to see the sergeant standing in the doorway, shaking his head. He said, “First requirement for job: must be able to dress self...”

So what happens when an artist hits the street as a cop? What happens when art, law enforcement, and the big questions collide at the midlife intersection? Well, the first thing that happened to me was that suddenly I was having fun working again. I couldn’t wait to start a shift, whether I was just working as a reserve alongside a full-time officer, or working by myself as a part-time officer. I loved the feeling of putting on the uniform and going out the door into the unknown, loved never knowing what was going to happen next. Stepping outside my door as a cop was very much like stepping out of the wings onto the stage as a performer.

You learn your role, you work on your skills, but you never really know what’s going to happen out there. As a dancer, or any kind of performer, there is a real sense in which you never really know what show you’re going to do out there on the stage. Oh, sure, it’s whatever piece you’ve been rehearsing, but it’s different every time. Your rhythms, your breathing, something about the way the light falls, what your partners do, the audience’s timing, their feel for what you’re doing up there—always different, always changing. And then, of course, there are the mistakes. You fall on your face, part of your costume falls off, the electricity goes out. There are also the inexplicable perfections, the performances where you didn’t do anything differently, but everything you did shone with a blissful ease and a luminous truth. However it goes out there, you play it, surf it, struggle with it, love it.

Meanwhile, I struggled with the guilty knowledge that my day job, my tenure-track teaching job, in spite of its rewards, was just a job. When, after seminary, I took the leap into full-time dance, I went with a deep sense of call, of vocation, although becoming a professional modern dancer didn’t seem to make much sense for someone already in her mid-twenties. Dance careers don’t usually start that late. But I had found the place where, in Frederick Buechner’s words, my “deep passion” (dance) met the world’s “deep need” (meaning), and I was willing to do whatever it took to acquire the skills to work at that intersection.

Now, twenty years and several injuries later, I felt exactly the same crazy sense of call about being a police officer. Okay, so I was relatively fearless and liked lights and sirens. But what did that have to do with the world’s deep need? Could an over-forty, female, politically liberal artist/intellectual child of the sixties, with old dance injuries and a terminal degree in theology, make it as a full-time cop? If this blue door opened to me and I walked through it, where would I be?

Over the piano was a velvet painting of Jesus, standing at a door, knocking. I thought it looked like the kind of door the princess is always behind in fairy tales. Every day, I’d go into the parlor—and he was still there. Still hoping someone would take a minute, get up, put down the baby, stop stringing the beans, stop arguing. See who’s there….
Something about the guy’s unholy persistence got to us. Because we keep on.
One cousin keeps on getting married. Another cousin keeps on getting divorced. My favorite cousin got his soul blown up over there in Viet Nam. He made it home, became a cop. Now he’s a minister. I went the other way, with detours: first a minister, then a dancer, then a professor, then a cop. I keep knocking on doors...
—Response Time, Part I

Sometimes that unmistakable sense of call comes because you’re on the way to where you’re going; it comes before you arrive at the next place you’re called to be. Sometimes it comes because you’ve finally let go and loved the transition. That can be confusing, because a transition is to move through, not to stay in. One night, I was guarding an emotionally disturbed man we had just arrested for a felony. The doctor had to check him out before we took him to jail. I stood in the hospital hallway, watching the interview through the little window in the door, responsible for the safety of everyone concerned. Not a hard job—the felon was reading his Bible, the doctor was writing his report. I stood in the fluorescent glare with a deep feeling of happiness, of being exactly where I was supposed to be.

The feeling persisted. Up to my knees in snow, directing traffic, slogging through winter ditches looking for road kill deer, chatting with truck drivers in the middle of the night when I stopped at SuperAmerica for coffee, I was in the right place. People remarked, “You’re such a happy cop....” I didn’t mind boredom, or danger, or discomfort, or working all night.

So I started applying for full-time police jobs. During college vacations, I went out to Berkeley and Los Angeles (where people might shoot at me, but at least I wouldn’t freeze to death) to run obstacle courses, climb walls, drag 200 pound weights. Examining boards grilled me about what I would do in this or that situation on the street. Doing pushups in a moonlit canyon at the LAPD test site, I was flooded with the same happiness I had felt in the hospital hallway and the winter ditches. But under the happiness was a growing sense of disquiet about the ways I didn’t fit in the law enforcement world.

Politically liberal police officers are a minority. There are cops with Ph.D.’s, but not many. But those are relatively minor differences. The chasm opening at my feet was about perception. The focus of police work is on what happens, not on the meaning of what happens. When you write a police report, your sergeant wants to know “what,” not “why.” As a dancer and choreographer, I had always regarded facts as fascinating raw material for making art, action as the process for making meaning. As the veteran police officer who was my mentor, training officer, and sometime-partner later commented, “When we worked together, I’d be watching the traffic, and Judith would be watching the way the light fell on the trees....”

Every police call is a scene out of someone’s drama—lit with flashing lights, accompanied by sirens. I get out of the car, and pieces of life-script are blowing around my feet, like fragments of text, as though some library had decayed and collapsed, and forgotten languages lie in the street, along with the ATM receipts, gum wrappers, and broken umbrellas....
—Response Time, Part I

It was also increasingly clear that the physical side of full-time police training was going to be a problem. I turned down a provisional job offer from the LAPD after watching an academy class take off for its morning run straight up the side of a canyon. Knees that don’t want to do any more pliés also don’t want to run up and down canyon walls.

In spite of my sense of vocation, I felt that I had walked into a box canyon. I wanted to be a full-time cop, but that was making less and less sense, seeming less and less possible. Meanwhile, the teaching job was also coming to an end. The college had financial problems, and new faculty—like me—were being cut. Two box canyons.

Just at that point, Luther College, in Decorah, Iowa, invited me to do their 1995 Sihler Lecture. This annual lecture was about women in the church and the contemporary world. But, they said, we don’t want “talking heads.” Do something different, they said. The police officer I worked with most often had repeatedly asked me, “When are you going to make a dance out of all this?” When the lecture invitation came, I realized I was going to make theater out of “all this,” out of what happens on the street, what happens when an artist hits the street as a cop.

The original version of Response Time was performed for the first time on a snowy March night at Luther. The piece was supposed to start with video footage of two cops walking a beat; then I would pick out the melody of “The Old Rugged Cross” at the piano and start talking about my great-grandmother as the lights came up. But the video equipment failed, and I had to stand up and say, “Well, folks, we have a problem.” Then I started over.

My great-grandmother, Eliza, talked out loud to Jesus in the middle of the night....
Now, I talk out loud to Jesus in the middle of the night...
I’m working the three to eleven shift. My partner’s driving. We get a radio call, a burglary-in-progress call. My first burglary-in-progress call. We get to the scene, my partner says, ‘I’ll go in the front, you take the side.’
[Get out of car, pull out gun]
Right. Take the side.... And do what with it? Could we rehearse this?...
I’m running around the side of the building, ducking under the window. I gotta see through to the front, gotta know when my partner goes in...Who’s in there, how many guys? What have they got?...
[Duck back from window]
Three guys in there! Oh, Jesus....
—Response Time, Part I

I tried to make my transition out of dance by starting over as a police officer. But the blue door led onto the stage, and instead, I started over as an actress. That wasn’t the end of the transition, though. It took most of another year to finish the journey through the transitional passageway back into the world of performing.

In August of that year, still not ready to let go of the dream of being a full-time cop, I moved into temporary housing in a Florida trailer park, and entered the local police academy. I was the oldest member of my class by thirteen years. For four months, I ran, wrestled, shot, drove, took tests, argued, and laughed with my classmates. This academy was less physically demanding than the LAPD training, but it was demanding enough.

Every day, before dawn, I fall into my uniform and drive 25 miles to the academy, so I can get tackled, thrown, and outrun by Generation X. On breaks they complain to me about how tired they are! Me, I’d consider dying, just to get some rest....
—Response Time, Part II

There were two reasons (besides the gorgeous warm weather) for moving to Florida. One was that Florida has no law enforcement age limit. The other was that my mother, who still lived in the house near the Gulf of Mexico where I grew up, needed more and more help.

At the end of the day, I cross the blistering asphalt of the academy parking lot to my car, go check on my mother....
She offers me a cookie, and I free-fall down the rabbit hole of her dementia. I get smaller and smaller until I land in a world where the men on TV look up my mother’s skirt, and mysterious people in white crawl around under the Buick in the garage, stealing the car keys.
My mother’s mind is disappearing. Leaving her body hanging in the air....
—Response Time, Part II

Though my academy classmates and I disagreed about many things, we were united in our dislike of sedentary boredom. We loved the action training, and fidgeted and sighed through most of the classroom hours. One afternoon, as an instructor went on and on about measuring skid marks at traffic accidents, my classroom boredom reached crisis proportions. I tried to entertain myself by imagining a herd of tiny elephants wandering across the savanna of my desk and began working out the exact scale of everything else in the classroom as river valley, mountains, and sky. Then, when the math of the scale problem became as impenetrable as the skid mark calculations, I turned the page in my notebook and began to write the first sketches for Part II of Response Time.

By now, I had performed the first part three times. Audiences seemed to like it, and I loved doing it. I had started to wonder if it could be expanded into an evening-length one-woman show. My life-circumstances—going through the police academy, living in the Golden Acres Trailer Park, trying to take care of my mother—offered, if nothing else, a wealth of new material.

In the Academy, we have Officer Survival Training. A SWAT Team officer comes in to teach us. He’s maybe 28...cute! So physically fit, he’s scary. This guy looks like a Ken doll made of hard rubber. Before he hands out the riot helmets and the paint ball guns, he talks to us. Preaches! His energy boomerangs off the walls, his voice hits me like a jet engine blast. My hair must be blowing straight back from my head in this testosterone hurricane!
But he cares about us—he really does. Because we’re gonna be cops, and he wants us to be safe out there. Safe.
So we can go home to our families at the end of a shift.
‘If we’re gonna know how to be safe out there, we have to train! Train all the time! But do we train enough? No! We don’t train enough—why? I’ll tell you why. We don’t train enough, because we say we’re too busy. We are busy—we all are, absolutely! Look at all we gotta do—pay the bills, wash the car, cut the grass, beat the wife....’
Up against the gender wall, officer!
I spend a lot of time spread-eagled on the gender wall. I’m not being searched; I’m searching. For a way over, a way in....
—Response Time, Part II

As the steamy Florida September melted into a merely hot Florida October, my mother continued through her own calamitous transition. One Sunday evening, she made seventeen 911 calls to the sheriff’s office, hid her diamond rings, and ran away. After neighbors and a deputy found her, I went to the hospital and signed the papers committing her to the twenty-four-hour-a-day care she needed. Then I went back to her house, back home.

The house doesn’t know she’s gone yet.
I hear her dish towels and pajamas spinning in the dryer. The men on TV are looking for her....
[Go out onto porch]
A fire siren wails along the road. I sit and watch the embers of my own emergency burn in the rain.
Seventeen 911 calls. She knew it was an emergency!
Call 911 to stop a crime, save a life.
If I call 911, will they send a SWAT team to raid my mother’s mind and bring her back? A sniper to take out the dying cells holding her hostage? A negotiator to talk the paranoia down?
Why haven’t they taught me how to do that?
Last week we learned something. Most missing persons? Never found.
—Response Time, Part II

I moved out of the Golden Acres trailer and into the house. Through November and December, as academy graduation and the police licensing exam drew nearer, I searched every cupboard, closet, and box in my mother’s house, sorted through every piece of clothing, looked at every photograph. My search was partly an effort not to lose anything of value, since she had hidden so many things in her fear and confusion (she was certain the mysterious people in white had stolen the title to the Buick); but, I was also looking for what I needed to take into the future, and saying goodbye to what could be left behind.

Stuff—stuff to sort, pack, ship, sell, throw away, give away...
I wish I knew what the people in white did with the car title.
We’ve had search techniques—I grid search the house!
The trouble is, at most crime scenes, the stuff doesn’t belong to your mother. Your baby shoes aren’t in the bottom drawer.
Your letters from college, tied up in ribbon, aren’t under the bed, next to the butcher knife...and the five pound stones.
The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the freezer aren’t the same Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups you and she ate together every night when you were ten.
The awful paint-by-numbers picture of Jesus against the wall isn’t the same one she bought last spring at a garage sale and asked you to hang for her because it made her feel safe, but you never did. Because it’s so ugly....
—Response Time, Part II

On a balmy December day, my class went for its last academy run. By now I had privately decided that, though I would graduate and take the state exam, taking my law enforcement exploration all the way to the finish line, I would not apply for police department jobs. I would go back to New York and try to go where Response Time seemed to be leading me. I felt both relieved and sad about my decision: relieved to let go of what, in the last analysis, did not fit, sad to let go of the street, the risk and excitement and service of that particular “edge.”

I ran that morning in a tangle of emotion, ecstatic that this painful running was nearly over, grieving for what I was leaving behind. As usual, I was near the end of the line, laboring to keep up. As I rounded a bend and began to pass the others who were already headed back, they began to chant, “Judith, dancer, doesn’t quit, doesn’t quit....” They high-fived me as I ran past.

I saw them, through the tears running down my face, as the partners who had helped me through the last stretch of the long transition. It was as though they were telling me, “You can go through the door now; you can close it behind you, with love, with honor.”

Partners....
Dancers have partners...the air, space, time, weight. Each other. Your partner throws you, you catch him, your partner carries you, you carry her. Together, you tell the shining truth that lives in the skin.
Whole audiences soar on your wings to some planet without gravity, where to fall is to fly!
You spread glory before the watchers, a golden cloak thrown over the mud of age, and injury, and death. All pass over! Because as long as you and your partners are dancing, no one will hurt. No one will die.
—Response Time Part II

Back in New York, I settled in to work on skills—not shooting and driving this time, but voice and acting. Another actress sent me to a tough, canny, and loving teacher, Gerard Russak, who became the director for Response Time. Together, we worked toward the first production of the evening-length version. Meanwhile, I continued to do the first part of the show wherever I could. I did it for scholars on sabbatical, women artists, seminarians, college students, Benedictine nuns, the annual conference of the Minnesota Association of Women Police (MAWP). After the MAWP performance, a deputy from a rural county said, “You know the part where you get out of the car and pieces of life-script are blowing around your feet? I really liked that, because I always thought I was the only cop in the world who felt like that....”

The artist has partners. A piece only becomes itself in relation to an audience, viewers, responders. Audience and artist call out to each other, hold up mirrors for each other. We hold each other’s hopes and loves and fears in our hands.

In June, 1997, the complete version of Response Time had its premiere performance in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, produced by the New Hampshire Theater Project. The weekend was more successful than any of us had dared to hope. As I stood in the dressing room waiting to begin, I didn’t feel the same happiness and excitement I had felt sometimes as a part-time cop; I felt something more sober, because the stakes were higher. I was staking everything—every nuance of life-experience, every step of the long transition, every ability—on the next hour and a half. I was staking everything on the chance to go out there on a bare stage and knock on meaning until it opened.

I’ll be arresting someone—and I’ll start thinking about those people in my grandmother’s Bible....
She kept it by the telephone, on top of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. And when she sat down in the big chair covered with the pink chenille bedspread and opened her Bible—all these people jumped out! And went to the mat with angels, burning bushes, crazy prophets....
Whoever answers the door, you play these scenes up close and personal. Face to face.
—Response Time, Part I

Now the director and I are working toward the first New York production of Response Time in May, 1998 And I continue to work on other performance projects, write, teach, and volunteer as an auxiliary police officer with the NYPD. (My partner is a singer, and she and I are known in the unit as ‘‘the Do-Wop cops.”)

Twenty years ago, answering the call to be a dancer, I thought dance itself was my “deep passion.” Moving through the transition out of dance, I realized that a deeper passion has been there all the time, under the dancing. That deeper passion, making meaning and offering it to an audience, drove me back onto the stage, this time as an actress. Transitions really are, as my teacher said long ago, where the grace is. In this transition, I found the kind of grace that transforms loss and wound into gift. Now my job is to go on being what an artist is: a good detective, chasing not just the facts, but the truth.

Find the lost! The lost coin, the lost sheep, the lost drunk, the lost.... You fill in the blank. What was missing when you looked in the mirror this morning?
Don’t give up—crawl through the bushes, ransack the closet! Pound on those locked doors.
—Response Time, Part I

Judith Rock is an actress and writer. Her one-woman show, Response Time, was performed at the 78th Street Theatre Lab in New York City in 1998. She is also a lecturer in art and communication at Union Theological Seminary (NYC).

Visit Judith Rock as Image Artist of the Month for January 2000

Issue #18 • Winter 1997