Toni Lander and Bruce Marks – My Date With Destiny

My sister yells, from her bedroom, “Mom! She’s dancing in my room again! Make her stop!”
It’s an accusation and a statement of fact, all in one.
I can’t stop dancing! I don’t want to stop dancing! I think, “Doesn’t everyone want to be dancing? Why isn’t everyone dancing?”
My mother accuses me of doing pirouettes while in utero. She was sure what those pointy things she was feeling on opposite sides must be, an arm and another a foot.
But when she gave birth, I had a callous on my knees because I was sitting in a plie while inside her body with my feet pointed. That is when she realized it was two knees.
The joke was, “I wasn’t born, I was “turned out!”
My mother realized early that I was always sleeping with my knees out to both sides on my back. Or sleeping on my stomach completely turned out with my knees out to the sides.
But I was perfectly comfortable.
As a child, I would sit in the Chinese splits to play games or to watch television.
It would bother my father and he would tell me that sitting like that was “unladylike”, but I did not care. It was the most comfortable position for me.
The first time that it registered (for me) that something might be unusual inside … was when I broke my ankle when I was 5 years old. The doctor ex-rayed me from my feet to my hips and came in and said, “Suzanne, is it difficult for you to walk?”
I shook my head and said, “No.”

Then he said, “Well, when you walk do your hips pop out?”

And I nodded my head smiling, “Oh, yea! It does that all the time!”

Then he said, “It’s not supposed to be doing that. You do not have a ball and socket in your hips, you have a flat plate and a flat plate. You are holding your legs together with your muscles. You will have to have strong leg muscles your whole life to keep your hips and legs attached.”

I just smiled, like that was going to be a normal thing for me.
What that would give me was an exceptional range of motion in my legs and hips. What I did not know was that would be perfect for a ballet dancer.
As a child, I was a perpetual motion machine. I had more energy than I knew what to do with.
I would chase after the rainbows, certain that if I was fast enough, I could find the pot of gold.
I would listen to the songs in the wind as they played notes and traded stories with the trees, the grasses, and the canyons.
I heard the conversations between the creek in our backyard, and the creatures that called it home.
And then everything changed.
My mother got us tickets to see “Stars of the American Ballet Theater” in Dallas, Texas.
I had never been to a theater or a ballet performance at that time. It was the summer just before my 6^th birthday.
It was after I badly broke my ankle and the healing process of it. During that time, my father was to do some physical therapy with me and stretching. The doctor had been concerned on how my bones were oddly formed and felt that I needed forms of exercise to help my bones form correctly as I grew.
My mother decided to take us both to the ballet.
It was just her and I, neither my father nor my sister was interested in going.
It was going to be our special night! I was so very excited. I put on my special pink dress and put on my patent leather shoes and we were off to the theater.
From the moment I walked up to the building I was in awe. It was huge! There was lots of glass and so many people were coming! There was excitement in the air, and everyone was dressed so beautifully! I hoped I was properly dressed for this event.
We come in the foyer of the theater, and there are chandeliers and red carpets. It looked like a palace to me in my mind.
We hand our tickets to the attendant, and they are torn, then we are handed a program and told where to find our seats.
I had never seen such a place as open, spacious, and magnificent! The curtain looks like it is made of red velvet and gold. The chairs are a deep red color, and we sit down and see others excitedly coming to their seats.
There are moments when my mind intuitively knows to take a picture of a special moment. And that was one of them.
I am sitting in the balcony looking down on a stage, knowing that this was a place of magic. This was where something important was going to happen. And I was going to get to see that!

I could barely sit still.
The music starts, the curtain seems to magically lift up, going into some unknown place and dancers start to move about on the stage.
Instantly, I am leaning forward to gasping in awe. I am transfixed. What is this thing I am watching? My mother called it a ballet, and it was beautiful!
I do not know in that moment that the dancers that have captured my heart and soul were Bruce Marks and Toni Lander. I did not know their names until many years later when I came across the program that I had kept secretly under my mattress. A treasure that was mine and mine alone.
At the time they were both Principal Dancers with American Ballet Theater.
I knew nothing of them. To me, they were diamonds on a stage. But in my mind they ignited a love that still fires my heart and inspires my soul to this day.
I had an instinctive and magical pull to both of them. There was a type of attraction that I did not understand at the time. Something about them was exciting, and familiar. And that feeling was going to magnetically pull us back together in other times and places in this life.
In that moment, they were the spark that kindled a feeling that was so deep and profound inside my being that once that genie came out of that bottle, she was never going to go back inside. Ever!
They were the embodiment of a dream that my soul craved, and from that moment on … I knew that I would never be the same.
I did not know that they had the power to give me free wishes, I did not understand that in acquiring those wishes, that I would put myself on a karmic path towards some preordained destiny.
I was to learn that destiny has a mind of its own. Destiny has a plan that is required for one to attain certain wishes.
Great destinies have a great cost.
The lessons of destiny take one into places that we did not see coming.
Watching them dance, I wanted to be them. They were perfect in every way to my child’s mind. They were the personification of goodness, grace, and beauty. They were the ideal potential that I believed I could become.
In that moment, I saw their great gifts and ability to weave magic for an audience to enjoy and escape into.
I could feel that I had some of that same type of magic inside my soul. And now it was clamoring to get out and to fly.
As the curtain came down, there is an eruption of applause and the yells of “Bravo” as people are standing to recognize their great talent. I could feel, what that would feel like in my body to be on that stage, bowing so humbly and gracefully.
I got home that night, and my mind was spinning. I could not sleep. I stood up and practiced the curtsey that I saw them both do in my bedroom, imagining that I was them up on that stage. It was so real. I could feel it. I knew that was where I belonged.
From that point on, I could not stop dancing. If my mind raced, I started spinning, twirling, becoming my own planet, circling their stars. If my feelings felt broken by my life, I would privately practice collapsing in grief as I saw Bruce Marks do in that performance.
It was driving my sister crazy, and I did not care, nor did I realize that such a thing might be irritating.
To me dancing was joy! Therefore, for everyone, it had to be joy as well. And I planned on spreading this feeling of joy for the rest of my life.
Bruce Marks and Toni Lander showed me the door. And I was going to step through that door. Little did I know that this tremendous beginning would have to have an end. And while the end would not be what I envisioned; it would be a full circle. One that clearly needed to be completed.
Stars cycle in different times from their beginning to their end.
I would become one of the many witnesses as Toni Landers star completed in this life. And I would play a small part that was where my karma was required to participate to practice love and truth.
That karma would create a profound healing for both myself, and Toni. But the process was going to be hard.
Bruce Marks and Toni Lander were a part of my beginning. They are a big part of my story. I would become who I am today because of their many gifts and some shocking revelations. I would learn to shine my own star regardless of if one of them deemed me worthy or not.
There are moments when certain stars fade away while others teach us what we need to become in the face of conflict and rejection.
In the end, the love that pulled me to them was a strong unbreakable bond that would allow me to find grace when faced with projection, pain, and fear. A bond so strong that even in death, healing would still take place. And the circle would complete.
This life would become a journey for me to find my own light and how that light was to shine in this lifetime. There is a moment to realize that while certain bright stars would ignite my own dreams, that my stars trajectory would be different than theirs. But it would shine bright in its own way.
It would shine in ways that would surprise me and it would shine in a way that I would leave behind a very different legacy. One that I hope will inspire those that come after me and I intend to be a guide to when I am long gone from this world and this life.
Toni would teach me about grace and grit.
Bruce would teach me about knowing that all things must change.
And I would give both of them what I had to offer at that time.

~Suzanne Wagner~