For me the end of tour ment going back to live my busy struggling dancer life in New York City. It was the begining of the summer and I had just moved into the quintessential struggling dancer housing situation. A flight attendant crash pad in Queens shared with 4 cute flight attendants. I rented my small room for 500 bucks a month and included in the amazing price was 3 flights of stairs between the kitchen and my room, a 20 minute walk to the E train subway line and a small family of mice eating my pantry items daily. I didn’t have the heart to kill the mice so I made my landlord come over an catch and release them twice a week, they always came back and soon I gave up. After all the little mice were just trying to get by, and so was I. A normal day would consist of me waking up, getting ready and heading out the door to the subway early in the morning to be first in the 200 girl long line at the 10 am broadway auditions. Sometime in the mid afternoon after I auditioned my heart out all day, i would make it down to the last 5 girls and would inevitably get cut. I would drag my heavy dance bag and heavy heart all the way back to Queens. My nights were spent hussling to make rent. Sometimes I would go-go dance, sometimes I would dance at bar-mitvas, sometimes I would paint my whole body gold and stand as a human statue at some rich new yorker’s over the top birthday party. I was a hustler. Relentless, and determined do only “dance related” work. I did not want to have to be a waitress. Whatever happened. I just did not want to be one of those people who went through life as a actress/waitress or dancer/waitress or musician/waitress. If I was not booking the best dance jobs then I was determined to just cha-cha slide my way to making rent. I was knew if had to tell my parents I was a waitress they would begin questioning my lifechoice to skip college and move to New York. I had enrolled in the school of hard knocks and I as determined to be the valdictorian. - from Rockettes, Rockstars and Rockbottom by Keltie Colleen
