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 Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban | Don't miss all of Daughter, First: In part 1, we meet the Governor's daughter, Katie Mahoney Brown; in part 2, the attorney who's going to take down the administration digs into the family secrets; in part 3, the matriarch, Rosemary Mahoney, uncovers her husband's dirty business deals; in part 4, Katie's marriage begins to unravel; in part 5, the federal prosecutor has second thoughts as she closes in on the Mahoney family; and in part 6, Big Jim and his son-in-law Tom go head-to-head over the prosecution. Katie typed out the curt text — Here — but didn’t send it. Not because she had any hesitations. She unzipped her purse, located her tube of Chanel Longwear concealer, and dotted it under her eyes with the pad of a finger. It had been an hour and half’s drive in horrific traffic to her father’s stately Boston home, and a hell of a day before that. From the back window of her SUV, there was no sign of paparazzi, but enough pictures of her family had surfaced over the years for her to know that the most enterprising photographers prefer to get their money shot from the bushes. Katie knew the last thing her family needed was an image of her looking haggard on the day her husband was indicted on federal charges of racketeering, conspiracy, bribery, and extortion. Hence, the concealer. “Thank you, Sully,” Katie said, as her driver opened the door. That’s when she sent the text — but not to her husband. *** “There she is,” Big Jim said when Katie appeared in the doorway of his study. He leaned back and draped his hands across his generous stomach, wearing a satisfied expression on his face as though he had just eaten a great meal. By the looks of the greasy KFC bucket on his desk, he had. Tom, in comparison, looked like he could use some sustenance. Sitting in the chair across from Big Jim, her husband appeared drawn, tired, and even paler than usual. Unlike Katie — unlike her father — his guilt was showing. His features were even more pinched than usual. Tom stood, slowly, unsteadily, as Katie approached. When she opened her arms and hugged him, his relief was palpable. For a half-second, Katie felt sorry for him. “Hi, Dad,” Katie said, locking eyes with Big Jim over Tom’s shoulder. Dad. Not Daddy. Something in the room shifted — almost imperceptibly, instantaneously. The name hung in the air between them. “Thank you for coming,” Tom said, giving Katie a squeeze before releasing her. Katie took a seat — Tom’s seat — so he had to settle for standing beside her, one hand resting awkwardly on her shoulder. The last time they’d been this affectionate was for an interview with 60 Minutes. That had been weeks ago. Months. “I’m here,” Katie said to Big Jim with the same flat affectation she usually reserved for the journalists who had the gall to ask about her father’s affairs. She went on, “So what do we need to talk about that isn’t already on the landing page of every major news outlet in the country?” Big Jim didn’t answer immediately, though he did take a great big inhale, snuffling a wad of his own phlegm. Tom felt queasy when his father-in-law swallowed it. “Katie,” Big Jim spoke at last, “your husband has been offered immunity in exchange for his testimony against me. He wants to take the deal.” Katie tried not to flush — the man she had promised to love and support for all the days of her life had revealed himself to have no backbone. Still, she vowed to support him. “And let me guess,” Katie returned, coolly. “You asked me here to talk him out of it. To persuade him to take the fall for you.” “There’s no fall to take,” Big Jim said. He had the nerve to chuckle. “It’s Tom’s signature on the documents, not mine.” “We all know you approved the documents before he signed them, Dad.” There it was again. Dad. Big Jim’s face turned a shade of red usually associated with a major heart event. “What’s gotten into you today, Katie?” “Maybe whatever got into you that winter you cut off heat to the apartment complex in Southie? You managed to push the old tenants out, you tore it down and built your luxury condo, but an elderly woman froze to death before it was all over.”` Tom covered his mouth in utter shock. Katie had always maintained, like her father, that Big Jim had nothing to do with that. Big Jim checked his phone, either because he couldn’t face Katie as she spoke the truth or because his attention span was stunted and Twitter was calling. “It was an old building. The pipes went out.” He pursed his lips — sad, but not his doing. Katie dug her perfectly manicured fingernails into the armrests of her chair. She would not let her father off the hook so easily. For the next hour, Tom watched, bloodless and stunned, as Katie confronted her father with every dirty business dealing he’d had in the past decade. It all came pouring out: the kickbacks and the bribes, the foreign accounts never filed with the FBI, the slew of mistresses he’d paid off over the years using state tax dollars. On and on she went, arms crossed, her voice low, her gaze steady. Her eyes never left Big Jim’s face. He had an excuse for it all. Every unscrupulous charge. In the end, Katie started to tremble with frustration and rage. Tom had never seen her so emotional, so undone. Baby hairs stuck to her forehead with sweat. “Stop lying!” Katie shouted at her father, doing something then that she hadn’t done since she was a little girl: cry. “Take responsibility, Dad, for once in your life. Take it right now, or you will never see Orla or Declan again — you will never see me again.” Big Jim ran his hands over his face. He left them there, covering his eyes, as he thought a moment. Whatever he came up with, it moved him to open the bottom drawer of his desk. Tom peered over the gleaming mahogany surface, trying to see what it was Big Jim had removed from the bottom drawer. It was one of his father-in-law’s infamous campaign hats. Keep Boston Strong, it read in white lettering across the bright-blue fabric. “Use this to cover your face on your way out,” Big Jim said, tossing the swag at Katie. “There’s probably some vermin hiding with a long lens out there, and you look like shit.” Katie didn’t flinch. “Bye, Dad.” *** In the car on the way back to their house, Tom reached for Katie’s hand. He whispered, “Thank you for choosing me.” Katie looked at Tom’s milky-white hand on top of hers. She started to laugh. She threw back her head and laughed until there were tears streaming down her cheeks. *** Three hours before Katie arrived at her father’s house, Dia had climbed into the back of Katie’s car. Dia looked exactly as Katie remembered her, and Katie wondered what made it possible for a woman she hadn’t seen since senior year of college to appear as though she hadn’t aged at all. No one looked the same after fifteen years — not even Katie, with her every-other-month IPL treatments and forehead smoothed with Fillerina (more natural looking than Botox, Dr. Ruby assured her). Dia said, “Thank you for meeting me.” “I don’t believe I had much of a choice,” Katie said, noting the squad car parked next to her own SUV. Dia had texted her the address of an abandoned warehouse in Quincy, somewhere far from the fray of Beacon Hill, where the paparazzi wouldn’t think to stake out in hopes of a Mahoney sighting. She had told Katie to meet her there at six on the nose or her husband would be taken into custody before the night was over. “Sully,” Katie smiled, when her driver opened the front door and went to climb behind the wheel, “some privacy please.” Sully dipped his head in apology and closed the door, leaving the two women alone. You always have a choice, Dia thought but didn’t say; she needed something from Katie, and she knew antagonizing her wasn’t the way to get it. Instead, Dia said, “We know you’re on your way to see your husband and your father.” Katie laughed — “What, are you tapping my…” — then stopped, as reality set in. Of course they were tapping her phone. “I’m here to offer you a deal.” Dia’s stomach turned as she said the words. She prided herself on being a barracuda, but she was negotiating with a shark. Her only chance at winning was to bite first, to injure and weaken her much more formidable opponent. Katie listened, stone-faced, as Dia laid it all out. She would wear a wire. She would get Big Jim to confess. In return, she would be granted immunity. “Immunity from what?” Katie genuinely wanted to know. “It’s your signature on the checks to Ellen Palmer, whom your father fraudulently reported as the president of Wychmere Selections. You’ve been paying her to keep quiet about the affair she had with your father, which amounts to an illegal campaign contribution. It helped your father win the election by keeping politically damaging stories out of public view.” “I’ve never even heard of Ellen Palmer,” Katie said. “If what you say is true, my signature has been forged. It won’t stand up in court.” Katie’s voice was steady, but as she changed the cross of her legs, Dia heard the back of her thighs unstick from the leather interior. Katie was sweating. “I haven’t even gotten to the most attractive part of the deal,” Dia said, and Katie was quiet again. “The FBI will hold off on pursuing the multiple charges against Tom until you have time to arrange for a divorce and protect your assets,” Dia continued. “Tom is going down, and so is your father, whether you help me or not. And you know as well as I do that there is no real money in the Mahoney name. Your only shot at maintaining your lifestyle — at maintaining your children’s lifestyle — is your husband’s trust, which will be considerably diminished after we move forward with the charges against him. I’m giving you the chance to secure a healthy chunk before Uncle Sam comes for the rest.” Katie stared out the window, recalling the Dia she knew in college while the sun bowed behind the Charles. Katie met Dia crying on the sixth-floor landing of their dorm. She had been scared and profoundly out of place — and Katie had offered her a kind word and a helping hand. Now, Dia was in a position to help Katie, and instead, she wanted to destroy her, destroy her family. To the window, she muttered, “I was nice to you, Dia.” “You were polite to me. The way you’re polite to him.” Dia nodded at Sully, who stood at the edge of the muddy brown river, hands stuffed in his pockets, his body language telegraphing subservience. “That’s not the same as being nice.” Katie turned to Dia, green eyes bright with resolve. “I’ll try my hardest. I will. But my father is paranoid. He may suspect something is up. If I can’t get him to confess, will I still get the deal? Immunity? Time to protect myself before you go after Tom?” Dia knew Big Jim would find a way to weasel out of charges. He always did. The only way to nail him was to get him to let down his guard around his favorite child, with the feds listening. Dia shook her head no. “I have children, Dia,” Katie pleaded. Lots of people do, Dia thought, callously. But in a moment, she recalled the Daily Mail images of Katie carrying Orla out of her school earlier that day. The little girl was sobbing in her mother’s shoulder, terrified. Dia ran a hand over her face with a sigh. “If you can’t get him to confess,” Dia conceded, “but I listen to that tape and it’s clear you tried every trick in the book — and I do mean every trick in the book — then yes, the deal stands. But only if you really try, Katie.” Dia nodded at her, as if to say: I*’m sticking my neck out for you, so you better do the same for me.* Katie frowned at her. “Deal.” *** “Why are you laughing?” Tom asked. Katie wiped her eyes and tried to catch her breath. Sully glanced at the couple in the rear-view mirror. “Because you think I chose my father over you, and that is very, very funny.” Tom’s eyes flashed. “Isn’t that what happened back there, Katie?” Katie spoke to her driver. “Can you please put up the privacy window, Sully?” “Yes, Miss Mahoney,” Sully said, pressing the button. “Thank you,” Katie said, only after Sully could no longer hear or see her. She began to unbutton her shirt. “What are you doing?” Tom cried, horrified. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Katie without her clothes. She’d given up trying to seduce him after Orla was born. Katie shushed him, the way one would shush a child. Tom watched in amazement as his wife removed the wire wrapped around her taut upper torso. She dropped the contraption onto the floor of the SUV, using the heel of her nude Jimmy Choo to grind the micro-recorder to pieces. She said, “Ever since I was a freshman in college, Daddy and I have had our own special signal.” Tom tried not to shudder. Katie was back to talking about Big Jim in that lovesick, little-girl way of hers that had always disturbed him more than he was willing to admit to when the press asked about the creepy-close bond shared by his wife and father-in-law. “If I ever call him Dad, that’s our signal that it isn’t safe for him to speak candidly.” Katie smiled at Tom as Sully made the turn onto their street and everything changed. Sully lowered the privacy divider, taking in Katie’s reaction as she watched the cavalcade of FBI agents entering and exiting the front door to her classic redbrick townhome. Like a small, efficient army, they ferried file folders, lock boxes, and whole drawers from the built-ins that lined Tom’s and Katie’s home offices. Life as they knew it was over. Sully felt a prick of remorse as he imagined how much Declan and Orla would miss their parents, but it was quickly replaced by the memories of his Christmastime bonuses, which for the past fifteen years had taken the form of designer scented candles. He may have preferred Katie to her siblings, but this was a low bar when it came to the entitled members of the Mahoney family. When Dia had approached him before Tom’s indictment, asking for permission to bug the SUV, Sully hadn’t hesitated. He gave the D.A. his full cooperation. Katie was halfway out the door before Sully could put the SUV in park. She shouted at Dia, who stood on the front steps, bathed in police-blue light. “We had a deal!” “And I was all set to honor it until I heard about your signal with Daddy,” Dia replied as an officer approached Katie and told her to put her hands behind her back. Dia watched the steel cuffs enclose Katie’s wrists, her baby-pink nails waving helplessly and the ends of her now-frizzing blowout trembling with indignation. She was going to look like shit in orange. Thank you to instagram user @trishyhimot for the Chanel Longwear detail, and Instagram users @vintageismylife, @sailorgirl_85, @gilly_chilly_ ,@im_ricky_1599, @ah3ahna, @gvenvivare, @mjugar10, @shannonlcaruso, @heather71394, @hannahlovespll, and @ceceliafoglia for suggesting Katie would wear Jimmy Choos. Jessica Knoll is the New York Times best-selling author of Luckiest Girl Alive and The Favorite Sister, which will be released from Simon & Schuster on May 15th. | | | | |
 Illustration by Orlagh Murphy | Disobedience is a film based on the novel by Naomi Alderman, a book I optioned just over three years ago and had the great joy of bringing to the screen with the expert direction of Sebastián Lelio. I play Ronit, a woman who was banished as a girl from her North London Orthodox Jewish community by her father, the rabbi, when he discovers that his daughter and her childhood best friend, Esti (played by Rachel McAdams), are lovers. The film begins some years later in New York City, where the now-very-secular Ronit is enjoying her freedom. She is told of her father’s death and returns to North London for the funeral to find that Esti has married her father’s favorite pupil and heir apparent, Dovid (played by Alessandro Nivola). The film — the first English-language movie directed by Lelio, who is Chilean — takes place over the seven days of mourning that lead to the memorial for her father. In this time, Esti and Ronit time travel back to their adolescence and rekindle their love. Trouble ensues, Dovid and Esti’s marriage is left reeling, and their community is, too. Esti is a gay woman trying to reconcile her deep religious faith with her sexual identity. This is the story of a love that is forbidden by certain societies, a story of being a misfit, and a journey toward self-realization. Lelio’s past two films, Gloria and A Fantastic Woman (which just won the Oscar for best foreign film), place characters who are mostly in the margins of storytelling front and center. In Gloria, he explores the sexual desires and escapades of a 58-year-old female divorcée. In Fantastic Woman, the film follows a trans woman who struggles to be allowed to love the man of her choice. And in Disobedience, two gay women try to find a way to love each other freely. Rachel McAdams was the first actress to read the script, and we were extremely lucky, as she immediately felt she wanted to play Esti and understood her. We had met and worked briefly for a day when I played a role in a Terrence Malick film she was starring in, but we didn’t get to chat in any depth. I was an admirer of her work, her range and subtlety, her terrific honesty and truthfulness, and of course the radiance she emanates on screen. It turned out that we work in a similar way. We both do our preparation privately in advance of shooting, eschewing on-set analysis and debate for just running on our instincts and getting lost in the story between action and cut. Chemistry isn’t a thing you can fabricate — it’s either there or it isn’t. With Rachel, I found an immediate sense of trust, an openness, and a vulnerability. She has great inner strength and conviction and a moral tenacity. I loved collaborating with her and hope we get to do it again. She was very easy to fall in love with, and I think her Esti is a marvel. Here is a chat we had on the phone the other day. —Rachel Weisz Rachel Weisz: When we first spoke, you had such a powerful reaction to the film. It just spoke to you. Sometimes maybe that’s not explainable, why a story hits a person so hard. But when I met you, you were Esti. It wasn’t like you had prosthetics: I mean, your face was scrubbed, and you had what you thought was a bad wig. I thought you looked hot. You just transformed; you changed your DNA. What was it in Esti that you knew who she was? Rachel McAdams: Sometimes something just jumps inside of you when you read a script, and it starts to live in you somewhere. It’s like falling in love — it just happens and you don’t know why exactly, at least initially. And then you start to pick it apart and find something concrete to hang on to and explore. I instantly felt connected to Esti, and my heart bled for her. It was very easy to get wrapped up in this journey she was on, but for all the characters too. I remember you asking me that: Do you connect to Esti? And then I thought: I kind of connected to all the characters, and that’s so rare, that all three characters — yours, mine, and Alessandro’s — were so rich and had this amazing arc. That really struck me. RW: Our characters are like two halves of the same person. My character is the one that left, yours is the one that stayed. It made me think that we’re almost sort of bound together in some ways. I’m always spending time with men in fictions, so for me it was just really unusual and lovely. As a woman, you’re often the object of the man’s desire, or he’s the object of yours, but I felt like there was something just so different about the female gaze. RM: Energetically, it was very different. We had great communication, and there was a very vulnerable, open, gentle, intelligent feeling to everything. We talked about the safety of it as well, doing a love scene. That was a very different love scene than I’ve ever done before, and it was the most kind of raw and vulnerable love-making scene I’ve ever done. And yet at the same time, I felt incredibly safe and cared for and free to explore. RW: I agree. I’d never done a sex scene where I felt like it told a story. It was about your character’s release in that incredible orgasm. It was sex, but it was also freedom. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it just felt like it had so much meaning. It was so emotional and so vulnerable. And there was much less stubble, I’ve got to say. RM: Yeah, you’re right [laughs]. It was such a huge plot point. So often with sex scenes, you’re asking yourself: Is this scene gratuitous, or does it belong here? It never feels like a pivotal plot point that brings the characters to the next phase of their life or helps them to make a huge decision about the path that their life will take. I’ve never come across that before. RW: It was sort of the heart of the story, in a way. RM: Sebastián [Lelio, the director] had his finger on that the whole time. The scene was a real dance to him. He had choreographed it, and we talked about it a lot. RW: He storyboarded it. We can’t claim that we thought up all the spitting and the moisture. He wasn’t interested in seeing breasts and bottoms and nipples — it was about our faces full of emotion and then the mystery outside the frame. RM: It is interesting to be fully clothed and feel that vulnerable. I do think that was an interesting juxtaposition. Alessandro and I did a love scene where we were much more physically stripped down, and yet it was very closed off for our characters. RW: I’ve met people who interpret your love scene with Alessandro in different ways. Some people see you having real pleasure, and some people said to me, “Oh, no, no, she’s just pretending.” It’s such a mysterious performance. RM: I remember Sebastián saying, “Oh, maybe fake an orgasm.” I think he was not going for comedy, but it almost got to be like dark comedy a little bit. I was a little worried about that. I thought: Oh, are we going too far with it? I like that he was pushing those boundaries. We were also exploring the fact that Esti and Dovid do have a good marriage, and she wants to be able to give herself over to him. It would make life a lot easier if she could just let go and be in this relationship that is very good and positive and loving. RW: I genuinely believe Esti’s spirituality — that she really believes in God but she can’t align her Orthodoxy with her sexuality. How did you make me believe that you believe so strongly in God and this religion? RM: I guess it was through research, because I didn’t have a lot of experience with the Orthodox community or Jewish religion to that extent. It was in the learning that I realized how much that was a part of who Esti was. She wasn’t willing to give religion up; that never really even occurred to her. I think it was just in learning about the religion and how much it meant to her — it was her whole life, her community, her marriage. She loved these girls that she teaches. She believed that she could maybe offer them something more, that maybe she had a purpose to teach, and to teach a little bit more openness. But you have to make a choice at some point; you can’t straddle the line. That’s the greatest choice she ever has to make in her life, is between her religion and who she is, which are linked. It was very confusing. As I’m talking about it, I’m still confused. I think everyone can relate to that in a way: The world doesn’t always embrace what you are — you have to try to slot yourself in somewhere. There’s a lot of pain and confusion that comes up in that. RW: It’s just so beautiful the way you explained the identity of her community, of being a teacher, of being a wife, of being a religious Jew in this community. And then there’s her sexuality, which this world won’t allow. The disobedience that she found to leave is the heart of the film. Do you think disobedience can be a good thing in the right place? RM: I think it’s an interesting word, because it’s been labeled with this negativity. I think it’s so imperative to our growth that we ask questions of that label. I love that Esti comes to that conclusion: she almost has to find a loophole in her religion to get her out, to help her to have both, so that she can still believe in her religion, that God gives her the right to be who she is. She comes to the conclusion that free will is just as much a part of her religion as anything else. I just think that’s so profound, that she could somehow hold both at the same time and it didn’t make her wrong. It actually made her very right. This interview has been condensed and edited. Rachel Weisz produces and stars in Disobedience, in theaters starting April 27. Rachel McAdams is an Academy-Award nominated actress and can next be seen in Disobedience. | | | | |  Illustration by Lauren Cierzan | It was on the last morning of a trip that my childhood friends made from Houston to visit me in Washington, D.C., that I was introduced to the competitive-dance reality series Bring It! on Lifetime. The four of us skipped brunch and camped out in my living room, eating guacamole and binge-watching the first season. I’d considered myself a bystander to the drama unfolding on the screen, mindlessly tuning in and just biding my time until my hangover subsided. But by the end of the first episode, I was pulling the hair from my scalp and yelling alongside the over-the-top stage moms, who were always being shady in their confessionals. I found myself moving my couch so I could have enough space to better mimic the girls’ dance moves. I found myself praying for Crystianna to buck her heart out. The show gives a glimpse into the epic wins and rare losses of the Dancing Dolls of Jackson, Mississippi, a young, all-black girl’s dance team named after the Dancing Dolls of Southern University, and follows their intense practices every week and competitive-dance performances each weekend. The Dolls, and all the other teams they’re up against from across the Black American South, are unapologetically styled in the image of the legendary Historically Black Colleges and Universities majorette lines, and the middle and high schoolers who make up the teams seem to know that with each buck or death drop, there’s more than just a trophy but an important legacy on the line. From the first dance battle I saw — when Crystianna, one of the younger girls, pulled her heel up into a standing leg stretch and had the unmitigated gall to look down at her nails, as if to say, How long you got? Because I could do this all day — I was hooked. It was such a joy to be reminded of the pride, self-confidence, and personal empowerment that the mere image of black majorettes had given to young girls like me growing up in the Black South. The Dancing Dolls’ high-energy, tradition-twisting battles had me excited for the future yet stuck on how rich the culture was behind their every eight-count. *** The Third Ward area of Houston, Texas, where my family moved when I was in the sixth grade, serves as an intersection of black life in the city. It has its own rap, its own landmarks, hallowed grounds, and legends, its own projects, its own mansions, its own golf courses, and a heavy influence of the alumni bases from schools like Prairie View, Grambling, Southern, Tennessee State, and Florida A&M, with Texas Southern University sitting right in the middle. In southern-HBCU circles like the one I grew up in, there is a prolific use of the phrase “Half time is game time.” It affirms what everyone has known about HBCU sporting events since integration: the marching band is inarguably the best and most important part of the experience. My friends and I came up hearing TSU’s drumline practice for games from our back porches, and we moved through adolescence at the football classics, where we would go from sitting and watching the games with our parents to roaming around the stadium with our friends. HBCU band culture and fan clubs were pervasive, but for me and many others raised in that environment, the music was merely a palette for the featured artists — the dancers whose eight-counts and sequined outfits gave the whole endeavor life. I can still remember being in elementary school and clamoring up to the guardrail to see PV’s Black Foxes and TSU’s Motion of the Ocean strut down the street at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade. I copied their dance moves from the sidewalk and swung the long, imaginary ponytail that I wasn’t old enough to wear yet. They looked like grown-up versions of me, empowered and unafraid, in control of their bodies and compelled to use them as tools for expression. Fueling the spirit of the event and setting the stage for the immense band behind them, they livened the streets of our shared neighborhood. There were so many things I wanted to be growing up, and a majorette at a black college was absolutely one of them. *** There is something special about the HBCU majorette. She, who has mastered the fine art of pinning a full set of tracks into a performance-ready ponytail. She, who has ballerina moves with the swag of Lackawanna Blues. She, who over generations has perfected the all-important bleacher routine, aka “stands,” aka “grandstands,” and sees them popping up in music videos all over the world. Everything they do — from the way they sit to the way they stand to the way they walk out of a stadium — is sculpted and refined in a way that, to me, reflects a desire to celebrate and portray ourselves highly in a world that rarely does. The sequined headpieces that act as crowns, the cutouts in the leggings that embrace, not hide, large thighs, the capes that add an extra side of drama just because. More than a dance team, they are a force, a movement, a subculture that was shaped, fashioned, and formed by and for black women (though a whole subsect of black gay men has adopted it as well). Previously defined solely by the twirling batons and drum-major-type uniforms, in the hands of black women, majorette has been transformed and expanded to an artistic style of its own, whose routines sing just as loudly as the instruments blaring behind them. The most important evolution in black majorette dancing is the “grandstand,” which was first put into motion in 1970 by Shirley Middleton, a former member of the Prancing Jaycettes (currently called the J-Settes) at Jackson State University who led the charge for majorettes to take more control over the way they presented themselves. They dropped the batons in order to free themselves up for more flavorful routines, which came to be defined by pop-locking arms and deep pelvic thrusts, complex line formations, high kicks and silky athleticism. Grandstands, or “j-setting,” in particular are a series of eight-counts designed to be executed from the confined space of the bleachers while still managing to have as much visual impact as possible. They have names and personalities of their own, can be started in ripple or in sequence, and though they vary from team to team, they always adhere to the same basic, hip-throwing style. On Bring It!, grandstands are saved for the last, magnanimous “stand battle” that ultimately determines the winner at the end of each episode. For those of us who are initiated, we know that rhythmic pattern when we see it and get hype each time we do like we’ve never seen it before. We got hype when Beyoncé first went full HBCU majorette in her choreography for “Single Ladies,” and more recently during her epic Coachella performance this month; my younger sister and I would get hype every time we saw Zoe Saldana and her comrades flash on the screen in Drumline; and I stanned for the Dancing Dolls when Bring It! came on my television screen each week. *** My mom still likes to tell the story of the comical shock on everyone’s face when I announced that I would be trying out for Lionettes — the celebrated majorette dance team for the beloved, predominantly black Jack Yates, aka Third Ward High School. For years, I had been fondly thought of as stiff — one of those “tragic cases” of a black girl with no rhythm, too quiet or shy to want to perform during half time at a Friday-night football game; or people thought that I wasn’t “the kind of girl” who would be interested in leotards and sequined shorts. And even though I was many of those things, I was also so much more than they or even I could imagine — so complex, so textured, so layered — and majoretting was one of the many ways I found to express that. Every time I saw one of the Dolls pop, thrust, and spin into a pique, I was seeing a style of dance that had been perfected by generations of southern, black, HBCU-bred women, being glorified on national television. I was thrilled to be seeing the young girls continue something with such a rich history of black female empowerment, and it made me grateful for the little systems of affirmation that black women have put in place for one another and sustained from one generation to the next. Beneath my fandom was the hope that they would gain from it as much as me and Beyoncé did. Jada F. Smith is a writer in Houston, Texas. Read more of her work at CasualTuesdays.com. | | | | |  Illustration by Christina Chung | Before I got sick, I probably would have said I had a lot of trust in medicine. Not that I’d given it much thought; as a healthy twentysomething, I’d at that point had little need to. But I believed in science, and I viewed medicine as an extension of science. Sure, I knew that women had been almost entirely excluded from the medical profession until the mid-’70s. And I knew that the medical men of centuries past had some absurdly sexist theories — like that getting a higher education would cause women’s uteri to atrophy or that women’s smaller brains put them lower on the evolutionary ladder. As a longtime feminist writer, I certainly knew, intellectually, that scientific “objectivity” is a myth; that researchers, like all of us, cannot help but bring their biases to their work; that it affects the questions they ask, and the questions they don’t ask. Still, I had enough faith in science — in its ability to be a force for progress and truth — that it seemed like a few decades was probably long enough to overturn the sexist legacies of a historically male-dominated medical system. Above all, I just hadn’t worried too much about it — that is, until several years ago, when my immune system started attacking my joints. I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and became one of the estimated 50 million Americans, three-quarters of whom are women, with an autoimmune disease. As I learned more about autoimmune diseases, I discovered just how lucky I’d been to get diagnosed within several months. According to a survey by the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association, patients with autoimmune diseases see an average of four doctors over four years before they are accurately diagnosed, and nearly half report being labeled “chronic complainers” overly concerned with their health during that search. As I started asking among my social networks if other women had had similar experiences, it turned out it wasn’t just women with autoimmune diseases who had struggled to get health-care providers to take their symptoms seriously: There was a friend whose abdominal pain and incontinence from a ureaplasma infection was diagnosed as “stress.” There was another friend experiencing dizziness, wooziness, ringing in her ears, and floaters in her eyes from West Nile virus who was referred to a therapist for depression. Another who’d been told her stabbing chest pain from pericarditis, inflammation of the lining of the heart, was likely just anxiety. The list went on. After spending the past few years writing a book about gender bias in medicine — and hearing from nearly 200 women with similar tales of having their symptoms dismissed, belittled, or disbelieved entirely — I’ve realized that doctors just aren’t equipped with the knowledge they need to be able to provide care for their women patients as well as they can for their male patients. For decades, women were largely left out of clinical research, a problem that wasn’t even on the radar until the early ’90s. Even today, analyzing research results by gender to determine if there are any differences between men and women still isn’t the norm, even though we increasingly know there often are differences — in everything from drug metabolism to the symptoms of a heart attack. Preclinical research on animals and cell lines still skews to male subjects. Many conditions that disproportionately affect women — including endometriosis, fibromyalgia, vulvodynia, interstitial cystitis, and chronic fatigue syndrome — are still very poorly understood, yet receive minuscule amounts of research funding. And since medical education evolves at a snail’s pace, much of the new knowledge about women’s health that has emerged over the past few decades still hasn’t made its way into clinical practice. When I first started hearing stories from women whose ailments were brushed off as anxiety, depression, or “stress,” I assumed this was just yet another realm where women’s voices were not granted the same authority as men’s voices are. But the distrust of women’s reports of their symptoms has even deeper roots. While we tend to think of “hysteria” as a quaint relic of the nineteenth century, in fact, while the terms may have changed, the concept of hysteria never really disappeared. The idea that any physical symptoms that medicine can’t explain by a well-understood physical disease can be attributed to the patient’s “unconscious mind” — and the belief that it is women especially who have such psychogenic symptoms — has proved to be a very persistent one. Encountering this kind of medical gaslighting when you have a degree of privilege, like I do, can feel a bit like walking through the looking glass and finding yourself in 1950. As one woman, the filmmaker Jen Brea, told me, “It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever doubted my account of the world.” When she’d suddenly begun experiencing disabling dizziness and neurological symptoms after a severe fever, doctors insisted she was just stressed or dehydrated and, eventually, that she had “conversion disorder” from a repressed trauma. In the real world, she was an accomplished Harvard PhD candidate; in this medical realm, where there seemed to be stereotypes at play that she sensed but didn’t fully understand, she felt like she needed to bring her fiancé to appointments to “vouch” for her credibility. Even more disturbing: that did seem to help. It’s hard to overstate how disorienting it can be to be told that “nothing is wrong” when your body is telling you that something most definitely is. As feminist scholar Susan Wendell has written, “What can I know if I can’t know what I am feeling in my own body? How can I remain connected to a world that denies I am in pain, or dizzy, or nauseated, when I myself cannot deny that I am?” To reconcile this dissonance, even highly educated, “empowered” patients may doubt themselves rather than the expert; the authority conferred by that white coat still holds a powerful sway in our culture. But more and more, I think, we are trusting ourselves instead — and some enlightened doctors are willing to admit their limits. That means that, as Dr. Sandra Gelbard wrote in a recent Lenny Letter piece, instead of dismissing symptoms they can’t readily explain, doctors need to learn to embrace the words I don’t know. The consequences of not doing so, she points out, can be devastating for patients, as well as breed “mistrust that can be hard to come back from.” Winning back women’s faith in medicine will require that all doctors start believing us when we say we’re sick. Trust is a two-way street. Maya Dusenbery is the editorial director of Feministing.com and author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, which was published in March by HarperOne. | | | | |  Illustration by Ran Zheng | Claudia Schreier walks into a rehearsal studio at Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet. She carries a notebook in which she has written the ballet that has possessed her for months. In it are sketches of the floor patterns for her dancers, the shapes she wants them to make with their elastic limbs, the crescendo and rhythm of the music as she imagined it through her dancers’ bodies. She shows me her choreography notebook before her rehearsals start one January morning, but I can’t decipher what she’s written down. It’s her own language, one she is able to transpose onto the young dancers who are, at that moment, stretching along the studio’s perimeter. Her dancers are primarily Studio Company members at Joffrey Ballet, one of the best companies in the country; many of them have moved here from all over the world. Claudia herself was never a dancer here but landed in this room through a more circuitous route, after winning a coveted spot in the 2018 Joffrey’s Winning Works Competition. At age 31, Claudia would be nearing the end of her career as a professional ballet dancer. As a choreographer, she’s just getting started. *** Claudia grew up in a mixed-race family in Westchester, the daughter of a Jamaican mother and white father, and soon noticed that no one around her, including in her ballet classes, looked like her. “My community was predominantly white, upper middle class, and liberal, which made for a comfortable but sheltered childhood,” she recalls. “I consider myself lucky not to have felt that I was treated differently in ballet class due to my skin color, but it wasn’t until years later that I understood how much my upbringing influenced my perception of what ballet was and who it was for.” In the past few years, Claudia has become a full-time freelance choreographer, notably as a woman of color in an art form that has had a diversity problem since its beginnings.  Claudia Schreier at the Hartt School Dance Division. Photo by Erica Wolf. |
Dance is one of the most ephemeral art forms, leaving no trace behind, and the part of dance that lasts — choreography — has been historically dominated in ballet by white men (George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Vaslav Nijinsky are perhaps the most famous among them). A few women of color, like Misty Copeland of American Ballet Theatre and Michaela DePrince of the Dutch National Ballet, have made headlines for changing the face of classical ballet onstage, but Claudia stands out in the industry for being one of very few women of color who identify specifically as ballet choreographers. “Staking a claim in an art form historically associated with exclusion is critical to broadening the definition of what ballet can and should be,” she wrote in an email. In her Joffrey rehearsal, Claudia is choreographing a new ballet called “Night Vision,” a nearly twelve-minute piece set to a concerto by Richard Danielpour. The dancers speak several languages as they work out the ballet’s kinks together, but they all count in English once the music starts, snapping their fingers to the irregular rhythm. Claudia works through each sequence with them several times, explaining what she’s after and trying different steps on their bodies until she’s satisfied — until her dancers move with ease through the staccato sequences. I ask Los Angeles Ballet soloist Liz Walker, who has worked with Claudia in the past, to describe her choreographic style. She explains that it’s a mix of “balletic vocabulary with the sweeping movement through space … more commonly found in modern dance.” In “Night Vision,” for example, much of the dancing is contemporary, with more modern gestures like turned-in legs and flexed hands, but the women dance en pointe, partnered by male dancers. “I actually really love making ballets that can be performed on both pointe and in flat shoes,” Claudia tells me later. She doesn’t require female dancers to wear pointe shoes “because there is just so much more freedom in movement.” In other words, she often plays with equalizing dancers by having them all dance on flat, another nod toward a more contemporary dance vocabulary, an update to the traditional and often limiting ways women are partnered by men. *** When Claudia was a young dancer, she had no idea that ballet could look like anything other than thin pale women in tutus. “I had a very twisted view of what beauty was because I didn’t see anyone who looked like me in my world,” she says. Like so many ballet dancers, Claudia saw only one road to dance success — a road paved with satin pointe shoes and hyper-turned-out legs — which would require her to work her way up from the corps de ballets. She could already foresee all the disappointment of forcing her body into the very specific mold of classical ballet, forcing her joints and ligaments into positions that would end up causing her serious injuries. “By age eighteen,” she says, “all I knew was that I was confident I didn’t want to pursue a professional career in ballet, but that I still wasn’t ready to let go.” Claudia chose to attend Harvard, where she majored in sociology but could study with the Harvard Dance Program, as both a dancer and scholar. Here, she was able to develop a new vocabulary for her body, for the history and culture of dance in America, and for what was possible through diverse and pioneering choreography and representation. “Suddenly, there was [Paul] Taylor,” she recalls. “There was [Martha] Graham, there was [José] Limón, there were all of these names that I hadn’t had clear exposure to.” .jpg) Wendy Whelan in Claudia's "The Trilling Wire." Photo by Travis Magee. |
One of her most influential Harvard professors was Heather Watts, the last ballerina George Balanchine selected before his death, who is married to former New York City Ballet (NYCB) principal dancer and newly appointed Juilliard president Damian Woetzel. “Heather and Damian are actively changing the face of dance in America,” she wrote in an email. “They illuminate the past with first-hand accounts of their experiences with Balanchine, Robbins, and the other greats, and fortify the future of dance by fostering collaboration, curiosity, and creativity at every level.” Claudia now considers both Woetzel and Watts her mentors. Because Claudia didn’t follow what she calls a “traditional company structure: choreographers who get their start through creating works on the companies for which they dance,” she had the freedom to realize that choreography, not dancing, was her future. “If you’re one of a hundred women trying to make it through the company ranks, you’re not going to be spending all your time wondering, How can I be making art?, because your focus is performing,” she tells me. Choreography became an outlet for Claudia during her time at Harvard. “It was a thing I did when I didn’t want to work on my papers, or when I had a piece of music in mind that I was dying to work on with my friends,” she recalls. “But I never felt pressure — I did this because I wanted to.” After graduating in 2008, Claudia took a job in the marketing department at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Claudia describes her seven years at Ailey as “a lot of time management,” waking up early to choreograph before going to work and working with dancers late at night. Then, Woetzel commissioned her to premiere a work for Vail Dance Festival — an opportunity she identifies as pivotal in her career. The following year, another call significantly shifted the course of Claudia’s life: she was awarded the Virginia B. Toulmin Fellowship for Women Choreographers at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University. After that, she decided to leave her position at Ailey and focus full-time on her choreography. “My entire life changed in one minute,” she says of the acceptance call she received from the center. “It was surreal.” Shortly thereafter, she was accepted at the New York Choreographic Institute at NYCB, where she collaborated on a ballet with Juilliard composer Will Stackpole. In the past few years, Claudia’s work has been performed at Joffrey Winning Works and Barnard Department of Dance, with upcoming commissions for Ballet Hispánico (a Vail co-commission, her third for the festival) and Dance Theatre of Harlem. In 2015, she began her own company, Claudia Schreier & Company, and two years later she was invited to present a full evening of her choreography at the Joyce Theater in New York City. She continues to work with Woetzel as his rehearsal associate when she isn’t choreographing herself. ***  A scene from "Night Vision." Photo by Cheryl Mann |
In the final minutes of the “Night Vision” rehearsal, Claudia stands at the front of the room while the male dancers drag their partners offstage. “You have time,” she tells them, to keep them from rushing through the steps. The women lay their heads against the male dancers’ chests and lean into them. Claudia makes notes in her notebook, perhaps what she wants to keep working on or how the ballet has changed to accommodate the dancers’ different strengths. Her choreography reflects the ways the greater cultural movement has asked the dance community to consider what it means to use the body as an artistic tool. “The way we think about the use of the body professionally is changing because of the conversations we’re having culturally, socially, politically. In the dance world in particular, there is increasing focus on how teachers and choreographers interact with students and dancers,” she explains. Walker tells me that Claudia “doesn’t take on the stereotypical choreographer’s ego, which often can result from a choreographer’s effort to grasp control of the working environment.” She adapts to each group of dancers and each new job. Before she left the Joffrey studio, she thanked each dancer, standing at the front as they all came up to her individually to bow and curtsy. Claudia bowed back to each one, thanking them for being her instruments for the day. As she continues her choreographic work, Claudia will have to keep inventing both where she’s heading and what will bring her there. She thinks one day she’d like to take on more of a leadership role in the arts. But her ultimate goal, she says, is “transforming spaces by still being kind.” Ellen O’Connell Whittet is a writer living in California and is working on a memoir about ballet and women’s bodies. | | | | | | | | |
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