I took my very first ballet class when I was 8 years old, at the YMCA in San Diego, California. I immediately loved it more than anything else I had ever done. I still remember those classes and how tiny I was and how complex, but wonderful, the steps seemed.
Unfortunately, after only a few months of classes, my family moved away from San Diego and to a small town in New Hampshire… where there were no dance classes. I waited for four years before a ballet teacher showed up to town. My mother saw in the newspaper that this former ballerina was opening a ballet school in the next town over, and advertised that there would be scholarship auditions for new students she hoped to attract. I was so excited for this opportunity. I did not have proper leotards, we could not afford them, but my mother brought me to the audition and the teacher gave me a full scholarship.
Only four girls showed up to the audition, so she gave us all scholarships. My scholarship continued for the next four years, presumably because my teacher noticed we did not have much money, and probably could not afford the classes otherwise (we could not have). She never said anything, just never charged us. Thus I began my dance training at 12 years old. Ballet class was considered “not cool” to do back then, by my middle school’s social standards, but I was passionate about it and hoped someday to become a professional.
My dance teacher was Miss Lyn (Campbell). Even married women are addressed as “Miss” in ballet, as she was married to Ray Campbell and he is the one who financed her dance studio. She had the studio for four years, but then lost the studio space when it was bought out by some local newspaper company, that also wanted a nice big space… It was a perfect ballet studio with bouncy wooden floors, high ceilings and big windows on one side to let the sunlight in. There was no other comparable space available for rent, and so she had to close down her school.
Here is a newspaper clipping from a June 1978 performance. Miss Lyn would produce and choreograph a full performance once a year. This shows the older, more advanced students on the left, who performed a Tarantella dance on pointe. I am over with the younger dancers in the right panel, I was not dancing on pointe yet.
So, I was 16 when her studio had to close down. I also had some health problems around then, I had a pretty serious bout with childhood cancer, and was just recovering when she lost her school. It would be two more years before I would take any dance classes again. (As an aside, Miss Lyn came to visit me a few times when I was in the hospital. Most people were pretty sure I was going to die, as childhood cancer was usually a death sentence in the 1970s. It was only very special people who weren’t afraid of that and would come visit me anyway, Miss Lyn was one of them.) I got very sick, but I did eventually recover, it took several months.
I did not dance again until I moved to Vista, California (in North San Diego County) when I was 17, convincing my best friend to move there with me. I was 18 when I finally found some affordable dance classes…
The first place I found to dance was the local community college, Palomar College, which I paid for with Pell grants and student loans. Community colleges were very affordable back then, it was the early 1980s, and they really made education accessible to anyone. So I could take full classes there even though I had no money. I was able to take a large number of dance classes, and was highly focused on improving as I was getting old (in ballet, where 21 is “over the hill” already, and I was fast approaching the end of my teens).
One day while on the bus going to Palomar College for dance class, a young man, my age, asked if he could take pictures of me. I told him I was a dancer and he could take some dance pictures of me over at the college. That is how I got these photos. I remember being 19 at the time.
There was suddenly a bounty of classes for me when another former ballerina opened a ballet school just a few doors down from where I was living at the time. Her name was Margarete Neumann. Those classes I asked my father to pay for, and he did. I danced there for two years, and between the performances she would produce and choreograph and the Palomar College performances — I got to dance in lot of performances. Here is a newspaper photo of me and two of my classmates waiting for our turn to dance at a big outdoor festival in Escondido, California. I don’t have a date for the photo but it was probably around 1983. That’s me on the right.
I was always pursuing more and better dance training, and I went down to San Diego to audition for a summer scholarship at San Diego’s top private dance school, Stage 7. And I won a full scholarship. This would let me take 3 or 4 dance classes every day, at no cost, and with a performance at the end of the summer. That first summer I lived on my sister’s couch while taking classes there. For the next summer I moved to San Diego so that I could dance year round at Stage 7. Which I did for another 2 or 3 years.
During this time, I was exceedingly poor. I worked to have money for basic survival and for dance classes (I only had a full scholarship during the summers, not year round). Dance was my driving motivation and when I danced full time, it was not possible to earn money. So, I often did not have food, or much food and was hungry a lot. I owned very little, I did not have a car, though I had gotten a moped, which helped a lot. I did not own a camera, and barely could afford new toe shoes, I could not afford to do anything that cost money. Most of my friends were also poor, as I met them at my minimum wage jobs, and they were all just scraping by too. I was completely obsessed with dancing and would just do whatever I could so that I could dance. No cameras means no photos. I never got any more dance photos, despite becoming a much better dancer in my time in San Diego. I only have the photos I do have because a stranger on the bus asked to take my picture when I was 19.
I did not care about photos back then, I just wanted to dance. I just wish I had some now.
I left Stage 7 when I injured my toe, from dancing, and had to have the toenail removed. It just hurt to dance on pointe anymore, and besides, I was in my early 20s, and thus “over the hill” for ballet, and it was just as well that my toe forced me to change dance styles. I switched over to modern dance (though Stage 7 offered great Jazz dance classes, Bob Fosse style, and that was incredibly fun to dance and perform — there just were not enough Jazz classes around to make a career of it).
So I went to a scholarship audition at the only modern dance studio in town, 3’s Company & Dancers, founded by Jean Isaacs in 1973, now defunct. It was another summer-only scholarship, but I got a full one, and I started dancing there, and performing in their end-of-summer performances. Then during the rest of the year, I would have to come up with money for classes, which was a problem. They would have great guest dancers come in to teach during the summers. One summer it was Bill T. Jones from NYC, and he was so kind.
In order to dance year round, I found that one of the local universities had an exceptional modern dance program. This was at San Diego State University (SDSU), and so I applied there. I once again got Pell grants and student loans, and that paid for the cost for classes, and then I could dance regularly again. My modern dance professor, Melissa Nunn, had a really great choreographic style, and it was there that I really got into modern dance and enjoyed it. Melissa was also very kind, and in fact, it was my dance teachers, from Miss Lyn to Melissa Nunn who really gave me so much in life, by being my dance teachers.
I danced at SDSU for a couple of years and it went very well, and they were just starting a dance company and I would be in it, but then I took a physics class there, and my destiny changed. I ended up transferring to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and majored in physics. I had won a full scholarship that covered housing and food as well as tuition and I would for the first time in my adult (and teen) life be financially secure and have safe, consistent housing, and a secure supply of food. So, I obviously went there.
I tried to continue to take dance classes at UCSB, but with a full load of physics courses, I just could not excel at both at once. I got too tired for the dance classes on top of studying and struggled to even attend on some days, and so I stopped dancing completely after my first year at UCSB. I was 26 years old.
Copyright © 2025 by Melinda Jane Kellogg