Dancing in the Light Read Online Free PDF

closet for costumes and props, and carrying on long detailed conversations with her scene partners about what was expected of them the next day.
    Word began to filter back to me about her talent. But more than that, people loved having her as friend. Of course, most or the new friends she made were struggling, using ingenious methods to make ends meet, and learning to adjust to the emotional cruelty of the oppressive competition of show business. It made no difference to Sachi. She knew she was in the right business and she would make it one day.
    There was also a profound aspect of therapy in relation to what Sachi derived from acting. During all her years in Japan and England, she had suffered from the cultural requirement to repress her feelings. She was an American, not a Japanese or an English person. The double standard had begun to weigh heavily on her heart. She needed to express her feelings, her latent fears, angers, and confusions. She needed to mirror herself somehow, pulling out her emotions so she could confront them. She found acting to be a perfect forum, and because she was once removed from feeling “real,” she allowed herself free rein in searching out who she was.
    She soon became a participant in the positive aspects of California culture. She went for long walks in the Calabasas mountains, waded in the ocean, learned all the backstreet shortcuts in the Valley, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica areas, and haunted the health food stores.
    She was repulsed (thank goodness) by the cocaine toots and never drank more than a Kir (white wine and cassis) before dinner or her vermouth when she cooked. She met a young man who was also a fellow actor, whose family lived in Santa Barbara, so she treated herself to time away from her classes for walks along the trails and mountains, and she camped out under the stars with him.
    At first I was concerned about the drug scene I knew she was bound to encounter in Hollywood. Sending her to school in Japan in the first place hadbeen one way of avoiding that problem, particularly when I was on location most of the time anyway. Her father and I had discussed that early on. As soon as she was of school age, we had agreed that being educated away from Hollywood would afford her the opportunity to have a multicultural support system, avoiding what could potentially have been a tragedy for the child of a movie star. Who knows whether we made the right decision. I’m sure there were other confusions that plagued her as a result of being separated from me so much as a child, and I knew she had been through lonely hours as she searched for herself. But we often talked about that search being one you had to make on your own, and as I gazed at her in front of me now, bubbling with wondrous fun, I was comfortable in the certainty that she was a happy person, full of optimism, and that our relationship had survived the confused stickiness that plagued so many mothers and daughters.
    Sachi and Dennis and Sandy and I celebrated for an hour. We talked of how important it was to celebrate oneself. We talked of how we could each make whatever we desired happen in our lives if we believed it enough. If we couldn’t celebrate ourselves, how could we celebrate someone else? If we didn’t love ourselves, how could we really love anyone else? If we felt good about ourselves, we’d feel good about others. It had taken me fifty years to reach that state of mind, and I wasn’t about to change it even if such an attitude seemed self-aggrandizing. It was real to me. It was working for me. I also felt, and still do, that as long as I keep a positive attitude, it’s only the unlimited beginning.

Chapter 2
    I dressed in a warm knit suit, said good-bye to Sachi and Dennis and Sandy for a few hours, and went over to Bantam.
    The first person I saw as I walked into the offices was Betty Ballantine, my editor on Limb. I call her G.A. because she was my guardian angel as she shepherded me through weeks