Miss you, Mr. Peter.

On Saturday, I went to a local dance performance with two of my sisters-in-law. I love watching dance, and Credo’s Christian-based dance academy had a great show. The highlight for me, though, was taking Evie.

We filed into our high school theatre row, avoided gum on the armrest and under the seat, and settled in with great expectation. I watched Evie’s face as the house lights blacked out and the music and stage lights came on. It was every bit as magical as I hoped it would be for her. Sure, we ended up standing in the back by the end because a two-year-old can’t sit still for THAT long, but she loved it. She’s still talking about it.

As I watched the show, though, I couldn’t help but think of Mr. Peter, artistic director of Duluth School of Ballet and my ballet teacher of 12 years. He would have rolled his eyes at the mere word “recital” and yelled because there were long pauses between dances. He was all theatre and insisted that even a dance school could perform a “show” with a storyline, characters, and costumes.

And he was a very important person in my life.

He taught me discipline without demanding perfection. He taught me to love the music and the theatrics, not just the perfect steps. It never mattered to him that the majority of his students would never dance professionally. Instead, he let me run away to the circus and be a Nereid princess. I got to dance as Alice and the Dew Drop Fairy, and I was his daughter three times in his favorite show, The Twelve Dancing Princesses. (Did he ever call me Katy? Or was it always Katya?) He gave me a tutu and a tiara. He knew my mood based on how I said “hello” back (or didn’t) to his personal and over-the-top “HiYa!” (How did he manage so many emotional teenage girls?) I feel like I spent half my childhood at that dance studio and loved dance camps and movie nights and long rehearsal Saturdays. He hired women to teach for him that I grew to admire as people and not just teachers. I forged friendships I still cherish today because he insisted that we compete with ourselves and not each other. (It didn’t always work that way, but I knew his heart.)

It’s hard to believe that he’s been gone for 3 years and that it’s been over a decade since I danced at Duluth School of Ballet. I always expected DSB to be a forever part of my life, and it is in memory and lessons learned.

But DSB wasn’t just an old, converted post-office. To me, it was Mr. Peter. 

Wish Evie could have met him. He would have loved her.