God, I Hope I Get It

I think of myself as one of the most risk-adverse people I know. I never took time off to backpack around the world. I never experimented with drugs. I've never even had a variable rate mortgage. Instead, I went to school, I went to work, I paid my bills.

But now I'm reconsidering that view of myself. This week I watched "Every Little Step," a documentary about the recent revival of "A Chorus Line" set against an exploration of the original production.

I saw the revival in New York a few years ago. But I also saw the original production at the Schubert when I was in high school. When "A Chorus Line" first came to prominence I was already deeply and truly bitten by the dance bug. I spent nearly every day after school taking class at American Ballet Theatre. Perfecting a triple pirouette was all I could think about, when I should have been worrying about my SATs. When I went to see "A Chorus Line" with my friends from high school, I most likely had my dance bag on my shoulder and pink tights on under my jeans.

After the show finished, when everyone had that flushed, amazed look from having briefly entered another world, I had a "see what I mean?" reaction. I already felt like I lived in that world.

But I didn't. I was a student at Stuyvesant, New York's famous "public prep" school, and was hoping to go to a "serious" college. I was tongue-tied and insecure about my looks and my body and was never going to be a professional dancer.

So what made me go uptown after school every day and take my place at the barre, wearing just the thinnest layers of nylon and exposing all of my physical faults to a room of not exactly sympathetic eyes?

I don't know.

As I watched the movie this week I started thinking about all of the other risky things I've done --

-- leaving my family in New York to go to college in California, knowing I would never go back to New York
-- leaving my first job in Silicon Valley to go to law school with less than $1,000 in savings
-- deciding there was no reason I shouldn't become a partner in a major law firm and work on intellectual property matters during the internet boom, when I had two children under age ten
-- resigning from that same law firm ten years later to write a book
-- taking on an entirely new area of law when the book was done, during the worst recession the country has seen in my lifetime

Maybe I'm a contrarian. Maybe I don't like being told I can't do something that intrigues me. Maybe I don't like being defined by one phrase or word -- "the smart girl," "the mother," "the lawyer."

Maybe I'm a lot more attracted to risk than I ever imagined. Maybe I just define risk in a different way than most people.