The Dancer, Karl Schappell, Is Alive & Well and Dancing in Philedelphia

Looking through a shoebox of my old photos I finally took from the closet of my parents' house, I found a surprising number of people I remembered not at all. Most of the photographs in the shoebox were pictures of family, or of friends. With some of the latter I may either have stayed in somewhat imperfect touch, even in this day of "social networking" and the Internet, or sadly lost sight of altogether, but I knew them. It might have taken me a few minutes to put the name to a face, but with most I eventually remembered at least that much. Not always though. There were strangers in the shoebox. Not just the people passing through a picture I took or a picture that was taken of me, you understand, but people I obviously knew then, and fairly well it would seem, from the innocent intimacy of the captured embrace or the shared laugh, but of whom I now have no memory at all. Often the setting was perfectly familiar: school, or camp, or backstage at a show I was in, or there were other people in the picture I knew and might still know, but then there were these... other people. Sometimes they would recur, and not always in the same series of pictures or the same location, some of them popping up with a disconcerting regularity; first at a birthday party, then more mysteriously in what was my own back yard, or on my arm at a fair or a dance, or even in my lap! That sort of thing can happen out in the world, I know, but not so far back in the day as these pictures. There simply weren't that many people around in those days, when I was a teenager, in a small town, with whom I might have had snapshots taken and then forgotten entirely. Who was the girl with whom I seem to have laughed so hard that we tipped over a sofa? Why are she and I leaning so comfortably together against the cold on a street in Pittsburgh, obviously years later, in front of some library, and why were we there? Who was the boy I was draped over at that unfamiliar desk? Why are he and I sitting in a car I remember, though I can't place him at all? I'm middle-aged now, but can it really have been so long as that? That I shouldn't know either of these people at all? Well, the fact is, I don't.

I have a whole wedding, for instance, in which I recognize neither bride nor groom, nor another soul in the church. Who the hell were these people and what on earth was I doing there? Asked my parents about these, before I left, and neither of them knew anybody at the wedding either. Was the bride a teacher of mine? In junior high school? That's possible.

Who, for instance, is that redheaded boy at the left in this photograph from the last day at the summer program I attended at Bucknell University? No idea.
Now I've got the shoebox home, I've sorted the pictures a bit; putting all the pictures of particular friends together, so that the pictures might be scanned and sent to or posted for the people in them. I've spent the better part of the day doing just that. Great fun, my last laggard day of vacation.

There were of course pictures of people who've already died, and that's been a rather melancholy aspect of reviewing these snapshots of so many happy, beautiful, young faces. None of the pictures were taken any later than high school. I'm not unaccustomed now to looking at faces I'll never see again, but seeing some of these that I did not know but as children, somehow makes their absence from life specially unreal.

There is one face I'll never forget, though I must admit, I really had no idea if he was living or dead until today. Happily, it seems he's still very much alive. In a box I shipped to myself just before I flew back home to Seattle, I have a little bundle of letters from him, seemingly all in answer to letters I'd sent him, the whole correspondence having lasted just a year or two after we last saw each other. His name is Karl Schappell. He's that beautiful tall boy in the pink shirt in the photo above, with the utterly unknown redhead leaning on his shoulder and my hand around his waist. (I'm the dapper, hairy little chap in the middle of the picture.)

Karl was, and is a dancer. As I've just learned from the Internet, after we lost touch he studied at Temple University, toured and danced all over Europe, lived in Ireland and Holland, and eventually returned to Philadelphia, where he still dances, teaches, and now has his own dance-company, called "Pluck." Just this past June, he appeared as a featured artist at "The New Festival," in Philadelphia, where he showed a piece called "Fall Down, Get Up. Breathe Loud. Karl Schappell’s Guide to Modern Dance."

I knew him when.

We met at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, that summer program then hosted at Bucknell University. That's where we were when we were photographed in that picture above. PGSA was a wonderful experience, for the most part. I was a theater student, and appeared in a scene from "Of Mice and Men" that was selected for our final performance for, I think, the then Governor's wife and other dignitaries. I performed with a boy who's name I forget. He intended to be a professional ventriloquist, by the way, and may well have become one, for all I know. (That should give you some idea the caliber of the acting involved, in case that seemed like I was bragging just now.) I got us in trouble by insisting, for authenticity's sake, that we both wear hats in that scene. Evidently, no one could see our faces for most of it.

One of the best parts of being at that summer program for me was falling in love. I did quite a bit of that, that summer. There was a rather luscious blond boy named Philip who turned out, unhappily, to like my friend Ellen quite a bit better than me. Couldn't blame him, or her. Then there was the slightly older and terribly sophisticated interpreter for the deaf who was working there that summer. I had a terrific crush on him. Later, when my husband and I moved to San Francisco, he became my first friend there. Still an interpreter, still smashingly attractive, by the way. When I discovered that his interests lay elsewhere, I remember sitting on the stairs outside his room, inconsolably holding a shoe I'd stolen from him after a bit of rough-housing on the quad, while he and his beautiful young dancer said their goodbyes behind the closed door.

Guess who that was?

Wait, it gets far more tragic. (I dreamed then of a life on the stage, remember, and I was all of seventeen, so I suppose it had to, didn't it?) I was, you see, also more than a little in love with Karl Schappell myself. Such tsuris. You can imagine. There they are, on their last day together, with me intruding with a camera. Not the best excuse, but then, as I said, I was rather in love with both of them, wasn't I?

And who wouldn't have fallen in love with Karl Schappell, and with the interpreter, and with both of them? So lovely.

It was more complicated than that, I like to think. I certainly thought so at the time. Karl was beautiful, truly beautiful. He had a touching disbelief in his own physical attractions then, and an utterly unselfconscious grace, as most dancers at that age do. Nothing sexier than a man who doesn't quite know it yet. He knew something even then of that physical power of attention that only dancers have. I remember studying his walk. Dancers are notoriously awkward on plain pavement; their training turns their feet out and tucks their asses in in a strange way for just walking. Karl, though he had something of this dancers' waddle, and that rather rigid posture, never moved, even if just from one side of the room to the other, without extending those magnificent long legs of his and looking as if about to leap. Most of the dancers I've known, and I've known a few, are rather languid and lazy when they're not actually dancing or in a rehearsal hall. Perhaps it was just symptomatic of our self-consciousness as teenagers -- I certainly moved through the world then as if being noticed even when I wasn't -- but Karl never seemed to get up but rather rise, never simply moved but flew, never seemed to stop anywhere so much as land.

I only wish I had a photograph of Karl as he was then, actually in flight. The nearest I can come to that is this rather silly shot of him in the hallway, being melodramatically silly for me. Still, one can see, I should think, something of the whole, long length of the boy, and the potential in all that bright young flesh, even in this.

I haven't known where Karl was or what he was doing for years and years now. I assumed he continued to dance, but I didn't know. Many, if not most of the male dancers I've known are dead. Horrifying thought, but ours was a generation just shy of knowledge, and we suffered for it. Incalculable losses.

I have tried finding him, "on the computer," as my mother would say, but finding these snapshots inspired me to look more seriously. Here he is now, by the way, still dancing, still beautiful, though in a very different, though no less impossibly sexy way, I think.

I wish I'd found a way to get in touch, but so far I haven't.

I've been going on about what a beautiful boy he was, but I really think I haven't quite said what I mean by that. He was lovely, of course, but there was more to it, for me, than that. Karl was, and may well still be, I'm sure of it in fact, one of those unique individuals who manage somehow to embody some sort of ideal. For me, Karl is the dancer. It isn't just that he danced or that he dances. When I knew him, however briefly, all those years ago, he was my perfect opposite in many ways: graceful where I was hopelessly clumsy, quite confident, in a young way, in his future, as I am never likely to be, and entirely present, within himself and in the company of others, which I know sounds terribly vague, but is as close as I can come to explaining just how exhilarating and captivating it was to be near him that summer, and that is something I've had to struggle to find, something I've had to cultivate and practice and fail to do all my life. What I mean is exactly unlike ego. Perhaps it's nearer to say innocence. He was hardly a bashful virgin, even then, I'm sure -- who gets to be even only as old as we were then, looking like Karl, untouched? -- but innocence I think is in fact the right word. To my mind, that is the character of an artist, in whatever discipline, that distinguishes them from the rest of us: the newness of every day's undertaking, however practiced or familiar, the willingness to try the unfamiliar stance, to move rather than rest, the unembarrassed, unstudied concentration on only the things that matter, like work, like art, like love, like joy.

Most of us, myself included, are too timid or too easily persuaded to compromise, or too lacking in talent or discipline to live that way. That's not much of an admission, or even anything really about which to be embarrassed. Life, as we find or make it, is sufficient or near enough to being, for most of us. Art requires too much, frankly, of those that make it seriously.

I can not say just how much it may have required of Karl. I don't know the shape of his life since we last spoke, decades ago. But I can't explain how satisfying it is to me to know that Karl is an artist, still, that he is still beautiful, that he still dances.

When I look at all those unknown faces in these old photographs, or even at the familiar faces, or at my own, still in these pictures so astonishingly young, I have to wonder that Karl's is the face in which, even as a boy, I see the man I am in some strange way most happy to have met.

How often does one see real beauty in this world?