Taking the Lead: Lessons From a Life in Motion by Derek Hough Page B

one night. She was having trouble with her back and wanted to see a physiotherapist. “Can you come with me?” she asked. She drove us through a residential section of Beverly Hills. We pulled into a house with a shed out back. Oddly, it didn’t look like a doctor’s office. There was a couch and incense burning. An Australian guy with a white beard came in: “Hey, mates.” I looked at Jen and she winked at me. This was no physical therapy. She’d signed us up for some bizarre couples therapy!
    The guy spoke to us for a while, then he asked Jennifer if she wouldn’t mind leaving us to chat. I thought the whole thing was pretty out there, but I didn’t think I could make a run for it.
    “So, Derek,” he said. “Tell me about your childhood.” I laid it all out for him—I talked for almost two hours—and he nodded. “You can go pick him up now.”
    I raised an eyebrow. “Pick who up?”
    The therapist smiled. “That younger boy, that self you left in Utah. You left him there while you’ve been on a mission moving forward so vigorously. Now you can go get him back.”
    I sat there, utterly stunned and speechless. It was beyond powerful and enlightening. Had I really left that part of me behind? Had I lost that fun-loving, wide-eyed kid and all his creative exuberance?
    When I came out of my therapy session, Jennifer was waiting for me. “If I’d told you this was where we were going, you wouldn’t have come,” she said. She was right. She had to blindside me to get me to grapple with this. She’s a very spiritual person, and she saw how I was struggling, how I seemed to be in some kind of emotional rut. Just visualizing myself taking the old Derek by the hand was an incredible exercise. I think we often tuck our younger selves away for safekeeping. In my case, I associated my early years with painful memories. I wanted to keep young Derek at a distance. But what I forgot was all the good I experienced with him as well: the joy, the hope, the excitement, the wonder. I forgot what a great kid Derek was. I gave myself permission to reconnect with that little boy, to see the world through his eyes again. It was the kick in the butt I needed.
    Jennifer would say, “Told ya so.”
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    REFLECTING ON DEREK
    “In every dance that I did with Derek, there were at least two moves or moments that I looked forward to, like a kid in a candy shop. It was always very satisfying to see Derek’s face after the dance was over, when he looked at me with so much pride. He and I both knew how hard-won it was. There was not a dance that we did that was easy for me. Every week, I had a crisis of faith. I could set my watch to it. Feeling like, This is the time, this is the dance where I am goin’ down. Derek’s brilliant choreography coupled with the experience of being taught by him was extraordinary. He is an amazing dance partner. Facing my fears in doing Dancing with the Stars took everything I had, and Derek made it more than worth the Herculean effort.”
    —JENNIFER GREY
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8
    WILD THANG
    I ’ VE ALWAYS HAD this split personality: the crazy, wild, silly kid, and the very disciplined, focused dancer. My old coach Rick dubbed me “Heavy D”—that was me at my most competitive and aggressive. In London, Mark and I were a dangerous duo: crazy meets crazy. We threw Shirley’s garden hose into the heated swimming pool pretending to “slay the snake.” We set up a trampoline next to that pool and did flips and dives into it for hours. At Halloween, we egged houses and decorated our own to look like something out of a horror flick. I was always “borrowing” Corky’s things: an Armani tux worth thousands for a school play, and his brand-new expensive Bally shoes for skateboarding. When I returned them to him, the shiny loafers looked like they had been run over by a truck.
    In Utah, my parents didn’t know how to punish me for misbehaving; Shirley, however, was a master at it. She knew I would spend twenty