More and Then More by Laura Oliver

I used to mention my age to salesclerks when shopping for clothes or makeup, but I stopped when they stopped being fake-surprised. 

As a remedy for this disappointing turn of events, my dermatologist suggests unappealing procedures such as sandblasting, peeling, and electrocution—so when she offers a new procedure involving injections with no downtime, I’m all in. It can take six months to see any improvement, however, because this is not filler. It’s a process that tells your collagen to get its giddy up.

My trainer, JT, rolls his eyes. “Why?” he moans. “You don’t need to do this.”

Sitting cross-legged in the chair next to his desk, I’m trying to explain why I want to look better and why there is a massive bruise on my left cheek. 

“The doctor had ’Before’ and ‘Way-Way-Way-After’ photos,” I explain. “On her phone. That meant they were real.” 

He is dumbfounded but entertained once again, by the confidences shared each week before my workout. And that’s when he tells me I’m making a big mistake going to see a performance of Shen Yun, the Chinese dance company with the colorful ads (curiously devoid of content) that claim to be preserving China’s ancient culture before Communism. “Propaganda,” JT says, referring to both my bruise and the upcoming performance. “You’re so gullible! You’ll believe anything.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say, smiling. ”Blows that theory.”

I actually know nothing about this organization, but the ads depicting leaping, whirling dancers in neon-colored costumes have made me curious. I’ve always wanted to go. Tickets are expensive but these were a gift. “Life changing!” one man exclaims in a promotion. “Transformational!” a young mother gushes.

Life-changing and transformational get me every time. As if whatever my life currently is, I’m always on the search for something more.

That’s how our brains work. As soon as we receive the thing we long for, we want something new, something else—a psychological fact often pointed to with disapproval, but I don’t think seeking more is a moral failing. I think it’s more likely creative energy at work. Or curiosity, which is holy.

Or evolution. Life begets life. Creation is irrepressible, always reaching for an improvement, an adaptation that better serves, and I think that is as true of us spiritually and emotionally as it is physically. 

Longing is innate and eternal. You don’t ever get done.

Until eternal is eternal. Maybe heaven is a state of being in which you finally want nothing more. 

“You do this all the time,” says JT. “Don’t waste your money on this performance and stop showing me those poochy places on your jawline. He gets up and motions me over to the cable pulls. “You’ll follow anyone. You’re a duckling to a duck,” he says. 

“Right behind you,” I say, trailing him, but he doesn’t get it. 

So, we go to see Shen Yun. I’m excited despite JT’s dire warnings. Once seated at the Hippodrome, the dances are a swirling combination of unnaturally bright yellow, lime green, vivid pinks, sky blues–the dancers lighter than air—they make you wonder why ballerinas bother to dance on pointe. 

The program is as beautiful as advertised, although there is a lack of variety or diversity of any kind. The costumes change primarily in color. The intensity, pacing, and moves— same, same, same. If you’ve seen the windmilling arms and leaps of the promotions, you’ve seen the show. I begin to feel as if I’m eating cotton candy. Something feels off. A robotic male and female host, with the plastic smiles of beauty contestants, narrate the show. I lean over and whisper, Are we in Stepford? 

A huge screen behind the dancers (a patented technology) allows them to seem to dance into a three-dimensional background of temples, gardens, and sky, seamlessly transforming from real dancers to a digital representation that flies into the clouds and disappears when, in fact, the dancers have dropped like lead down a trough behind the stage, scurried to the wings in order to pop up again later stage right. 

Suddenly, this giant screen takes on an unexpected role: the promotion of Falun Dafa’s religious-political ideology. The pastoral background dissolves, and an announcement appears. “We deny the myth of atheism and evolution!” 

The screen returns to a pastoral background as conservative morality tales unfold, depicting the idea that we arrived fully sprung from a divine being created to dance; then the message reappears. 

“Resist the myth of atheism and evolution!” the screen exhorts the audience again. 

“Told you!” JT says when I confess how unsettling this was.

When the performance is over, we are streaming out with the crowd, and a woman stops me to ask what I thought of the performance. I tell her the dancers’ skills were impressive. This is true. That’s when I look behind her and see a TV crew with production lights set up. “Would you let me interview you on camera?” she asks. In the mirrored wall behind her I see the bruise on my cheek is still concealed. Will I look better in a few months? Will I be better? Any kinder, smarter, more generous? Transformed?

I really want to go home. I think she should come with me. Everything I’ve just seen makes me want to whisper, “Blink twice if you need help!” And I want to get to the elevator before the 500 people behind me. Plus, I don’t want to assure anyone else that what I’ve seen is life-changing. Because it wasn’t life-changing, and yet life is always changing. 

And that’s the good and the bad news. The tender, painful blessing. We may be descendants of the divine, and maybe we were born to dance. But evolution is not an ideology to deny or believe in. 

It’s an inevitable fact. How do I know? 

Because I got exactly what I wanted. To see the perplexing spectacle that is Shen Yun. 

And I leave, as I live, looking and longing for something more. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Laura Oliver will be reading her work at the Stoltz Listening Room at the Avalon Foundation in Easton on April 24th at 6 pm as part of our Spy Nights series. Tickets can be purchased here.