A couple of weeks ago I “watched” the Super Bowl. But for me, the football was the least interesting part of the broadcast. The Chrysler advertisement featuring Clint Eastwood was amazing. I was most attentive, however, during Madonna’s halftime show.
I’m a little biased though. Against football, because I just can’t seem to get into it and practice nonviolence, and towards Madonna, because she’s a former classmate of mine at Marygrove College in Detroit. Watching her career progress over the years has been so exciting. She was a dance major. I was working towards a dance therapy degree. We performed in the same dance company and our lockers were right next to each other!
Despite our proximity, I can’t say I knew Madonna all that well. Basically, she didn’t have time to make any purely social connections because she was the most focused and driven dancer in the program. Perhaps she cared only about her career, practiced incessantly, and viewed us as potential rivals. But that’s just speculation.
She definitely left an impression during the short time she took classes at Marygrove. Every day her arrival was like a comet streaking through the hallways. Sometimes that comet looked like it had slept in a car the previous night, but the luminosity never dimmed. She had, what my teacher would call, a burning desire to create change in her life. It showed in the way she practiced, day in and day out.
Even though she never said explicitly that she wanted to be famous, we all felt it. And it would have been a bold proclamation because she spent all her time dancing. I’ve heard that she’s often been self-conscious about her voice. While that may not be what she’s known for, I’m sure that she worked at it with the same zeal she did as a dance major.
Madonna certainly did become successful, probably beyond even her wildest dreams. She wasn’t at Marygrove for very long, maybe a little over a year, before moving to New York and rocketing to stardom. And she’s been at or near the top ever since. I can’t help but wonder, since I’ve changed career paths as well to become a yoga instructor, if her well-known fanaticism for yoga has contributed to her longevity and youthful looks. Some of those moves she made during halftime showed that she’s been practicing yoga for many years! In my brief acquaintance with Madonna, I never knew her to do anything but at full speed. This applied to dancing, lifestyle choices, and from what I’ve heard and read, yoga. Her longevity in the business, her ability to avoid career-threatening vices, and her sustained athleticism gives a strong argument for the yoga’s efficacy.
So to me it’s no surprise she’s become so famous. Passion is the key ingredient to achievement—there’s no better example of this than Madonna.
