Free Every Step You Take by Jock Soto Page B

wherever she is, must be watching and smiling, wondering what she should teach us next.

The Happy Family Picnic
    O N S UNDAY MORNINGS when I was young my mother would get up early, carefully apply her makeup, and then head to the kitchen to put together our family picnic. The menu varied, but my favorite entrées were always chicken-cheese-alfalfa-sprout sandwiches (on white bread with tons of mayonnaise) and Mom’s special “barbecued” chicken, which she actually cooked in a casserole in the oven. The chicken can also be “barbecued” on the stovetop or in a Crock-Pot if you don’t have an oven.
    One of the wonderful things about picnics is they will work just about anywhere. You need only transport a tasty meal to a place where you don’t normally eat—it could be your living room floor—and the rest is all attitude. For my brother, Kiko, and me, sitting in the backseat of my father’s 1965 Cadillac convertible with the top down and the wind blowing through our hair on our way to a family picnic was about as good as life got.
Mom’s Stove-Top BBQ Chicken
    ______
    SERVES 10
    8 chicken thighs, bone in, with skin
    8 chicken legs, bone in, with skin
    2 whole chicken breasts, bone in, with skin, each breast halved and quartered
    1 large Spanish onion, finely chopped
    Â¾ cup chicken broth
    Salt and pepper
    3 cups honey-mustard barbecue sauce
    Heat the oven to 350 degrees.
    Place the chicken and onions in a large casserole dish, and pour in the broth. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix these with your hands until everything is coated.
    Cover the casserole dish with aluminum foil, and place in the oven to bake. After 45 minutes, add the barbecue sauce and toss to coat the chicken evenly. Turn the oven up to 475 degrees, and bake without the foil for another 10 to 15 minutes, or until the chicken starts to dry a bit. Keep an eye on it to prevent it from drying too much—every oven is different. Remove from the oven and cool for 10 minutes, covered loosely with foil, before serving.
    This is delicious served hot, lukewarm, or cold—but make sure you have plenty of napkins.

C HAPTER S IX
    ______
Losing Arizona
    Make something beautiful of your life.
    â€”A BRAHAM V ERGHESE , C UTTING FOR S TONE
    B y the time I was nine or ten the world of ballet at large and my own weekly ballet classes had become an alternate reality for me, a place where I could hide and dream. I still acted out my role as just another neighborhood kid in the desert community where I lived, but I also lived another, more exciting, life inside the small studio of the Phoenix School of Ballet. I was attending more and more classes, which meant spending more time waiting to be picked up. I can remember spending much of that idle time locked in the school’s one and only dressing room, where I would try on various items from the lost-and-found bin and dance all around in the borrowed outfits, becoming different characters. When people came banging on the door—“Let us in! We need to change!”—I would quickly strip and get back in my own clothes and open the door and exit as nonchalantly as possible.
    Stories of a bigger ballet world beyond my little Arizona school drifted back to me and I hoarded every detail and dreamed of becoming part of that world someday. Three of Isabel and Kelly’s children—Leslie, Ethan, and Elizabeth—were studying ballet in New York, and there was huge excitement in our school when rumors surfaced that Leslie might be cast in a film, dancing with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had recently defected from Russia. (She did get the part, and in fact was nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Turning Point , a film I must have watched a hundred times in the year or so after it came out.) I had seen news coverage and clips of Baryshnikov on the television, and I wanted desperately to get an autographed picture of him. My mother found out where to send mail