D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
August 2009
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The Dancing DentistWhether teaching salsa dancing, helping empower local girls or fixing teeth, Gail Willow says "open wide" to life.
Story and photos by Richard Mahler |
She bursts through the doorway wearing a mischievous grin, gets a catchy tune spinning on the CD player, and marches to a merengue beat into the middle of the dance floor.
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Gail Willow takes a turn on the dance
floor during a salsa session. |
"Okay, everybody," Gail Willow exclaims, clapping her hands and gyrating her hips. "Let's go!"
Immediately, wide-eyed students step forward, swinging and swaying in time to the sizzling music. For the next hour, Willow will cover the basics of such popular Latin dances as cumbia, salsa, bachata and merengue. Sometimes her brother, John, helps demonstrate the slinky moves, but mostly she teaches solo. Eager men and women of seemingly every age, color, shape and ability are seen practicing alone, with one another, and under the critical eye of their instructor while Silver City's Conservatory of Dance throbs with the syncopated rhythms of clave, timbale and conga. Within minutes, tight bodies relax and feet begin to fly. It is all about "learning by doing."
This kind of dancing is excellent aerobic exercise and allows men and women to engage physically as partners, without being sexual. "It's so good for the body and the soul," Willow adds. "I used to do a lot of swing and funk and what I call 'wiggle worm.' But this is different, the way it gets into you." If the response among class members is any clue, her sentiments are widely shared.
Many of her dance students, it seems, also respond to Gail Willow in a completely different context. She is their dentist. Mine, too, it must be noted. And in the interest of full reportorial disclosure, she is my occasional dance instructor.
"I just love this music," Willow shrugs, when asked to justify her enthusiasm for the likes of Celia Cruz and Ibrahim Ferrar. "It is joyful. I'll teach a class even if only one or two people show up."
At her century-old, TV-free home near Western New Mexico University, surrounded by tall trees and lush vegetation, speakers in every room deliver a steady beat of Latin dance music. "I always have it on," confesses Willow, who is trim, blonde, blue-eyed, and of Irish descent. "Since I was just a girl, I've really loved to dance."
Shall we Dance?
Dr. Gail Willow's weekly one-hour Latin dance classes at the Conservatory of Dance (2020 Cottage San Road, Silver City) will resume on Wednesdays in September. Call 538-5865 for details. Meanwhile, she is teaching informal one-hour classes at 7 p.m.on Saturday, August 22, at the Javalina coffee house (388-1350) at Bullard and Broadway in Silver City. Two hours of dancing follow on the Javalina's vintage hardwood floor. "Salsa Saturday" sessions are free to former class members, $5 per person for all others. No partner is needed. A hood source of Latin music on the radio, presented bilingually by host Emily Guerra, is KRWG's "Fiesta!" The program airs from 7 to 9 p.m. weeknights over Las Cruces public station KRWG-FM, heard via translators in Deming, Lordsburg, Silver City, Alamogordo and Truth or Consequences. |
Just how much does she love Latin music and dance? This is a busy, full-time businesswoman who thinks nothing of driving to Tucson — or even as far as Albuquerque — for a chance to join fellow salseras (y salseros) for a few hours before a live band at the El Parador or Cooperage night spots. Her die-hard dedication goes even further on some weekends, when she takes private lessons in Tucson from a dance pro whose mother puts his New Mexican client up for the night.
"The problem with Silver City," she concedes, "is there is no place to dance salsa regularly. People have been asking me to do something about that for a long time. Now I am." (See accompanying box.)
Though it may sound like a stretch at first, Gail Willow sees a connection between her dual passions of dentistry and salsa.
"I have come to see that both can be art forms," she explains, fork hovering over a plate of eggs, cheeks flushed after bicycling across town to join me for a breakfast interview. "I love my patients — interacting with them and involving them in their own health. It's not so very different helping people learn to dance."
When I ask her to elaborate, Willow looks wistful. "Dentistry really can be like dancing," she muses. "When I'm working with a partner — and my assistant has been with me for 14 years — we pass instruments back and forth. If I can't see it and touch it and it isn't right, I might push back, just like a dancer would. When we work well together, there's a flow and a smoothness that feels like dancing. It's a partnership, a give and take."
The flow of Willow's life began under challenging circumstances, marked by tenacious commitments to education, achievement and independent thinking. As a child of divorced parents, Willow shuttled between her mother in Albuquerque and her father in the San Francisco Bay Area. She recalls a humble existence, living in low-income households with no spare funds for frills but lots of support for doing your own thing. Based on Willow's description, her parents raised their children outside the prevailing middle-class mainstream.
"My mother never gave us sodas or candy," she remembers. "If she had any extra money, which was not often, she'd buy us fresh fruit."
Dentists were an unattainable expense. But the first one to peek inside Gail's mouth, when she was 15, could not find a single cavity.
Willow's father was an engineer, with a penchant for innovation and tinkering. While living in Half Moon Bay, a small fishing port on the Pacific, he was given permission to raise a sunken vessel and, after refurbishing it, call it his own. Willow's father subsequently signed a contract with the US Coast Guard that allowed authorities to borrow his 39-foot boat in the event of an emergency. The rest of the time he could — and did — use it for commercial fishing.
"I helped my dad go out to sea and catch salmon," says Willow matter-of-factly. "I was always a tomboy."
As a straight-A student, with a facility for math and science, she expected to follow in her dad's footsteps and become an engineer. But fate intervened when the family took advantage of free health care offered to them, again as a perk for emergency use of their boat, at San Francisco's Presidio.
"As a teenager," Willow recalls, "I would sit in the dental office and wait for Coast Guard personnel to break their appointments. Then I could be ushered in and get treated." Lying back in the dental chair, something clicked inside Gail's head: "I thought to myself, 'I know I could learn how to do this.' I'd always used my hands a lot, for things like macram and knitting. I had the manual dexterity, and I liked all sorts of mathematics and science. But I knew that if I was going to dental school, I'd have to do it on my own."
Willow worked hard, saved her money, and eventually completed her higher education in California and Missouri. She returned to New Mexico, which lacks a dental school, in the mid-1980s, passed her board exam and became a bona fide dentist. It was good to be back in the land of spectacular skies and fresh chile, but Albuquerque had sprawled. And Willow didn't like the changes she saw there.
"I got a letter from the widow of a dentist in Silver City who'd passed away," says Willow. "She was selling his business. So I came down, fell in love with the town, and wound up buying a practice being closed by a different dentist. I've been in Silver ever since, doing the same thing."
Willow contends you can't practice dentistry as "an art" these days in a big city, "where it's about your volume of patients and the amount of money that passes through your office each month. A lot of patients in big cities now expect dentists to do cosmetic procedures," says Willow, "which I'm not interested in focusing on. Instead I take a more holistic approach, appreciating the whole person and what they need, explaining what I am doing and why. I'll be touching their shoulders, taking time to talk with them, making a crown or a filling that fits exactly right. I may not see as many patients that way, but I think this approach helps make me a good dentist."
During her first year in Silver City, Willow began conducting a free clinic and dental education program in the Gila Valley community of Cliff. It's been an annual tradition ever since. Now the walls (and ceiling) of one room of her Bullard Street office are covered with appreciative drawings and messages from children she's seen in Cliff, many of whom are now adults.
"I still get a hoot when I look at some of these things," says Willow, "even when they've been tacked up for years."
Through a program called Expanding Your Horizons, coordinated by WNMU's Joanne Fisher, Willow has been a volunteer mentor of girls and young women. Using dental techniques, they learn to cast replicas of their fingers and put surrogate fillings in loose teeth. Some participants want to become veterinarians, nurses, or doctors. "I stress," says Willow, "that science and math are used in doing things like this."
She encourages them to do as well as they can in those subjects, thus assuring themselves "of as many career options as possible. The harsh reality is they are the ones who are most responsible for their own lives. If they want to do something, they have to figure out how to make it happen."
When questioned, virtually every girl seems to know another who is pregnant. This invariably leads Willow to ask: "How do you think it would affect your ability to get an education and start into a profession if you were pregnant?"
Willow encourages self-development among the women working in her dental practice, too. Long lunch hours allow them time to exercise. The office is closed on Fridays, freeing Willow to hit the gym, ride her bike, or drive to a salsa venue.
"I've been a big supporter of the Tour of the Gila [annual bicycle race] since the beginning," says Willow, a long-time cyclist who has participated in some Tour events and once took a two-month bicycling trip through Chile. She was the housing director of the Tour for 10 years and now drives officials during various races. "I know the courses pretty well by now," she says.
Later in the year, during festivities that follow the Signal Peak mountain-bike race, she wears a costume that reflects an annual theme: a glitzy "James Bond girl" one year, a jaunty court jester the next. This time around, the Signal Peak theme is "Rocky Horror Picture Show," so who knows what the dentist will wear.
"I also like dressing in costume for holidays at work," Willow adds. Her receptionist maintains a picture of her boss in St. Patrick's Day regalia as a computer screensaver.
A night of dancing, of course, offers yet another fine excuse to play dress-up. But it also links Willow to south-of-the-border peoples and their rich traditions, which have long interested her. Fluent in Spanish, she has made extended trips, often alone, through Guatemala's highlands and to Mexico's Chiapas and Oaxaca, where the presence of indigenous cultures remains strong.
"On one of these trips," Willow recalls, "I had a chance to take salsa lessons. I just loved it." And the rest, as the saying goes, is history.