The Governess

The Governess disapproves of the Maid and Bulter's flirtations and she hates Drosselmeyer.

She throws her hands up in dismay at Drosselmeyer's arrival and doesn't like his antics during the party. What she does get on board with, though, is the Nutcracker March. After watching the children dance it, she decides the whole crew should try it out. She stands front and center, the Christmas tree displayed behind her, and leads the cast of Garden City Ballet's 40th Nutcracker in the steps.

For three years, Carolyn Lewis from Seeley Lake has played the role of the Governess, a role created specifically for her by the artistic director of Missoula's Nutcracker. Lewis, unlike some of the dancers in the cast, hasn't been dancing her entire life, but rather started studying ballet a few decades in. And definitely unlike many of the dancers in the cast, she's spent the 30 years since figuring out how to own her age as an adult in the worlds she decided to pursue.

Lewis started studying ballet seriously, which to her meant going to class up to three times a week, in her forties. After a promotion at AT&T - one of the various bends in her career path - she moved to New Jersey where some coworkers asked her to an adult ballet class.

"I didn't know you could take beginning dance lessons as an adult. I thought you had to do it as a kid - grow up dancing, keep dancing ... I didn't know that adults could actually start as a beginner student," Lewis said.

The class didn't land with her coworkers. But for Lewis, it reminded her of what she was missing.

Her very first ballet class was in Havre, Montana - which she went to because a friend was going - at eight years old. This was the year she first took to the stage as well, as a horse dancing to the song Pony Boy in the late 1950s.

Her dad's job as a college professor moved the family back to Missoula - where Lewis was born - a couple years later. Both Lewis's parents were musicians, her dad a singer and her mom a pianist. In Missoula, she took ballet lessons on Saturday mornings with an instructor at the University of Montana when she was 10. Lewis said this instructor, Marnie Cooper, trained with George Balanchine and was recruited to UM to build the ballet program but also to train football players to improve their footwork and quickness.

Lewis loved it.

She remembered Cooper as exotic, always wearing the classic pink tights and ballet slippers and a turquoise, long-sleeved leotard. In between classes, Cooper would sit in her office - which was about half of a huge dance studio in the top floor of the Dennison Theatre on campus - take notes, organize her LPs and smoke a cigarette in a long cigarette holder.

Lewis learned from Cooper for two years before funding was cut from the program and Cooper left.

And that began the gap in Lewis's ballet training, until New Jersey. After that adult ballet class in her forties, she sifted through the yellow pages and called other studios, asking if they had adult ballet. She tried four classes before committing to the New Jersey Ballet School.

"I'm in class and I'm remembering all the positions and I have my arm out to the side, and the teacher comes up and lifts my elbow and curves it and he says, 'I can tell you've had some ballet at one point.' He said, 'When was that?' I said, 'Age 11.' He said, 'Well, you've obviously retained some of it. We have a lot of work to do here.'"

Lewis started taking classes twice a week. Four years later, she asked the director of the New Jersey Ballet School if she could perform in the school's Nutcracker. Normally, the school only used professional dancers in the productions, including for adult roles in the Party Scene, which in some Nutcrackers are open to more casual dancers. Lewis remembered the director being hesitant, but ultimately offered her a part as a Mouse in the Fight Scene. The Mice wear head pieces, so it's hard to tell age or gender.

The next year, the first instructor she had at the New Jersey Ballet School announced he was going to start his own studio, and wanted Lewis to help him set it up and produce its first Nutcracker.

"And I said, sure! I'm always up for an adventure, and I loved Leif Nunn," Lewis said. Nunn was that instructor who was a former professional, trained by Patsy Swazye, Patrick Swayze's mother.

Lewis was worried she might not be able to dance in Nunn's Nutcracker if she was so busy assisting, but Nunn let her be the Rat Queen, a role she played at the Nunnbetter Dance Theatre for three years. The Nunnbetter Dance Theatre is still offering adult classes, and its 26th Nutcracker is taking the stage this weekend.

One reason Lewis had such a ballet gap is that her focus turned to her career. The AT&T position in New Jersey was just one of many. She received her undergraduate degrees in history and literature from Barnard College, at the time the women's version of Colombia. She met her husband, Tom Browder, in New York (he was studying at Colombia) even though they both grew up in Missoula and are only a couple years apart in age.

Lewis started into more advanced degrees after Barnard but quickly realized it wasn't for her. Instead, she became a flight attendant for Pan Am until she was laid off during the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973. Lewis and Browder had gotten married a year before.

"Oh my god, my poor mother and father, they thought we'd split up. I said no, we're not splitting up. We love each other, we're having a great time, I'm just going to do something different. I think it was pretty revolutionary at the time," Lewis said. "The other thing was I kept my maiden name. Oh my god, did I take all sorts of crap from people. Even my own grandma refused to call me Carolyn Lewis. She would send my birthday cards to Mrs. Thomas M. Browder. I was kind of a little bit of a rebel."

Next she got her MBA and started working at Macy's in Kansas City until she realized she didn't have any fashion sense. After the stint at AT&T, Lewis and Browder lived in the Philippines for two years until they came back to Missoula, where she learned about adult ballet offerings from her pilates instructor.

Browder started pilates in the Philippines in 2012 and has noticed the benefits - strength, flexibility, quality of life. He sees friends his age that have back problems and just hurt.

"I don't have any of that," Browder, 77, said.

Browder was diagnosed with leukemia in 2022 and was in remission until a recurrence this year. He underwent chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant. He said the reason his specialists took him as a transplant patient was that his body is younger than his actual age, something he said extends to Lewis as well. In Garden City Ballet's "Nutcracker," the choreographers had her do things in the Party Scene that other adults didn't, "And that's a big deal," Browder said.

Browder went to two Nutcracker matinees. He loves watching Lewis onstage. The couple doesn't have kids, and Browder said that's allowed them to kind of do whatever they want with their lives.

"(Ballet's) probably the thing in her life that she's most passionate about," Browder said.

Lewis's first instructor at Ballet Arts Academy in Missoula was Marie Barnett, artistic director of the academy and Garden City Ballet's Nutcracker. Lewis had been away from ballet for eight years at that point and felt like the class was too advanced for her current skill level.

"I sent an email to Marie saying thank you for putting up with me, I really loved your class, it's way too hard for me. And she said - kind of what Leif had said years before - she said, 'Carolyn, your love of dance shows through. Keep coming, you'll be fine,'" Lewis said.

So, she kept at it and a year later Barnett asked if Lewis would consider being in Garden City Ballet's "Nutcracker." Lewis looked for her name on the cast list after auditions, scanning through the adults in the Party Scene and the Grandparents, and started to worry. She wasn't seeing her name. Finally, she came across a role called Governess with her name to the right.

"I said to Marie, what's the Governess? What am I supposed to do? She said, 'Oh it's a new role, I created it for you,'" Lewis said.

Barnett, after having Lewis in class, knew she had to have her in the Nutcracker.

"She is a beautiful dancer, a beautiful mover and she's just got spunk. There's a spark, and she can tell a story," Barnett said.

Lewis was thrilled to have a role created on her and more so that she didn't have to be the Grandmother. She was likely the oldest person in the cast anyway and didn't want to draw any more attention to it.

Three years ago when the Governess debuted, Lewis was still working for Meta as an accessibility assistant and dyed her hair to hide the grays. There's a lot of ageism out there, Lewis said, and she decided the "techies" didn't need to know how old she was.

And before the techies, Lewis saw hints of ageism in other jobs, like her position at AT&T in New Jersey. In her office, each time someone turned 40 their cubicles were decorated with black crepe paper. The "over the hill" mentality was strong. Lewis, opting out, decided to schedule a business trip during her 40th, and the occasion passed without anyone the wiser.

"I look at myself and in my heart I'm still 12 years old. I look at my peers and I think, who are all these old people? And then I think, oh no, these people are 20 years younger than me," Lewis said.

It wasn't until April that Lewis owned her age for the first time, with encouragement from Barnett. A show put on at the Westside Theater in Missoula called 40 Over 40 gathered 40 dancers over the age of 40 for a production. All six shows sold out.

In kind of a gimmick, part of the choreography Lewis performed in Barnett's piece had her say, "Oh Ms. Marie, hold your horses, I'm not 40 anymore. In fact, I'm not 70 anymore!"

It was the first time she announced her age so publicly and to a world that she felt might not have been ready to hear it.

"It's really incredible to see the adults in class because you've gone through so much in life and it's just such a place of healing. It's a place of centering and beauty, artistry, a place of freedom and it's just something that you can't even really put words to," Barnett said.

During Nutcracker season, which Lewis has been a part of for three years as the Governess, she's in Missoula four times a week. Off season, she drives from Seeley into town for class at least twice and once for a pilates class.

And the newest skill she's picked up on is ice skating.

"It fits. It's an adventure. I'm always up for an adventure," Lewis said.