Tap Dancing on Everest

 

What compels people to deliberately place themselves in harm’s way? Or attempt dangerous feats, endure extreme psychological and physical conditions? And joyfully repeat the experience.  An “unlikely candidate “, to imperil her life,   Mimi Zieman, had  a clear  path to medical school but   also thoughts   to make dancing her career. Willfully rejecting her   parents’ repeated   mantra to pursue medicine Zieman dumped   their “list of shoulds”  and  chose an    unimaginable alternative. Tap Dancing on Everest is author Mimi Zieman’s gleeful memoir, a journey  towards reaching   the top of the world.

 

Born in 1962, even at the age of six, Mimi Zieman knew she did not want to live in the shadow of her parents’ insecurities. Displaced from Europe during the Nazi onslaught, their escape to Mandated Palestine certainly saved their lives. However, being new immigrants in America was no picnic. The Ziemans moved into, a shabby tenement,   ironically called Versailles. They shared their cramped space   with their matriarch nicknamed Amama. A former choreographer for the Berlin Opera,  Amama was   fired from her job during  the Nazi regime .She  escaped to America  in 1933 and    inspired   her granddaughter, Mimi, to take   dancing lessons.

 

Zieman loved the freedom in her dance classes, the rhythm of tap, the pulse of jazz way more than her strict Orthodox religious education that she was compelled to complete.  Encouraged by her dancing instructor and her grandmother,  Zieman  hoped  to make dance her career. But her mother   inhibited her dreams, warning she can never make a living dancing often shouting, “you’ll starve---you have a perfectly good brain, use it.”  In 1980, at eighteen,  Zieman  took  the prescribed road of ‘shoulds. She applied and was accepted into  McGill University Medical School in Canada .   

  

 In the summer, Zieman  registered at  the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado . Though  she never gave up dancing, the   courses  at RMBL not only captured her interest  but Zieman determined she would follow an adventurous  career,” like Jane Goodall”; she loved the outdoors. Her biology classes at RMBL took her into the mountains. Climbing and hiking the Rockies replaced her feelings of self-doubt.  The   dizzying heights were exhilarating though  she saw others suffer from  altitude sickness ,  nausea headaches,  and other  physical  injuries . A third year medical student she helped where she could.  Resolute  to follow her passion Zieman  booked   a trip to the Himalayas  first to  Nepal, backpacking alone in Asia on mountains topping 26,000 feet (  Annapurna)  then to   Tibet on a    trekking  expedition where she would  combine her skills in   dance, medicine and  share   a  Passover Seder with her team.  

 

A truly breathtaking adventure of a bold (feminist) medical student who demanded a “boundless life” and discovered it on “terra incognita”.