Eager to Please : Dancer Hopes Teens Get Her Message That Their First Responsibility Is to Themselves

It’s a tough audience--a group of about 170 restless high school students who have been inside too long on a rainy day--but Susie Vanderlip is up to the challenge.

The 41-year-old Orange resident, who is presenting a program as part of Drug and Alcohol Awareness Week, grabs the students’ attention without any help from the teachers in charge of crowd control.

When Vanderlip is introduced, she is standing on a bare stage in a sailor dress with a look of youthful vulnerability that no doubt makes her audience more receptive to the emotional message she is about to deliver.

Vanderlip speaks on two levels--through movement as well as words--during a 20-minute program she calls “Legacy of Obsession.” She uses a combination of jazz and modern dance and dramatic monologues to tell the story of an insecure teen-age girl who suffers the abuse of an alcoholic father, then dates and eventually marries a man who also mistreats her during drinking binges.

Vanderlip, a professional dancer who sets the mood for this piece with music such as Joe Jackson’s “What’s the Use of Getting Sober?” and Sheena Easton’s “What Comes Naturally,” says she hopes her performance will help teen-agers who are living with or dating an alcoholic realize that “denying there’s a problem and keeping secrets doesn’t work.”

In the first monologue, the girl in the sailor dress admits her alcoholic father has embarrassed her in front of her friends, and Vanderlip’s dance movements show that he has abused her physically, but she keeps forgiving him, always with the hope of winning his love:

“Yeah, he does drink too much sometimes, but he doesn’t throw up or fall down in the street or anything. He does get real mean, though. But afterward, he says he’s sorry and takes me shopping for a new outfit.

“I’m gonna help my dad! I’m gonna be soooo good. He won’t ever be mad at me again!”

Vanderlip’s character is just as eager to please the abusive alcoholic who becomes her husband: “He says he loves me! I can’t believe somebody I want wants me . . . . I finally have somebody to love, and I’m gonna make him sooo happy!”

Vanderlip--who wears a black leotard that permits quick, symbolic costume changes from the sailor outfit to a jazzy gold jacket, a dowdy bathrobe and a smart red blazer--ends her program on a hopeful note, with a dependent and powerless woman finding self-esteem and inner strength through Al-Anon, a support group for families of alcoholics.

Vanderlip, who teaches jazz and modern dance at Coastline Community College, says “Legacy of Obsession” is not autobiographical, but the emotional pain she captures through movement was once very real to her.

She admitted during a question-answer session following her recent performance at Tustin High School that she was married to an alcoholic for 13 years and spent most of that time believing he would change “because I’d finally found someone to love and I didn’t want to lose him.”

Vanderlip presented three programs for a total of about 500 students at the Tustin campus, and she hopes to take her message to many more schools throughout Orange County.

She initially choreographed and performed portions of “Legacy of Obsession” as a member of Dance Kaleidoscope of Orange County, a semiprofessional jazz and modern dance company. At the request of friends in education who felt she had an important message for teens, she expanded the piece and presented it in mid-January at Cypress High School for an audience of students, school administrators and substance abuse recovery facility administrators.

Since then, she says, she has received a number of requests to present her unusual program, including one from the Orange County chapter of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, which has invited her to perform at its 35th anniversary fund-raiser in May at the Balboa Bay Club.

Lisa Roseman, a drama teacher at Tustin High School, says Vanderlip’s dance has far more emotional impact on students than the lectures and “confessionals” that dominate most anti-drug and alcoholism education programs.

“It’s so valuable. It let’s kids know they’re not alone,” Roseman says.

It also shows teens who feel trapped that they “have power that maybe they didn’t think about--and that they have a responsibility to take care of themselves,” she adds.

They get that message not only from the fictional story Vanderlip tells through her dance/monologue, but also through the personal story she shares after her performance.

Vanderlip was 20 when she married the high school boyfriend with whom she fell in love at age 15. She says she didn’t see any sign of a drinking problem until he started getting drunk and smoking marijuana at parties when they were in college.

“I thought that was cool then,” Vanderlip tells the Tustin High School students. However, she adds, “I chose not to use alcohol and pot very often because I like to be in control.”

Her husband’s drinking got steadily worse, and he eventually began using cocaine. The combination sometimes made him violent, Vanderlip recalls.

“It was exceedingly painful to watch this person who’d been my best friend since 15 slowly become a Jekyll and Hyde,” she says.

Meanwhile, Vanderlip kept trying to please her man, even though he never seemed to notice the special meals she prepared or the striking outfits she put together to get his attention.

“Why were you so attached to him?” one boy in her audience asks.

Because, from the time she met him as a teen-ager, she depended on him to fill the gaps in her own self-esteem, she explains. In high school, Vanderlip was a cheerleader and a straight-A student--”one of those really successful regular kids,” she says.

“I grew up trying to be perfect. On the outside, I was a together person. Underneath, I never felt pretty enough or smart enough. I felt I had to earn love, and when I found someone who loved me, I latched onto him with all my being.

“We loved each other very much, but he was obsessed with alcohol and I was obsessed with him.”

After about 12 years of marriage, Vanderlip finally sought help through a recovery program for families of alcoholics, where she learned that “we are responsible for our own happiness, not for other people’s choices.” And that her husband wasn’t going to change unless he made up his own mind to do so.

He never did.

But, with the support of her recovery group, Vanderlip began taking steps to protect herself instead of always looking out for her husband. For example, she started calling a cab or a friend instead of getting in the car with him when he was drunk, and she began avoiding him when he was angry instead of becoming a target of violence as she tried to calm him.

Eventually, she developed enough self-assurance to walk away from an unhealthy marriage. And two months after she divorced him, her husband died of an unintentional drug overdose at age 35.

That was seven years ago, and Vanderlip says she’s still going to weekly meetings of her recovery program to continue the “personal growth” she wishes she’d started when she was a teen-ager.

She urges teens who are feeling anger and resentment toward a loved one who abuses alcohol to confide in a trusted adult or get involved in a 12-step recovery program such as Alateen, a support group for young people dealing with alcoholism.

“Find a place where you can let your feelings out and learn to love yourself,” she tells students. “You don’t go to a 12-step program to stop the drinker from drinking. You go to feel OK inside.”

Vanderlip--who has remarried to Ken Vanderlip, a Fullerton marriage, family and child counselor--can now emphatically say, “I like my life.”

Her hopeful message seemed to be getting through to students at Tustin High School.

Melinda, a 15-year-old whose father is an alcoholic, says she feels “really alone” and helpless.

“It helps to hear that you can change things,” she says.

John, a 17-year-old with an alcoholic father, says it was a relief for him to hear that he shouldn’t blame himself or feel it’s his responsibility to stop his dad from drinking.

“I’m always asking myself, ‘What am I doing wrong? What can I do right?’ ” he says.

He thinks Vanderlip’s program is valuable because it encourages students to talk openly about alcoholism.

“You try to have this perfect shell. You want everyone to think everything’s OK all the time. But it’s better to get your feelings out now than wait 30 years and ruin your life,” he says.