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Kimberly Jones is a vivacious, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants beauty who started dance with visions of sugarplums and had her dream yanked out from under her when, at 17, she shot up to 5'10". Told her career was over, she wrung her hands for all of about ten seconds.
"I was 5'4" my whole life, really, really small, really petite and I was getting full scholarships to New York City Ballet, Joffrey Ballet. I was a ballerina. And then at seventeen, eighteen, when they start looking at you for company, I grew to 5'10". I was devastated. You know, everything goes in cycles and in that time frame, all the ensembles were 5'2". I was like, 'Oh my God!' You know, when one year they love me and the next they're like, 'Sorry. You're too tall.' And I was just like, 'My life is over.' You have no idea."
When her ballet dreams ended abruptly, she went home to California, auditioned for a national Disney tour and was hired instantly. "Well I got the job and I went on tour and it opened my world. I didn't know there was another kind of dance because they had jazz in it and they had singing and they had all sorts of things which I did, and I looked like a dork because I was such a ballerina still."
But returning to Los Angeles with new confidence in her ability to tackle other dance styles, she accompanied a friend to a Rockettes audition and on a whim, took the stage. She landed her second job and spent a year in Branson, Missouri before following the company to Las Vegas. She probably would have been perfectly happy if she hadn't gone to see Cirque du Soleil's "Mystere" and spied a role she desperately wanted. Six months later, she auditioned and got her dream role.
"So I did that for three years and I was twenty-three and I was like, 'My life is so easy. Great job. I live in a house. I'm twenty-three. I lay by the pool and go to work. There's more to my life. I'm moving to New York.' So I quit Cirque du Soleil. I had no friends, no job, no relatives, and I moved to New York just like that. I was like, 'What am I doing?'"
She spent the next three years with the Radio City Rockettes and worked hair shows in the off-season. "I had every hair color you can imagine - pink, purple, black, platinum, red, short, long...And then I was like, 'You know what? I'm done with this business. I'm done. I'm moving back to California...And I'm packing up my stuff and I get a phone call. 'Kim, we need you to come to final callback for " The Producers" tour.' I've never even auditioned for them." No surprise. She got the job and then near the end of the tour she got another amazing phone call: "'Hey, do you want to come to Broadway?' You don't turn down Broadway."
But eventually, the show closed. "I was like, 'Gosh, what am I going to do now? The Broadway show's closed.'" She mimes answering the phone. "'Do you want to go to Vegas?' 'OK.' That's how my life works and I kind of trust it, which is crazy, but I do. I kind of turn it over and I know something will show up and it always does."
Life has been good to Kimberly and she harbors no regrets about that lost ballerina career. "At the age of ten, I took a ballet class at a really strict ballet school in southern California and I couldn't stand it and I thought the teachers were really horrible but something in me was like, 'I want to go back and do this.'" But now? "Uh uh. It's a hard life. I mean my path and what I experienced was really, really challenging and I haven't spoken to many girls that thought otherwise. Maybe I've heard one girl that had a great experience. It's tough."
"There's a huge world out there where you can all fit in and I was told, 'You're too tall to be a dancer. You're 5'10". That's it. You're over.' And I believed it and it's not true. I've had an entire career since I've been told that. You know, there's a place for everybody." Sometimes you just need to be pointed in the right direction.