Dancing for the Devil: One Woman's Dramatic and Divine Rescue from the Sex Industry - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anny Donewald is the founder of Eve’s Angels, a Christian not-for-profit organization that ministers the word of Jesus Christ to women in the sex industry. Anny is a sex industry survivor who reveals that no one is immune to sin or salvation. The Western Michigan University alumnus has a B.S. in Family Studies and resides in the Midwest with her two children.

Carrie Gerlach Cecil, an inspirational and entertaining speaker and author, creates literary, television, film, online, and live content to impact and counter both pop and religious culture. A founding partner of Unfiltered Faith, her last novel, One Sunday, received critical praise and the national media spotlight. For more information, visit CarrieGerlachCecil.com.

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Dancing for the Devil

chapter one

SO YOU UNDERSTAND MY LINEAGE

When kids act out, it’s often the parents who get the blame. Whether the kids are getting in trouble in school or misbehaving with family, many parents worry they’re doing something wrong. But that may not always be the case.

Dr. Richard Friedman, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College

There were times that I couldn’t forgive myself for what I put my parents through in my darkest days. It wasn’t until I realized that they were the first people to show me unconditional love, and they did that through their relationship with Jesus Christ, that I was able to understand the Father’s love and to forgive myself.

Anny

It is a commonly held belief that unborn children become aware of their world through the sounds they hear while in the womb. Thus, swollen and puffy soon-to-be mommas are encouraged to coo and sing nursery rhymes ad nauseam directly into their protruding tummies.

The mantras I heard while in my mother’s belly were a serenade of a different sort. Instead of lullabies, I heard eighteen thousand pairs of feet stomping—WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!—in rhythm on metal bleachers and the pounding of bass drums in the percussion section of the Indiana Hoosiers’ basketball band. Adoring fans cheered and belted out, “Indiana, our Indiana, we’re all for you! Never daunted, we cannot falter, in the battle, we’re tried and true! Indiana, our Indiana, Indiana, we’re all for you! I-U!”

I arrived into this world screaming at the top of my lungs. Upon delivery, I had one arm above my head, my hand clenched into a triumphant fist. Perhaps it was the Donewald lineage, or perhaps it was the reverberations of the crowd I could hear and feel over and over during the NCAA basketball play-offs, but somehow I came into this world expecting fireworks, with the burning desire to let the spotlight shine on me.

I was the first child my father witnessed being born. For his three previous children’s births, he had been forced to wait in the lobby with the other expectant fathers. I picture him with a cigar in his hand, although he never smoked, as each of my siblings was handed to him neatly wrapped in a baby-blue or pastel-pink blanket. Not me. From the very beginning, my dad, the conservative Christian basketball coach, saw me messy, bloody, and hollering. He took the sterilized metal clamps and snipped the lifeline umbilical cord that connected me to my mother and forever made me his. My father has always helped transition me from one life event to the next. Sometimes that involved yanking and cutting and sometimes it involved holding me in his arms to keep me sheltered from the world. What he would come to understand is that he wouldn’t have arms big enough to free me from the darkness that my life would become.

My birth on November 15, 1977, made the national media two days later. It provided good color commentary as my dad coached an exhibition game against the Soviet national team: his boys at IU beat the Soviets in front of a sold-out Market Square Arena in Indianapolis. It was a big week for Dad, the entire state of Indiana, and American basketball fans. It was the season Billy Joel released the jukebox favorite “Only the Good Die Young,” a song that would become an anthem for my life. But I am getting ahead of myself.



My father met my mother, Kathy, on a blind date in the spring of 1967 in South Bend, Indiana, the home of the Studebaker and the Fighting Irish. Dad was the head basketball coach at St. Joseph’s Catholic High School, where he also taught economics to the junior and senior classes. Mom was an ICU nurse at Memorial Hospital of South Bend who had risen through the ranks to head of the department.

My mother was a natural beauty with a petite but strong frame and narrow face. She wore her hair in a pixie hairdo that bore a resemblance to Goldie Hawn’s during the Laugh-In era. Her brown bangs hung above big blue eyes that were framed by long brown lashes. She wore very little makeup, just a hint of rose on her thin cheeks, a brush or two of mascara, and a glimmer of Avon pink lip gloss. She dressed in below-the-knee wool pencil skirts. Her preppy collared shirts peeked out from underneath the sweaters she would knit. She resembled an Ivy Leaguer who knew how to keep her ankles crossed beneath the chair when eating dinner or listening to the preacher in church.

She was unlike the girls my dad had dated when he played basketball at Hanover College. She exuded the subtle seriousness that comes from growing up in a wealthy, educated Boston family and ultimately working in a hospital where she dealt with life-or-death patients and their IVs and bedpans.

My dad and mom were both in their midtwenties when they sat down for dinner at a restaurant that was far out of my father’s budget. He drank a Tom Collins and she sipped a scotch on the rocks. The lights were low as my mother raised her eyebrow and asked with watered-down wit, “You get paid to coach basketball?” She knew nothing about sports or his competitive, masculine world, nor did she like it. Then my father announced he had planned a small gathering that evening after dinner at his house to watch the NCAA play-offs. She found the entire encounter Neanderthalish.

“A basketball coach?” my grandmother Dorothy mocked in her heavy Boston accent no one in our family could ever understand. “Is he an eccentric man-child, or does he just not have the wherewithal or breeding to be a good lawyer, doctor, or CPA?”

Although she was in a loftier social league and perhaps out of his dating comfort zone, my dad instantly fell in love with my mother’s candor, dry sense of humor, and unwavering righteousness.

Dad had grown up poor with an absentee father who had a wandering eye—he was particularly fond of pretty ladies with Marilyn Monroe’s silhouette—and an unwavering dedication to never, ever leave a whiskey glass untouched.

My grandmother Alleene essentially raised my dad and his two siblings, older brother Jack and younger sister Sandy. My dad doesn’t talk much about his childhood, and when I pressed him for details, he told me that they were a typical family of the 1940s and 1950s. Although they struggled financially, their lives were sled races in the snow, neighborhood basketball games, sock hops, and family dinners with aunts and uncles who filled in the gaps that were left by his father’s carousing and his mother’s having to work.

I’ve only once heard him speak about the real tragedy in his childhood, the loss of his brother, Jack. He spoke quietly and deliberately about it to my sister as I pretended to be asleep on the couch. I was about seven years old, but the tone of his voice has stayed with me my entire life.

He told her of the Christmas holiday of 1959. The snow was two feet deep along the driveway and icicles hung from the rain gutters on their old house on Sylvan Lane in Carmel, Indiana. Sometime after midnight he heard the upstairs phone ring. My father stood in his bedroom doorway, watching his mother, in her light-blue nightgown, make her way through the dark hallway and pick up the black Mountain Bell receiver to hear the horrible news: his nineteen-year-old brother had been killed in an airplane crash as he was traveling back to his naval ship. My dad stood silently as his mother collapsed to her knees, wailing...