“I am honored to have been touched by this brave and remarkable woman. Her afterglow is vivid and pervasive.”
— Robert K. King,
Co-founder Chicago School of Massage Therapy
Victoria “Tory” Odum-Reed was a former dancer who found her calling as a massage therapist and teacher of corrective exercise for dancers. An early protégé of Robert K. King, co-founder of the Chicago School of Massage Therapy, Tory graduated from CSMT with honors in 1986. Tory had not yet finished school when Robert King recommended Tory for the position of staff massage therapist for the U.S. Women’s tennis team. Tory worked for the team for two years traveling to all the matches including the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. “The Tory Touch” was the title of the newsletter Tory wrote and mailed each month to her clients.
In 1990, Tory and her business partner, Flow Wolf, opened The Center for Muscle Therapy, a massage therapy clinic, in Evanston, Illinois. CMT was ahead of its time for creating visibility, acceptance, and legitimacy for the still emerging field of massage therapy. CMT took massage further, specializing in soft tissue maintenance and rehabilitation for an incredibly wide range of clients including athletes, dancers, children, pregnant women, and the elderly. CMT worked closely with podiatrists, chiropractors, and medical doctors with whom they cross-referred clients. The Center also offered a full slate of classes including qi gong, Pilates, exercise, and mediation.
Through all of this, Tory never forgot her roots as a dancer and made it her personal mission to help dancers perform better on stage, and feel better off stage. Again ahead of her time, Tory lectured and taught her own brand of corrective exercise classes at several Chicago dance studios including Onstage Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, Ruth Page Center, Joseph Holmes Dance Theater, and Barat College in Lake Forest, Illinois.
In 1989, after a routine blood test, Tory discovered she was HIV- positive. At the time, HIV and AIDS were deeply misunderstood, feared, and stigmatized. Treatments were few and survival was rare.
Tory never considered being sidelined by AIDS. Instead she used her illness to teach, inform, and inspire. At the last class she was able to teach at Barat College, she announced to the assembled class of young dancers that the reason she seemed weak and had difficulty walking, was that she had AIDS. She spent the rest of the class personally discussing the disease, what she’d learned about it, and how she was coping.
Tory passed away in 1994, about a year before the first appearance of HIV drug “cocktails.” The cocktails (customized combinations of antiretroviral drugs) have changed HIV and AIDS from a disease with an almost certain death sentence, to a livable condition for thousands of people who carry the virus.
Dancers never show they’re in pain, and Tory never showed anything less than dignity and grace in the face of this ravaging disease. At her funeral, Robert King wrote: “I am honored to have been touched by this brave and remarkable woman. Her afterglow is vivid and pervasive. She will, however, be terribly missed.”