Like most young dancers who wish to make the jump to the professional level, I took my first big step by auditioning for and attending a summer intensive at the School of American Ballet. It was a big stretch for me in many ways; I religiously rode the train each morning (with Rebecca, another young dancer and a car full of newspaper-toting suits) an hour each way from Connecticut to Manhattan then took a bus uptown to the school.
I was thirteen years old.
New York held the promise of a potential new and exciting life, a life I’d dreamed of for a long time. The chance to study at SAB meant I was one step closer to that life and becoming a full-time student… perhaps one day a member of New York City Ballet.
Although it sounds glamorous, I assure you it was not. Particularly that first summer. Our days were spent sweating it out, both literally and figuratively, vying to stand out from a crowded roomful of dancers (many of whom had made a cross-country trek for this privilege). In between morning and afternoon classes we had a brief recess for lunch.
But every lunch break brought up the serious question of whether or not we would survive crossing the stupendously large and busy intersections of Broadway and Columbus Avenues to get to the local deli. This was a thought-provoking question for two distinct yet equally important reasons: 1) Crossing any intersection in New York often meant taking your life in your hands because motorists (especially taxi drivers) tended to speed up when they had potential victims lined up in their sights and 2) a freak heat wave (temperatures hovered around 104 for weeks) made the streets so hot that you could fry an egg on them in seconds… you had to seriously consider whether or not a trip to the deli was really worth it… and whether or not your shoes would disintegrate on the asphalt.
self-explanatory.
Then there was the return trip to Grand Central to think about. Classes let out around 4pm each day – at the height of the day’s heat – and most of the busses weren’t air-conditioned. We’d exit the temperature-controlled halls of SAB and step out into a wall of heat. It felt like breathing hot bathwater. As the minutes ticked by while we waited at the bus stop we’d stare off into the wavy-lined, heat-soaked distance to see if the bus was even visible yet, wondering if we might expire before it arrived. A few days into the summer, Rebecca and I bought some groovy handheld fans at a little Asian shop, and I am pretty sure they saved our lives (lots of people died that summer…seriously).
School of American Ballet, 1936, by Alfred Eisenstaedt for LIFE
Although we were climatically challenged, this did nothing to dampen our enthusiasm. It was one of those character-building experiences, the first of many that any dancer goes through.
Little did we know: this was the easy part.