Preamble and Early Inspirations

PREAMBLE

It is September of 2008. I am over 68 years old. This past summer I attended my husband's 5oth college reunion, and my own 50th high school reunion. In four years I will attend my own 50th college reunion. Fifty years is a long time. Sixty-eight years is even longer. One thinks a lot about the past as one ages -- something those who study the elderly refer to as a "life review." One tries to make sense of it all, to evaluate experiences, to think about what one has accomplished or left undone.

Right now I am in a good place. I am still employed as a faculty member at Penn State's college in Altoona, PA, where I have been working since 1990. That was the year I received a Ph. D. in Human Development and Family Studies from Penn State. I have been married for 48 years, to a wonderful man, who is also still working, and we have 2 beautiful, intelligent, wonderful daughters, with busy lives of their own.

As a child, like most children, I always assumed that I would be a wife and mother. I also assumed, because unlike most children of that era, I had a mother who worked full time, that I would work, or have a career. But where I am now is not at all what I wanted to be when I was a girl. Indeed, like the women in Catherine Bateson's book Composeng A Life, I have had some twists and turns along the way, coming to grips with my own abilities and interests, and trying to mesh those with the hopes and aspirations of the man I fell in love with.

In this memor I plan to go back to my childhood dreams and follow myself until I catch up with the person I am today.

EARLY INSPIRATIONS

By the time I was nine I had decided on a career on the stage. I had been inspired by many sources. A favorite book -- one I still own though the binding is falling apart -- was Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes. This story, about three girls, adopted by an eccentric paleontologist who sent them home to his niece while out searching for fossils, presented me with an image of children who led highly organized lives of academic study with private tutors, and lessons in ballet, acting, and music, at an academy dedicated to training children to go on the stage. When they became 12, and old enough to work under British law (they lived in London), they went on auditions, and performed in plays, and pantomimes. I yearned for such a life.

I also had a book called Ballet for Beginners, which used photographs of children in dance classes at one of New York's major dance schools. They all wore black leotards, and black ballet slippers, and stood at a barre. The book showed them doing basic ballet exercises, and described each exercise in careful order. I wanted to go to a ballet school like that.

Of course I must neither forget, nor minimize the influence of the 1948 film, The Red Shoes, starring Moira Shearer of what is now the Royal Ballet of Convent Garden. In spite of its tragic ending, it filled me with an enormous desire to be a dancer.

Then one day a copy of Life magazine fell into my hands. In it was an artice called "LIFE Visits the High School of Performing Arts." The article described a high school right there, in New York City, where I lived, where students majored in dance, or drama, or music. Then and there I made up my mind. I was going to go to that high school! None other would do for me!

I believe in dreams, and in the power of dreams. As "Bloody Mary" sings in South Pacific, "you got to have a dream. If you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?" And as my step-father, Bob, wrote in one of my autograph albums, "the skies the limit, if she keeps her feet on the ground."