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“You were in a fight, Jock. You were in a fight. I’ve been so scared—you’ve been talking funny for a long time. Are you okay now? I’m trying to take you home.”

Over the next few hours, with many rest stops on the way, Ryan brought me home. Faded, dreamlike memories gradually came back; I began to recall flashes and images. Tackled, knocked down, and staggering back to my feet. Johnny Ford punched me in the face. Gaitlin and others of the Famwoods, as they ran up, punching away, too. I would be knocked down and stumble up, only to be punched down again. “My turn, my turn!” My friends began to intervene, and fights began breaking out all around. Bobby Rosario judo-throwing someone over his back, and the Famwoods leaving me to gang up on him. A police car rolling along the cyclone fence and then through a gap onto the turf of the field. (Abie Grossfeld, in later years, told me, “I called the cops.”) Everyone scattering, dashing in every direction. Pictures of the Famwoods clambering up and over the fence, fleeing from the scene. And then nothing remembered until coming to at the water fountain with Ryan an hour later and a half mile away.

That was the end of my life on the block. Like an amputation. I never saw any of the Famwoods again. The ballet became my world. I stayed in touch with a handful of friends, mostly Abie and Jimmy. Several times, I’d invite them to come to the ballet. I would secret a half dozen of them, via the City Center fire escape, to the upper balcony. At my first performance (October 1949), they endured Mother Goose Suite (I was one of four silhouetted couples dancing in the darkened background, and could barely lift my ballerina, Jillana, not because she was heavy, but because my muscles had not fully developed); Orpheus (dressed in gray and carrying a papier-mâché rock, in even murkier lighting); and then in the last ballet, Symphony in C, I popped onto the brightly lit stage in the back row for a few minutes of the fourth movement. My clique in the balcony remained alert enough to spot me, and broke into raucous whistles and bellowing cheers. After the final bows, Maria Tallchief, the star of the company, announced to the cast, “Did you hear that wonderful audience, cheering and whistling from the balcony? Oh, they loved me tonight!”

My best friend, Jimmy, eschewed being a sneaker-inner. He bought his balcony ticket and strode in through the front door. Jim haunted City Center, whether I was dancing or not, clipped and saved every newspaper review, and kept diaries. His collection of NYCB memorabilia is impressive. “Jack-o,” he wrote to me recently, “you ask me why I collected this stuff. Few people were doing it, as NYCB was not on the heap in those days. Also, Balanchine was amazing, though most people primarily looked at the dancers over what he was doing! And—during this time, it was just as exciting to see who was in the audience at the City Center as to who was on the stage:

Alfred Kinsey (of the Kinsey Reports) at Nutcracker, taking addresses from gays who approached him at the premiere’s intermission;

Anna Freud at the ballet Opus 34, looking glum and dour;

William Faulkner (with a discreet woman in black and pearls) in the City Center lobby during intermission, leaning against a radiator, smoking a pipe (and in a trench coat);

Salvador Dalí in an aisle seat in Row R (being inconspicuous!) with mustache and gold cane, always coming to New York in winter, staying at the St. Regis Hotel;

W. H. Auden at the ballet in his bedroom slippers (even when it was snowing outside);

Franchot Tone, the actor, a Balanchine admirer, trumpeting his praises in his sonorous voice at every opportunity, always seated with a beautiful blonde.

“The seats were by no means full, but the audience was as exciting as the dancers!”

Reading Jimmy’s notes sparked memories of several NYCB matinees at City Center, where there were more dancers onstage than patrons in the audience. The house held some two thousand seats,