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By Root 902 0

the nerve and desire to enter; it wasn’t warm and welcoming—what was?—but it offered its own gradations of grudging acceptance, based not on money, breeding, boarding-school connections, Ivy League affiliation, the right address, or the ability to wield a salad fork like a neurosurgeon’s scalpel but on the measure of knowledge, passion, and dogged curiosity for seeing what was out there to see because there was always something new to see even in things you had seen so many times before, a fresh interpretation that blew off the chalk dust. It made you come to it, rise to the challenging occasion. Piddlers need not apply. I went to modern dance performances, saw Cunningham’s company, and attended a few events on the outskirts of the Village that seemed to belong to the Soviet bloc where the venues were inadequately ventilated (you left coughing coal dust) to give those avant-gardenias a try, but for me they didn’t take root in the sky, seize the sun.

Perhaps ballet personified all of the nice things denied me up to then (by no one in particular, by the luck of the draw), things I thought I didn’t feel I deserved, and in certain moods still don’t. Without realizing it until the fug was washed off my windshield, I had grown up Beauty-deprived, a word I’m capitalizing to differentiate it from the beauty of a flower or the beauty of a sunset or the beauty of a smiling face or any of those other Kodak moments to paste in our memory books and tell ourselves are enough; and they’re not. They’re not genius-blessed. They’re not Bach, they’re not Balanchine, they’re not Geoffrey Beene, they’re not mind-woven enchantments of endlessly evolving, revolving fractals. No matter how Dewey decimalized your preferences and priorities may appear, you never know what you truly want in this pastiche world, because what you want is based on the tray of choices that were passed around during your upbringing, a limited selection that you believe is all that is available until a curtain parts, a light falls, and there something stands, in a state of expectancy, awaiting the cue. It would be leaning too hard on magnetic polarities to portray porn and ballet as the two opponents contending for my lapsed Catholic soul—a porn star perched on one shoulder, making lascivious mouth movements, Princess Aurora on the other, bourréeing to beat the band—but it would make a cool movie. Ballet was nearly everything I wasn’t, and what I wasn’t was what I must have wanted most. It also awakened the sensitive feminine side of me that had been lying dormant under all that Mailer and Peckinpah, an admission that I have usefully learned over the years can bring any conversation to a dead halt.

Classical ballet had its own rebel appeal. It stood perpendicular to the prevailing entertainment culture of the seventies, in a stance of stately opposition. Its conservatism, in retrospect, may have been the highest form of defiant resistance, a Brideshead Revisited breathing monument to faith, order, enduringness. Unlike Joffrey Ballet, which enjoyed a pop smash with its premiere of Twyla Tharp’s Deuce Coupe, set to the songs of the Beach Boys (and the template for every Broadway jukebox musical ever since, from Mamma Mia! to Jersey Boys), New York City Ballet remained a pennant-bannered Monaco moated and aloof from the nagging needlings of the Zeitgeist to be relevant, socially concerned, hip, happening, and in harmony with the vibrating moment, its few veerings in this direction winced at as flights of fancy that turned into instant dodos, such as Balanchine’s jet-age ode PAMTGG, pronounced “Pam-te-guh-guh.” To those few who saw it, “guh-guh” was gaga. Its title taken from Pan Am’s slogan jingle, “Pan Am Makes the Going Great,” PAMTGG flurried out female dancers in icicle-spiked helmets and male dancers in customized Speed Racer helmets on a mod set that included a loose pyramid of transparent Plexiglas luggage, and such cavorting they appear to do. From the relatively scarce photographs of the production, it isn’t commercial air travel being evoked at its most dashing