A Midnight Dance

by Joanna Davidson Politano

The most beautiful moments of any ballet are the unscripted ones, yet we often waste these fleeting experiences by resenting their intrusion. ~Delphine Bessette, Craven Street Theatre

So handsome, so reserved, compared to what he’d once been. The theater had used him up, it seemed, but hadn’t Paris done the same to me? Change had settled on both of us these past years, but his both intrigued and worried me. There was a depth, a knowing sadness in his expression that made me want to ask him where he’d been and what he’d done. Or what had been done to him. Life had worn down that boyish enthusiasm, paling the sparkle and dimming his eyes considerably.

Ballet is the only art form that never outlives the artist. A dancer is only alive for as long as she can dance, then the world forgets.

God had drawn near to her, and though she seemed to wrestle with how it all fit together in her life, God was part of who she was.

Gaudy as it had suddenly seemed, I belonged to ballet and ballet to me, for I’d loved it and desired it before experience had told me it was evil. There was a raw, unfiltered beauty on the stage before me, and my God-created heart was magnetized to it. “Does belonging to God mean I have to give up my dreams?” I’d asked this once of Mama when I was small—maybe seven or eight—and it had nearly broken my heart to even voice it. “No, little one,” she’d answered. “But it means you’d best be wholly willing to.”

“A great many things that were originally noble and beautiful have been tarnished by this world, but that doesn’t change what they were originally created to be.”