Don't Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet – A Powerful Memoir from the School of American Ballet and the Women Who Survived It

by Alice Robb

those men on the sidelines of Degas’s paintings had real-life counterparts in the rich men who scouted for lovers and prostitutes among the fresh-faced young girls at the Opera. And how the girls’ mothers would often act as pimps, arranging the sale of their own daughters.