Once a Dancer Holding Onto the Air on My Grave

I've spent the past couple of weeks immersed in the autobiographies of famous ballerinas. I just finished Allegra Kent's Once A Dancer, and I re-read Gelsey Kirkland's yarn, Dancing on my Grave, and Suzanne Farrell's Holding On to the Air just arrived in the mail yesterday. There are several books about Margot Fonteyn available, but I refuse to read any just yet, because I'm afraid of being disappointed and prefer to keep her on a special pedestal separate from all others. The ballerinas I happen to be concentrating on investigating are the moody, self-absorbed and -aggrandizing ones that seemed to gravitate towards Balanchine.

I haven't read the Farrell book yet, but I have "Elusive Muse" on DVD, which was based on the book, so I figure I have the general gist. Grave I read a few years ago when my ballet teacher in North Miami Beach, Laura Rose May, lent it to me. The book horrified me -- it looks like some cheesy, pulp-fiction-Danielle-Steele-knockoff paperback you'd expect to see on some cheap shelf at Waldenbooks. But it's terribly entertaining. And one has to forgive Gelsey -- she published in the mid-80's, and didn't quite know what she was doing. Farrell and Kent published in the 90's, and their books' presentations are much more stylish. Ms. Kent had the advantage of having been married to a famous, talented photographer, so her cover photo is the best. It totally represents the exotic, elusive, creative image she cultivated.

Out of the three, the one I probably would like the least if I were to meet her in person, Ms. Kent, is the one whose musings I find to be the most fun to read, as long as you have a glass of wine in your hand and aren't pursuing any intellectual purpose in turning the pages. The reason Kent gets my vote as Best Ballerina Autobiog I've Read Thus Far is because she's playful and not afraid to show how flakey she is. While Gelsey raves on and on about how she would very carefully prepare a meal out of a sliver of apple and a teaspoon of cottage cheese, Allegra lets it all out, going so far as to quote the truly-silly personal ads she used to publish. While Suzanne ruminates endlessly and dramatically about how she thinks Balanchine felt about her (and, like, DOZENS of other ballerinas), Allegra jokes about how she managed to stay on the NY City Ballet payroll despite only performing like once a year.

So despite the fact that she seems the flakiest of them all, my hat's off to Allegra Kent for having the clearest perspective on what would be the most useful (both from a writer's and reader's perspective) content to put in an autobiography that is to be read by the kind of people that would invest the time in reading a ballerina's autobiography. Because, when you think about it, why would anyone read a ballerina's autobiography? Ballerinas are there to be observed on the stage. We're reading for fun. Allegra, true to her adopted name, is fun.

The Pope Likes Condoms Now, Maybe

I really enjoyed today's NYT front-page story about the Catholic leadership's dilemma over condom policy ("Ideals Collide as Vatican Rethinks Condom Ban"). It's obvious the Pope will never take his head out of his ass long enough to face the reality that the AIDS epidemic mandates that condom usage be promoted, despite the fact that it's totally immoral to support an inflexible position that contributes to the deaths of tens of thousands of people every day. But ethicists are struggling valiently to figure out some way to develop just the right way for the Vatican to be able to state that condoms are perfectly acceptable, if only in very restricted circumstances.

You can just IMAGINE the difficulty. The Vatican's 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, banned contraception. Any nod to condom usage could undermine the very basis of the church's teaching on sexuality and marriage. But what of those marriages in which one partner is infected and the other is not? Here the ethicists are attempting some backbends. They really made me laugh, but I applaud their efforts.

The basic gist of the rather-tortured potential reasoning the Vatican might offer is thus: using a condom, in those very rare cases of married couples where one partner is infected, can be classified as "medical intervention" rather than contraception. Perhaps Benedict, known for his extremely conservative, dogmatic nature as protector of church doctrine back when he was called Ratzinger, is the only person that could pull something like this off. If anyone less conservative than he were to try to suggest such a thing, it would send Catholics everywhere into an uproar, wringing their hands over whether it is actually possible to use a condom without the intention of contraception.

It's fascinating, this whole thing. I mean, what a fantastic waste of time and energy. Wouldn't it be more productive to just start saving lives immediately and advocate condom usage right here, right now, to heck with the intentions of those using the condoms? What matters is the effect (people not dying), right? And add on top of that the fact that the church is experiencing its greatest growth in Africa, where AIDS is a raging epidemic.

Well, no, of course not, to a religious person. I'm a completely lapsed Catholic, so I guess it's easy for me to write that. But I'm thinking, maybe I should buy some stock in latex companies.