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My favorite dancer
Last Saturday, I was at the home of friends of mine, attending a celebration. It was crowded, but there was an old lady sitting alone on a couch: I went over to keep her company. I wasn't sure what her condition was--if she would be able to communicate with me--but she was very lucid and her eyes sparkled with humor. You could see in her face that she had once been a great beauty--still was, in my opinion.
She was born in 1907--100 years old! Her name is Dorothy. Her father was a minister. As a youngster she became an expert at ballroom dancing. Men and women danced all up and down the east coast of the US in those days in great halls--a little like Dancing With The Stars, she told me, "but we were more elegant." I could imagine it as she told it to me--the competitions, Dorothy at seventeen a stunning young woman. In that year, a magician named Houdini saw her dance, and went to her father and asked if Dorothy could go on tour with him. "I will treat her like my own daughter," Houdini told her father.
And he did. Dorothy became Houdini's stunt girl and she worked in all of his tricks. "There was nothing supernatural about him," she told me. "He was just good at what he did. And he had mesmerizing eyes." Dorothy said that in all of the years she worked with the great man, all of the times he handled her in their magic tricks, he was "always the perfect gentleman."
She stayed with him til the end. She missed him terribly when he was gone. She began dancing competitively again. She married her partner. He was a great businessman as well and soon owned a great deal of real estate in New York city. But unlike Houdini, he wasn't a faithful partner.
"Why do men do that, chase other women?" Dorothy asked, looking at me closely.
"I don't know," I said. "It isn't right. But think with some men it is hardwired into them."
Dorothy held my forearm and nodded at this sadly. "Sometimes it is a part of their nature," she said. You could see how it had wounded her. She stayed with the man, through thick and thin, until he died at age eighty. He left her such a huge fortune that universities now court her for her favor--she actually founded one university on her own, and a hospital as well. She went back to her dancing. She survived. She had breast cancer, lost both breasts. She had two bouts with colon cancer. She always went back to her dancing, and she survived.
"I've had a one in a million life," she said to me, with her miracle eyes sparkling, after we had talked for an hour. "Who would have guessed I could have so many wonderful things happen to me?" Her eyes were all about looking to the future--the game was still afoot. I thought: no wonder she's had such great fortune, with that attitude. Facing great despair, Dorothy danced. She just held on and always went back to the thing she loved, the thing that moved her more than anything else. She became, that evening, a hero of mine.
I thought I would share the story with the other, favorite dancers I've met on this website.
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Re: My favorite dancer
What a lovely story and amazing lady! Thanks for sharing (-:
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Re: My favorite dancer
ya know..I just researched more on this woman...we went to the same high school!