METROPOLITAN DIARY
Apollo’s Shine
Dear Diary:
In the early 1960s, I was a student at the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s official academy. I loved all of the company dancers, but Jacques d’Amboise was my all-out favorite. It was seeing him in Balanchine’s “Apollo” that led me to the ballet school.
Forty years later, I was working in London and saw that the National Dance Institute was offering a two-week teacher-training program in New York. Jacques had founded the institute in 1976 to give New York City schoolchildren firsthand experience with the arts.
I was aware that I was well past the usual recruitment age. A friend who knew Jacques from their early City Ballet days together wrote to him on my behalf, and I was accepted into the program.
At our first workshop, Jacques walked into the studio.
“Where is Kaye’s friend?” he shouted.
I maneuvered my way past the other dancers and stood facing him. I told him how much seeing him dance Apollo on that small City Center stage had meant to me.
He started humming a few bars of the Stravinsky score, rising to demi pointe, his arms circling his head.
He was Apollo once again.
— Madeleine Piepes Nicklin
Pasta Special
Dear Diary:
I was riding the N train from Manhattan to Queens on a sunny Saturday afternoon recently when a woman in a brightly printed sundress and large round glasses leaned out our subway car door at the Lexington Avenue stop and yelled, “Alfredo!”
A gray-haired man sitting across from me piped up.
“Fettuccine,” he said.
I laughed. I was the only one among the dozen or so nearby passengers who seemed to have heard and gotten the joke.
A few minutes later, after the train had surfaced from under the East River and pulled into Queensboro Plaza, the man rose to leave the train.
He turned to me as he stepped out the door.
“So long, linguine,” he called out.
— Cynthia Wachtell
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/01/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html
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