L'Chaim!

I found this at an estate sale several years ago and was so touched by it that I bought it for myself as a keepsake. I finally have somewhere to show it off. As far as I know, Dennis and I are not related, but clearly someone on The Healy Team performed a Mitzvah! The only thing I can find about him is that he was a veteran of WWI from Stoughton, if that is indeed the same Dennis A. Healy. It is a VERY heavy, big and beautiful bronze plaque. I am proud of you, Dennis, you have honored the Healy name. Happy Passover to all!

New York City

So Cathie Black had to resign. Thank Heavens. Next, please, please, Janette Sadik-Khan. The problem with people like Mayor Bloomberg is that they are not New Yorkers. They view Manhattan as an Emerald City on top of the hill, encrusted with jewels, and not to be tarnished with the vagaries of everyday living. There are real native New Yorkers who grow up here, and know the streets as their home town. New Yorkers don't see it as the place where they come to make their fortune, but rather the place where they have walked to school and to the playground as children. They take the subway without it being a photo opportunity and cause for self-congratulation. Their families live locally, and are--surprise!--also native New Yorkers. Mayor Bloomberg and his cohorts, who come to the City later in life, try to reshape it as a playground for the rich, and they fail to see or appreciate the nitty-gritty aspects. When they do see anything approaching quotidien reality, they try to eradicate it. They need to be reminded at some point in the proceedings that there are other boroughs which comprise the city of New York. A Danish friend of mine turned to me one evening at a dinner in Manhattan a few years ago and said: "Kathy, where are you from?"

"Here," I answered.

"No, I mean, where are you from before?"

"Here," I answered again.

"No, I mean, before you came here," he persisted.

"I was born here," I explained.

"You were?" He was dumbfounded. "You are a New Yorker?!"

"Yes."

"I don't think I've ever met one! I didn't know there were any!" He was really taken aback. Some rich irony in that he lived here for many years and never met a native New Yorker. Rich irony, too, in that he hails from Copenhagen. Our esteemed DOT commissioner is laboring mightily to remake NYC into Copenhagen, being as she vacationed there once and was struck by the beauty and quaintness of the Danish capital--not to mention its preponderance of bicycle traffic. I doubt that Copenhagen would care to be remolded into Manhattan, but for reasons which remain unfathomable to anyone but Ms. Sadik-Khan, she envisions the shaping of our five boroughs into a quaint European capital. Likewise Mr. Dictator, who rode roughshod over term limits, and does not wish anyone to be able to travel in a gas-guzzling black fancy SUV unobstructed through the City streets except for, of course, Himself. He does not know the City the way people who grew up there do. The way I think of New York is more the way Willa Cather closed the novel Lucy Gayheart: "What was a man's "home town" anyway, but the place where he had had disappointments, and had learned to bear them?" If Michael Bloomberg and his dilettante Ladies-Who-Lunch accomplices knew the City in that way, they would never be trying to perpetrate these affronts to the character of the City.

Thank you, Elizabeth Taylor

Photo copyright Walter Healy. All rights reserved.

With the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, I have been reflecting back on living through the initial period of the AIDS epidemic in New York as an adolescent, albeit one who was preternaturally professional in the ballet world. I signed a senior principal contract with the English National Ballet when I was fifteen years old, which situated me firmly in an adult professional world. The first one of my close friends died of the disease on my seventeenth birthday. By the time I was about twenty-seven, I had lost twenty-six people to HIV and AIDS. They were people I knew, had worked with or in some cases, was particularly close to. I deliberately stopped counting after that because counting them in trying to remember them hurt my brain. I would rather think of the people I lost by name than by numbers or quantity. There is a theological concept of embracing someone’s essence by “naming” them, so I wrote down their names on a small green sheet of paper and taped it up to my wall. It is almost filled on the second side of the sheet now. It wasn’t when I put it up first. Mercifully, the rate slowed after that. It has transmogrified into people who are living with HIV/AIDS as a condition that can be managed.

At the time, AIDS attached a dark cloud to the rest of us in the business. I experienced, in some measure, the same stigma as a gay man, because such was the ignorance of the disease that when I came up against “civilians,” they assumed anyone in “the business” might have it. I saw and felt firsthand much of the prejudice and fear gay men faced from people outside their community. Everyone was scared in the early eighties in Manhattan when there was so little information about the disease. I was scared, too, for myself, because at that point in the trajectory of the epidemic, no one understood exactly how the disease could be contracted.

But the worst part for me on a personal level came later. I was most terrified at the thought of losing people close to me. I lost several of them. I feared the potential loss of one of them in particular. I prayed every single night for years that he would be okay and I made several bargains with the Lord on that one. He is still living. I don’t think he survived because of my prayers and bargains (although I am grateful that he did), but rather because he was able to hang on long enough to get the stronger drug cocktails they have now that control it. There is some perverse irony and humor in my friend being an ornery personality. I have no doubt whatsoever that if he had suspected I was praying for him and making “survival” bargains on his behalf, he would have gone right ahead and died just to spite me.

Another excruciating aspect was the good-bye conversation. I had several of those, where people I had known for years bade me farewell, making pronouncements that took on apocalyptic tones in retrospect. “You have to try to do everything, Katherine, don’t let the bums get you down,” one of my friends admonished me in one such parting conversation. Another one observed in painful, slowed speech in the hospice where he was spending his final days that what he liked about me best was that “you are always a lady, and always so kind to everyone.” I seemed to lose my ability to verbalize at moments like that when I could have used it the most. And always, always, there were the people who were left behind. There was one practice where the coach who was rehearsing me had valiantly come in to work right after losing his lover. He started to cry during the practice session, and we both just gave up. I sat next to him and held his hand while he cried, and that was the rehearsal. I wished I could have made it better. Maybe I helped a little bit, because where we were (not New York City anymore) was not a place where you could easily bring up the topics of either homosexuality or AIDS, which immeasurably complicated the grieving process.

I remained mute for decades about the whole experience of losing that many people and living through a plague. No one understood if I did talk about it, even after the epidemic had subsided. They would still look at me funny, as though I might have it myself. If someone had a cold during the eighties in my little corner of the world, it was not uncommon to hear that they had died shortly afterwards. I had terrible hypochondria for years because I was traumatized by the suddenness and repetitiveness of those disappearances, which were possessed of the flat finality of granite. I came to forget what had triggered my hypochondria, and when I remembered again one day out of the clear blue, I got a shock.

What is awful now is that young people today have no conception of what it was like or what was lost: the people, the talent and the teachers. They also, perhaps not least, have no idea of how much trauma there remains in those of us who lived through it and didn’t die, those of us who are still walking around and remember all the people who did die. I don’t want anyone else to suffer through that the way we did in the eighties and well into the nineties, but it is important to comprehend what happened to us, too. It is also of paramount importance to understand certain things about this disease, in order to prevent it from happening again. Just because HIV/AIDS is considered a manageable condition now, doesn’t mean it is much fun to have, or that one should be careless about getting it. The light at the end of this sulfurous tunnel was a massive paradigm shift. A shift to a happier place (all relative, of course), where you can have normal everyday disagreements with a friend who has HIV, instead of being horribly aware that they might not be around for long and must therefore be treated with kid gloves, like angels-in-waiting hovering around a hellish airline gate.

Thank goodness for people like Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana. In the darkest hours, they made it less frightening. They showed everyone that you could interact with people living with HIV and AIDS, and they brought the disease out into the open so that there could be progress and research.

Some stray feral kittens and cats adopted me eight years ago. There is a theory that sometimes people reincarnate as animals, and I have often wondered if any of my cats are the souls of people I knew who have come back to me. I hope they are. Perhaps it is not quite as glamorous and “happening” as their previous go-round, but they have a loving and quiet life with me and they could have fared a lot worse.

As for myself, I walk around with an army of ghosts. I am like that kid in "The Sixth Sense.” I see dead people.

--Katherine Healy

   April 2, 2011

Vera Nemtchinova

My teacher was Vera Nemtchinova. By “teacher,” I mean my single foundational teacher in the way that ballerinas who went to the Kirov or the Bolshoi say that a certain pedagogue was “my teacher.” I addressed her as “Madame” until the end, and I curtsied to her after every lesson in addition to the formal révérence exercise that was a part of her class. She was a wonderful, elegant lady, who taught many people over a period of many years here in New York and left an indelible impression on those who were fortunate enough to take her classes. But beyond that, I was lucky enough to have had several years of private coaching with her. I went on to become a principal ballerina and in later years, a coach. I understand, therefore, the responsibility inherent in passing on the knowledge and the care Madame invested in me. I have tried to pay that forward when the opportunity arises with the young dancers I coach. I always say the training she gave me was like military boot camp—that is how strenuous and technically demanding it was. For example, I did barre work in the center, rarely actually holding on to the barre. She made me do fouettés as a child with my arms held in fifth/en couronne the entire time. Straight leg grands jetés landing in arabesque, with a relevé to balance on demi-pointe added after that. She taught me the original Diaghilev versions of all the Sleeping Beauty principal and soloist variations and Fokine’s Chopiniana. It was with Madame, in a private lesson on my tenth birthday, that I tied on my very first pair of pointe shoes and stood en pointe for the first time. I was always nervous before the lessons, for I did not want to disappoint her. She had such a beautiful way of moving. Her port de bras was infused with a weighty grandeur, poignantly tempered by the tremulous caution in movement that older artists develop with the passage of time—something I understand all too well now! My academic balletic education was at the School of American Ballet, but the personal coaching and foundation Madame gave me set the groundwork for everything I was able to do later, and it gave me the ability to appreciate and use the different methods of all my later teachers. It was such a fine foundation that I could have put almost anything over it later and I would have been able to manage.

Madame died in 1984. I grieved, but oddly, I never have felt as though she was actually gone. She got so thoroughly inside my artistry and technique in the process of forming it that she has, somehow, always been with me. When I later met and got to know Sir Frederick Ashton and Dame Alicia Markova in England, they both took me into their hearts as though I were a long lost child, such was their high regard for Madame. I was able to relate to them and they recognized her training in me. While there was a cavernous age difference, I found that Sir Frederick, Dame Alicia and I spoke the same artistic language and had the same set of reference points. That was finally, also, perhaps the most marvelous thing about Madame: although there was a vertiginous corridor of seventy years separating the two of us, I never felt it—while we were together, it was as though we were suspended in time and space. That chasm of seventy years vanished during the transfer of knowledge between the two ballerinas. Vera Nemtchinova is one of the few people about whom I would say, as a mark of deep respect and honor from one ballerina to another, that if she stood in a studio, no matter where it was, then there was really and truly “Ballet” in that studio.

                                                                                                -- Katherine Healy

                                                                                                    November, 2010

Still trying to navigate this!