A. Early Years and Work: 1949-1967
Permanent URI for this collection
For as long as I can remember, I have no memories of my
early childhood. That sounds strange, but bringing back
memories as an intentional act is a process of ‘remembering’,
and I can bring very little into my imagination until about the
age of ten. It was later when I had many interesting
conversations with Gerald Edelman, Nobel Prize winner and
founder of the Neurosciences Institute that I began to
understand memory. He called memory, “the remembered
present” and helped me to understand that memory is a
process, not a thing, and that reconstructing past maps of
information into the present, adaptive, conscious moment was
very complex and suggests that memory is fluid not static. As
you can see already, much of the narrative of this Archive is
going to skip from past to present to future and back. It is not
exactly a memoir, but I will try to capture the important
moments and how those moments might help shape something
useful for the reader.
Improvisation is going to be introduced even this early in my childhood and it will be a through line weaving across this narrative. As you can see from a photograph from third grade at Oak Lane Country Day School outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that I was engrossed in improvising through movement. I have no memory of why or how, but I think the young boy who was dancing with me was named Mark Jamison, although I could be mistaken. I know that Fran Weiss was pictured above my right arm, and that Jackie Novak was sitting next to her. I know that because they were my best friends in elementary school: Oak Lane Country Day School. I don’t know why I remember this so distinctly, and as I mentioned how few things I remembered, but one of them was that I could improvise my body from a very young age, and that it felt like survival to me. What I could not express in any other way, verbal, written or drawn, I could get my emotions out of my body through movement. Since I was sent to dance classes at around age 8, and then on to the Philadelphia Dance Academy around 10 years old in center city Philadelphia (later to become the University of the Arts), my powerful experience with my dance teacher Nadia Chilkovsky was modern dance improvisation.
I was born on March 2 nd , 1949 to parents Gladys and Herbert L. Myers. My sister, Margaret, “Maggie”, was born six years later. In all respects, a young African American woman, Grace Plummer was the person who was the most influential in my upbringing and instilled the values in me that I carry to this day., She basically took care of all of our needs, as our parents, who might have even been living in the house, were rarely seen or heard from. My mother had the memorable quality of running a dynamic art gallery called, “1015”, the address of our house: 1015 Greenwood Ave. Wyncote, Pennsylvania. What I remember about the house was my sister and I wandering around in this huge revolutionary war hospital, turned personal residence. The radiators creaked constantly, there were seven bathrooms, and it was frightening. There were so many door entrances, that parties could occur in certain parts of the house and you didn’t have a clue. Curtis Arboretum was up the street that consisted of different species of trees. I especially remember many times, going to see the ginkgo trees whenever I had the time and feeding the ducks.
It was simultaneously irritating and exciting to live inside an art gallery. My sister and I would eat TV dinners in front of television shows like Mr. Ed, Leave it to Beaver and Rocky and Bullwinkle while sophisticated people walked by us looking at interesting paintings by Philadelphia painters, sculptors and ceramicists such as Larry Day, Natalie Charkow, Paul Keane, Bill Daley and Rudy Staffel. I found out later that her gallery information and history is in the Smithsonian Archive in Washington, D.C. My mother was very smart and had a real interest in visual art. She got her B.A. degree at Beaver College in Pennsylvania when she was 60 years old. Her sister Esther, who in her 90s moved close to me in Vermont, always said that whenever she visited from California, which was not often, she was amazed at the fact that I was the parent in the family, and not my parents. I would walk around with a pocketbook with everything organized and ready to go when I was six years old. I have no memory of this at all.
Growing up with Gracie was nothing less than amazing and incredible. Most Saturday nights she would take us to “The Uptown”, which was a dance hall like the Apollo Theater in Harlem. All of the Motown groups from Detroit would perform there as well as Philadelphia icons. My whole childhood was the Miracles and Smokey Robinson, the Temptations and the four Tops. There is a through line here as in Junior High School, my best friend Judi Lowe’s father started a successful record company whose main feature was Chubby Checker and his hit single, the Twist. Of course, Didi Sharp followed with the “Mashed Potatoes”, and there was much more. I was a great social dancer, and learned it all from Gracie. Gracie was very thin and tall, with big eyes that could hardly see a thing without her super thick lenses and rimmed glasses. She was beautiful to us and had so much love pouring out of her that my sister and I were well taken care of, even though it was not exactly a traditional upbringing. Gracie went on to become a registered nurse and have four children of her own. On some Sundays, she would take us to a Baptist Church in North Philadelphia where everyone was African-American except for us, where there was serious spirituality, singing and faith speech going on, and definitely influenced my outlook on the world. I didn’t really comprehend the words from the preacher during his improvised sermons, but it was very exciting, inspiring, and allowed you to connect with people in real and deep ways. Even though I was Jewish and felt very connected to my roots, it seemed perfectly natural to engage in other forms of faith. Both of our parents were atheists, but my sister and I prayed every day, and we had no idea why.
It is important to say a few words about Oak Lane Country Day School where I went to school from nursery school through sixth grade. Followers of John Dewey founded the school (this will also be a recurring theme later to be picked up at Bennington College and other career choices). It had been a progressive school laboratory connected to Temple University, and then branched off to become its own school. It was a powerful elementary education, full of creativity, nature walks, and artistic exploration. Other than a brief time when a student bully charged us money every day or he would look up our skirts, it was a glorious education. I remember our wonderful student productions that were quite elaborate. In third grade, I was Sleeping Beauty in a beautiful dance ballet. In fourth grade, I was Peter Pan, having watched the Mary Martin production on Broadway, and in fifth or sixth grade, (I can’t remember which), we conceived a rendition of the cosmic universe accompanied by “The Planets” by Gustav Holst.
After sixth grade graduation, it was time to enter seventh grade at Thomas Williams Junior High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. As you can imagine, the first day I attended public school (my father wanted me to experience public education which was a noteworthy goal) I was wearing a pink poodle skirt, patent leather shoes, a big bulky wool sweater.
I never cut my hair so it was wild and thick and down to my waist. They immediately put me in section 57 (17 was the smartest), and everyone else in my class was wearing all black and looked like they were ready to rumble. I became good friends with all of them, and within days had been moved to section 47 where I met my best friends for the next 20 years, Pegge and Mert. By the end of the term, they had moved me to 17 where I never felt at home.
Returning to my dance training, my parents put me on a train all by myself at 12 years old to center city Philadelphia so that I could walk to Van Pelt St. to take serious dance training. The Philadelphia Dance Academy offered Isadora Duncan dance classes, modern dance technique, improvisation and composition, Flamenco, and Labanotation. Nadia Chilkovsky, my teacher had studied with an Isadorable, and was briefly in the original dance company of Martha Graham. I had to study all of the dance forms since it was an Academy, and we were trained to perform our dancing on the stage at The Academy of Music and I remember that being very special and very serious. The biggest dance companies in the world and Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev performed at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. I know because I saw them perform Romeo and Juliet and I cried. I won a Silver Medal award during this time and I remember one dance that revolved around a Sun King that I had a big part in, performed on this enormous stage at The Academy of Music. One feature of that school is that I ended up traveling to Helsinki, Finland and London, England with Nadia and her husband. Dyane Grey, who was a very talented dancer at The Philadelphia Dance Academy came with us. She stayed there and went on to have a great career. We toured and I danced while Nadia taught classes. Another feature was that Judith Jameson attended the school and she ended up dancing Revelations for Alvin Ailey and directing his dance company for years. Also, a strong dancer named Erica Goodman who happened to be the jazz great Benny Goodman’s niece. I loved improvising in my classes at The Philadelphia Dance Academy. I was hopeless at memorizing any steps for choreography, so finally my teacher gave up and only let me improvise all of my compositions. Since life at home was pure chaos, improvisation gave me ways to understand my feelings and make my way through the world. I kept having a recurring dream that shapes and objects were fracturing and fragments were flying everywhere, and improvising made me feel like I was always putting them back together.
Another important fact is that I was born Susan Elizabeth Myers, even though since my marriage, it has been Susan Sgorbati. I always liked the name Sgorbati better than Myers, and I think since my parents’ ancestors that were Jewish on both sides were very brave at escaping pogroms from Lithuania and Russia, most likely changed their names at Ellis Island, I never really thought Myers was our real name. Sgorbati is an odd Jewish name, coming from Italian ancestors of my former husband. However, since my former husband is Italian, it makes sense. During this formative period of childhood, there were two other significant events: Isadora Duncan dancing, and Indian Hill Camp. Isadora Duncan was a pioneer and breakthrough artist in the early 1900s, who danced her heart out in bare feet with very little clothing and plenty of beautiful silk, flowing scarves. Read her autobiography, “My Life” to get the full picture. Nadia Chilkovsky had either been an “Isadorable” as they were called or close to them, and this was serious business. We had to make our own costumes by dying crumpled silk tunics in tealeaves, and learn all of the Duncan dances by heart. Much of this was handling flowing silk, pastel scarves that could inspire our passions for beauty, art, love, and ecstatic expressions of movement. This was a wonderful activity for a young person as Isadora had recommended in her own life and autobiography. It freed our souls, made us feel like we were doing important work, and communed with nature and our spiritual selves. We performed everywhere, and I remember one time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art among Greek statues and blossoming flowers.
The other significant dance experience during this period of time was being sent to Indian Hill Camp, a summer residential program in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. This endeavor happened because my previous camp experience at Camp Geneva in the Poconos, was an unqualified disaster. I cried every night that I wasn’t sneaking out and stealing food out of the canteen. I am usually a fairly well-behaved person (at least in front of people at institutions) except for that time at overnight camp. Any longer I would have become a full-fledged criminal, anything to not obey the stifling rules of that enterprise. But in 1962, a few years later, I was sent to an arts camp where I could dance, and everyone thought that would take care of me for the summer. I was fifteen years old when I went to Indian Hill. It turned out to be a wonderful experience for the following reasons: my dance instructor, Marjorie Mazia was an inspired teacher, her son, Joady Guthrie was my first infatuation. Joadie was Arlo’s younger brother, and his sister Nora, I just idolized, and she liked to dance too. They were all the children of the unique and amazing legendary folk artist, Woody Guthrie and I was just enthralled. It was a very experimental summer, and it made me look at a bigger world than I was used to seeing from a Philadelphia perspective. Marjorie wanted me to expand my dance horizons as well, much to Nadia’s dismay, so I went once to NYC the following year to the Martha Graham Dance Studio, took a class, and decided that it was too choreographed for me, not enough improvisation and too far to travel from Philadelphia.
Another memory is my best friend, Pegge Kirschner living with me during my senior year of high school because her parents were also nowhere to be seen. Pegge went on to create “Garnet Hill”, the amazing clothing company and was the first person to import flannel sheets into the United States, of which I was a recipient. She also worked for Leon Botstein who was President of a small known college at the time called, Franconia College in Franconia, New Hampshire. He later went on to become the well-known President of Bard College. Pegge and her new husband Grant Dowse died in a small plane crash after we had returned from California and our wild ways and she had settled down and started the business. It happened a few years later in a snowstorm coming back from a catalogue meeting in Canada. It was such a shock that I still haven’t gotten over it. The other memory was going with another one of my best friends, David Richman, to Philadelphia 76er basketball games and meeting Wilt Chamberlain, who somehow got a crush on me (that was nothing unusual for him) and later pursued me when I was at Bennington College to no avail. David has just written a memoir about his time with Wilt since his father was the owner of the basketball team. David was the President of the Cheltenham High School Student Council and I was the Vice-President. I was also on the swimming team, being one of their best divers, and doing all kinds of crazy moves like the half gainer, one and a half pikes, and backward flips into the water from the high board. We were a wild bunch of teenagers in suburban Philadelphia and we played hard. The only thing that kept me sane and from getting into real trouble was my dancing, ‘improvisation’ to be more specific. I was certainly an adolescent ‘at-risk’, which will have another connection later on. The last interesting part of this early story was that a wild character who drove a Harley Davidson motorcycle and attended many of the wilder parties at my house at 1015 when the parents were not home, and loved to come visit my younger sister, turned out to the be the man that I would marry several years later. Whether it is legend or truth, my sister had an elaborate maize for her hamsters that filled the whole room and wrote her extensive autobiography by the time she was in sixth grade.
To make a transition to the next chapter which is the Bennington years, is based on the fact that I wanted to go to NYC to dance, but my father said no, “it is college that is going to happen next”, and there were only two colleges at that time in 1967 that offered modern dance as a major area of study: Bennington and Sarah Lawrence. The summer before I was to go to Bennington College, I traveled to Stockholm to dance with the former talented dancer from Philadelphia named Dyane Gray who had gone on the first trip to Europe and moved to Sweden. I ended up as a disco dancer in Paris, dancing on the tables 12 hours all night in a discotheque, getting really sick, having a mad crush on another dancer who turned out to be Rudolph Nureyev’s lover, and returned to the States just in time to go to Bennington College. I was barely able to hold myself together, having lost a tremendous amount of weight and being so weak from sickness. I don’t think my parents really noticed and whisked me up with a drive to Vermont.
Postcript: Reading this over, I think I have come down too hard on my parents, since I forgive them for being absent and I thank God for Gracie. My father was a successful businessman, but wishful jazz musician, and my mother always thought she was an art dilletante, but really achieved success with her Art Gallery, where she showed original Philadelphia artists. Her portrait and legacy, the artists and their paintings are currently in the Woodmere Museum in Philadelphia.
Photographs and News Articles
Early years with parents and sister
Photographs from Oak Lane Country Day School
Photographs from Cheltenham High School
Photographs from Indian Hill Camp
Photographs and Newspaper Articles from Philadelphia Dance
Academy
Photographs and Newspaper Articles from European trips
Improvisation is going to be introduced even this early in my childhood and it will be a through line weaving across this narrative. As you can see from a photograph from third grade at Oak Lane Country Day School outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that I was engrossed in improvising through movement. I have no memory of why or how, but I think the young boy who was dancing with me was named Mark Jamison, although I could be mistaken. I know that Fran Weiss was pictured above my right arm, and that Jackie Novak was sitting next to her. I know that because they were my best friends in elementary school: Oak Lane Country Day School. I don’t know why I remember this so distinctly, and as I mentioned how few things I remembered, but one of them was that I could improvise my body from a very young age, and that it felt like survival to me. What I could not express in any other way, verbal, written or drawn, I could get my emotions out of my body through movement. Since I was sent to dance classes at around age 8, and then on to the Philadelphia Dance Academy around 10 years old in center city Philadelphia (later to become the University of the Arts), my powerful experience with my dance teacher Nadia Chilkovsky was modern dance improvisation.
I was born on March 2 nd , 1949 to parents Gladys and Herbert L. Myers. My sister, Margaret, “Maggie”, was born six years later. In all respects, a young African American woman, Grace Plummer was the person who was the most influential in my upbringing and instilled the values in me that I carry to this day., She basically took care of all of our needs, as our parents, who might have even been living in the house, were rarely seen or heard from. My mother had the memorable quality of running a dynamic art gallery called, “1015”, the address of our house: 1015 Greenwood Ave. Wyncote, Pennsylvania. What I remember about the house was my sister and I wandering around in this huge revolutionary war hospital, turned personal residence. The radiators creaked constantly, there were seven bathrooms, and it was frightening. There were so many door entrances, that parties could occur in certain parts of the house and you didn’t have a clue. Curtis Arboretum was up the street that consisted of different species of trees. I especially remember many times, going to see the ginkgo trees whenever I had the time and feeding the ducks.
It was simultaneously irritating and exciting to live inside an art gallery. My sister and I would eat TV dinners in front of television shows like Mr. Ed, Leave it to Beaver and Rocky and Bullwinkle while sophisticated people walked by us looking at interesting paintings by Philadelphia painters, sculptors and ceramicists such as Larry Day, Natalie Charkow, Paul Keane, Bill Daley and Rudy Staffel. I found out later that her gallery information and history is in the Smithsonian Archive in Washington, D.C. My mother was very smart and had a real interest in visual art. She got her B.A. degree at Beaver College in Pennsylvania when she was 60 years old. Her sister Esther, who in her 90s moved close to me in Vermont, always said that whenever she visited from California, which was not often, she was amazed at the fact that I was the parent in the family, and not my parents. I would walk around with a pocketbook with everything organized and ready to go when I was six years old. I have no memory of this at all.
Growing up with Gracie was nothing less than amazing and incredible. Most Saturday nights she would take us to “The Uptown”, which was a dance hall like the Apollo Theater in Harlem. All of the Motown groups from Detroit would perform there as well as Philadelphia icons. My whole childhood was the Miracles and Smokey Robinson, the Temptations and the four Tops. There is a through line here as in Junior High School, my best friend Judi Lowe’s father started a successful record company whose main feature was Chubby Checker and his hit single, the Twist. Of course, Didi Sharp followed with the “Mashed Potatoes”, and there was much more. I was a great social dancer, and learned it all from Gracie. Gracie was very thin and tall, with big eyes that could hardly see a thing without her super thick lenses and rimmed glasses. She was beautiful to us and had so much love pouring out of her that my sister and I were well taken care of, even though it was not exactly a traditional upbringing. Gracie went on to become a registered nurse and have four children of her own. On some Sundays, she would take us to a Baptist Church in North Philadelphia where everyone was African-American except for us, where there was serious spirituality, singing and faith speech going on, and definitely influenced my outlook on the world. I didn’t really comprehend the words from the preacher during his improvised sermons, but it was very exciting, inspiring, and allowed you to connect with people in real and deep ways. Even though I was Jewish and felt very connected to my roots, it seemed perfectly natural to engage in other forms of faith. Both of our parents were atheists, but my sister and I prayed every day, and we had no idea why.
It is important to say a few words about Oak Lane Country Day School where I went to school from nursery school through sixth grade. Followers of John Dewey founded the school (this will also be a recurring theme later to be picked up at Bennington College and other career choices). It had been a progressive school laboratory connected to Temple University, and then branched off to become its own school. It was a powerful elementary education, full of creativity, nature walks, and artistic exploration. Other than a brief time when a student bully charged us money every day or he would look up our skirts, it was a glorious education. I remember our wonderful student productions that were quite elaborate. In third grade, I was Sleeping Beauty in a beautiful dance ballet. In fourth grade, I was Peter Pan, having watched the Mary Martin production on Broadway, and in fifth or sixth grade, (I can’t remember which), we conceived a rendition of the cosmic universe accompanied by “The Planets” by Gustav Holst.
After sixth grade graduation, it was time to enter seventh grade at Thomas Williams Junior High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. As you can imagine, the first day I attended public school (my father wanted me to experience public education which was a noteworthy goal) I was wearing a pink poodle skirt, patent leather shoes, a big bulky wool sweater.
I never cut my hair so it was wild and thick and down to my waist. They immediately put me in section 57 (17 was the smartest), and everyone else in my class was wearing all black and looked like they were ready to rumble. I became good friends with all of them, and within days had been moved to section 47 where I met my best friends for the next 20 years, Pegge and Mert. By the end of the term, they had moved me to 17 where I never felt at home.
Returning to my dance training, my parents put me on a train all by myself at 12 years old to center city Philadelphia so that I could walk to Van Pelt St. to take serious dance training. The Philadelphia Dance Academy offered Isadora Duncan dance classes, modern dance technique, improvisation and composition, Flamenco, and Labanotation. Nadia Chilkovsky, my teacher had studied with an Isadorable, and was briefly in the original dance company of Martha Graham. I had to study all of the dance forms since it was an Academy, and we were trained to perform our dancing on the stage at The Academy of Music and I remember that being very special and very serious. The biggest dance companies in the world and Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev performed at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. I know because I saw them perform Romeo and Juliet and I cried. I won a Silver Medal award during this time and I remember one dance that revolved around a Sun King that I had a big part in, performed on this enormous stage at The Academy of Music. One feature of that school is that I ended up traveling to Helsinki, Finland and London, England with Nadia and her husband. Dyane Grey, who was a very talented dancer at The Philadelphia Dance Academy came with us. She stayed there and went on to have a great career. We toured and I danced while Nadia taught classes. Another feature was that Judith Jameson attended the school and she ended up dancing Revelations for Alvin Ailey and directing his dance company for years. Also, a strong dancer named Erica Goodman who happened to be the jazz great Benny Goodman’s niece. I loved improvising in my classes at The Philadelphia Dance Academy. I was hopeless at memorizing any steps for choreography, so finally my teacher gave up and only let me improvise all of my compositions. Since life at home was pure chaos, improvisation gave me ways to understand my feelings and make my way through the world. I kept having a recurring dream that shapes and objects were fracturing and fragments were flying everywhere, and improvising made me feel like I was always putting them back together.
Another important fact is that I was born Susan Elizabeth Myers, even though since my marriage, it has been Susan Sgorbati. I always liked the name Sgorbati better than Myers, and I think since my parents’ ancestors that were Jewish on both sides were very brave at escaping pogroms from Lithuania and Russia, most likely changed their names at Ellis Island, I never really thought Myers was our real name. Sgorbati is an odd Jewish name, coming from Italian ancestors of my former husband. However, since my former husband is Italian, it makes sense. During this formative period of childhood, there were two other significant events: Isadora Duncan dancing, and Indian Hill Camp. Isadora Duncan was a pioneer and breakthrough artist in the early 1900s, who danced her heart out in bare feet with very little clothing and plenty of beautiful silk, flowing scarves. Read her autobiography, “My Life” to get the full picture. Nadia Chilkovsky had either been an “Isadorable” as they were called or close to them, and this was serious business. We had to make our own costumes by dying crumpled silk tunics in tealeaves, and learn all of the Duncan dances by heart. Much of this was handling flowing silk, pastel scarves that could inspire our passions for beauty, art, love, and ecstatic expressions of movement. This was a wonderful activity for a young person as Isadora had recommended in her own life and autobiography. It freed our souls, made us feel like we were doing important work, and communed with nature and our spiritual selves. We performed everywhere, and I remember one time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art among Greek statues and blossoming flowers.
The other significant dance experience during this period of time was being sent to Indian Hill Camp, a summer residential program in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. This endeavor happened because my previous camp experience at Camp Geneva in the Poconos, was an unqualified disaster. I cried every night that I wasn’t sneaking out and stealing food out of the canteen. I am usually a fairly well-behaved person (at least in front of people at institutions) except for that time at overnight camp. Any longer I would have become a full-fledged criminal, anything to not obey the stifling rules of that enterprise. But in 1962, a few years later, I was sent to an arts camp where I could dance, and everyone thought that would take care of me for the summer. I was fifteen years old when I went to Indian Hill. It turned out to be a wonderful experience for the following reasons: my dance instructor, Marjorie Mazia was an inspired teacher, her son, Joady Guthrie was my first infatuation. Joadie was Arlo’s younger brother, and his sister Nora, I just idolized, and she liked to dance too. They were all the children of the unique and amazing legendary folk artist, Woody Guthrie and I was just enthralled. It was a very experimental summer, and it made me look at a bigger world than I was used to seeing from a Philadelphia perspective. Marjorie wanted me to expand my dance horizons as well, much to Nadia’s dismay, so I went once to NYC the following year to the Martha Graham Dance Studio, took a class, and decided that it was too choreographed for me, not enough improvisation and too far to travel from Philadelphia.
Another memory is my best friend, Pegge Kirschner living with me during my senior year of high school because her parents were also nowhere to be seen. Pegge went on to create “Garnet Hill”, the amazing clothing company and was the first person to import flannel sheets into the United States, of which I was a recipient. She also worked for Leon Botstein who was President of a small known college at the time called, Franconia College in Franconia, New Hampshire. He later went on to become the well-known President of Bard College. Pegge and her new husband Grant Dowse died in a small plane crash after we had returned from California and our wild ways and she had settled down and started the business. It happened a few years later in a snowstorm coming back from a catalogue meeting in Canada. It was such a shock that I still haven’t gotten over it. The other memory was going with another one of my best friends, David Richman, to Philadelphia 76er basketball games and meeting Wilt Chamberlain, who somehow got a crush on me (that was nothing unusual for him) and later pursued me when I was at Bennington College to no avail. David has just written a memoir about his time with Wilt since his father was the owner of the basketball team. David was the President of the Cheltenham High School Student Council and I was the Vice-President. I was also on the swimming team, being one of their best divers, and doing all kinds of crazy moves like the half gainer, one and a half pikes, and backward flips into the water from the high board. We were a wild bunch of teenagers in suburban Philadelphia and we played hard. The only thing that kept me sane and from getting into real trouble was my dancing, ‘improvisation’ to be more specific. I was certainly an adolescent ‘at-risk’, which will have another connection later on. The last interesting part of this early story was that a wild character who drove a Harley Davidson motorcycle and attended many of the wilder parties at my house at 1015 when the parents were not home, and loved to come visit my younger sister, turned out to the be the man that I would marry several years later. Whether it is legend or truth, my sister had an elaborate maize for her hamsters that filled the whole room and wrote her extensive autobiography by the time she was in sixth grade.
To make a transition to the next chapter which is the Bennington years, is based on the fact that I wanted to go to NYC to dance, but my father said no, “it is college that is going to happen next”, and there were only two colleges at that time in 1967 that offered modern dance as a major area of study: Bennington and Sarah Lawrence. The summer before I was to go to Bennington College, I traveled to Stockholm to dance with the former talented dancer from Philadelphia named Dyane Gray who had gone on the first trip to Europe and moved to Sweden. I ended up as a disco dancer in Paris, dancing on the tables 12 hours all night in a discotheque, getting really sick, having a mad crush on another dancer who turned out to be Rudolph Nureyev’s lover, and returned to the States just in time to go to Bennington College. I was barely able to hold myself together, having lost a tremendous amount of weight and being so weak from sickness. I don’t think my parents really noticed and whisked me up with a drive to Vermont.
Postcript: Reading this over, I think I have come down too hard on my parents, since I forgive them for being absent and I thank God for Gracie. My father was a successful businessman, but wishful jazz musician, and my mother always thought she was an art dilletante, but really achieved success with her Art Gallery, where she showed original Philadelphia artists. Her portrait and legacy, the artists and their paintings are currently in the Woodmere Museum in Philadelphia.
Photographs and News Articles
Early years with parents and sister
Photographs from Oak Lane Country Day School
Photographs from Cheltenham High School
Photographs from Indian Hill Camp
Photographs and Newspaper Articles from Philadelphia Dance
Academy
Photographs and Newspaper Articles from European trips