—ABRAHAM VERGHESE, CUTTING FOR STONE By the time I was nine or ten the world of ballet at large and my own weekly ballet classes had become an alternate reality for me, a place where I could hide and dream. I still acted out my role as just another neighborhood kid in the desert community where I lived, but I also lived another, more exciting, life inside the small studio of the Phoenix School of Ballet. I was attending more and more classes, which meant spending more time waiting to be picked up. I can remember spending much of that idle time locked in the school’s one and only dressing room, where I would try on various items from the lost-and-found bin and dance all around in the borrowed outfits, becoming different characters. When people came banging on the door—“Let us in! We need to change!”—I would quickly strip and get back in my own clothes and open the door and exit as nonchalantly as possible. Stories of a bigger ballet world beyond my little Arizona school drifted back to me and I hoarded every detail and dreamed of becoming part of that world someday.
