Even my own people, when I go away, it’s wrong already, it’s not right. I won’t be here and they won’t be anymore my ballets. —George Balanchine
Saturday, April 30, 1983. I decided on a whim to go to the New York City Ballet. I called a friend and we went down to the New York State theater as it was called then and got tickets for the matinee. Before the performance Lincoln Kirstein, Jerome Robbins, and Peter Martins came out and stood in front of the heavy yellow curtain. Kirstein said, “Mr. Balanchine is with Tschaikovsky, Mozart, and Stravinsky now.”
Friday, December 11. Friday. A cold winter day in Ithaca, New York. I woke up and as usual wondered what I was doing in grad school.
I mechanically put on black clothes. All black. Black everything, even black jewelry. That wasn’t the fashion in those days and I wasn’t trying to make a fashion statement, I just did it. I went to my study carrel in the library, a dark, Gothic place, where you could look up into a brooding vastness. As I did, the image of my grandmother in her coffin came to me. At some point, I gave up and went to the student lounge.
Lounge is a grand word for a smallish, nondescript room with beat-up furniture. I spent altogether too much time there. I ran into the program’s resident smart aleck. He took one look at my get-up and said, “Who are you in mourning for?” I just smiled.
The smart aleck was a cynical Canadian with a sharp British wit. He let the mask slip once during an exchange about (sorry, cringe alert, this was grad school) masculinity and femininity. I said that insulting a woman’s femininity is as wounding as insulting a man’s masculinity. Or something like that.
(Forgive me: this was a dorm room argument, just not in a dorm room.)
The Canadian guy replied, “No it’s not.” I did a double take. The cynical mask had dropped from his face. He looked… vulnerable. Wounded. I didn’t respond because I knew he was right. In fact, I didn’t believe what I said even as I said it; it was something I said in the midst of an argument. Half the things people say during arguments they don’t really believe.
Thirty-five years on, I still don’t believe what I said.
Masculinity needs validation. Shoring up, bolstering, rituals, support, authentication, protocols. Femininity needs none of that. It simply is. Imagine two women having a duel over some absurd slight. You can’t.
I went home. At about 6 p.m. I got a phone call from my mother’s next-door neighbor. She told me that my father had died that afternoon, around 2 p.m. Gave me the details of the funeral. She stayed on the phone with me for half an hour.
Later that night, I realized that right around the time the Canadian had asked me who I was in mourning for, my father had left this earth.
Poignant and touchiing. My own dad died Jan 25, 1981, a few days short of 60