Mirrors

Mirrors is a book every dancer should read. Whether you want to go into classical ballet or become a show-stopping Broadway hoofer, this is the book for you. And even if you're not a dancer, but have always been fascinated with the world of the Broadway gypsies, this books brings you right smack into the center of their day-to-day world. I loaned my copy of Mirrors to a friend who teaches high school Theatre Arts and she devoured it in one night. It's a wonderful story with real characters that you will remember long after you finish the book. By the way, when this book first came out (back in the 1980s), I saw it prominently displayed (behind a glass partition) in Sardi's!

I found this book to be very enlightening in a number of ways. It focuses on a number of fields that print and other media tend to neglect as a whole, and most definitely neglect as they are applied internally. The main character is a diabetic dancer, who is from a midwest town and gets caught up in the gypsy world of Broadway dancing when she moves to the New York City. Her boyfriend is far her senior, a journalist for the newspaper of her midwestern town, and he gets caught up in her world. His innate conservatism eventually... well, that's part of the plot, and one of the only parts that gets a little hackneyed. We've all read love stories before, but never on this many levels. And though dancing is interesting, you can only here the phrase "trembling steel sinews" so many times.