Twelve
Home
Our building was finally becoming a reality.
We’d started fully exploring the idea on our return from Brussels in 1991, and the gala opening was in 2001. So that’s how long that takes.
MMDG needed a home. In fact, it was far more important for the company to have a home than it was for its founder. I’ve always thought of mine as a peripatetic existence, out of a suitcase on the road, and for much of my life, I haven’t even owned my own place, happily serving time in other people’s apartments. Besides the fact of touring, I’ve loved to wander around the world in my spare time, and very rarely felt the need to nest in the way that people do.
More generally, I like to live modestly. I now have an office at Mark Morris that’s nearly as big as my actual apartment. (It’s funny having a building named after oneself, but that’s the way we refer to it: I haven’t made the move to talking about myself in the third person quite yet. Things happen at or in Mark Morris. It’s weird when they happen “in” you.) And that office has a genuine stand-up porcelain urinal in its adjoining bathroom. That’s a little immodest perhaps, but what gentleman hasn’t always secretly wanted his own porcelain urinal?
Nancy is always asking me if I want to move somewhere bigger, a cute brownstone in Brooklyn, but I don’t want more than I’ve got, which is all I need. I always wanted a balcony (though no one in New York uses his balcony anyway), and I don’t need an extra room for someone to stay over. You’ll note, as we quickly walk through my apartment (it doesn’t take long), that the sofa is very shallow and doesn’t fold out. My theory is: if you want to stay with me, you have to sleep with me. You actually have to have sex with me, then leave before breakfast. I really don’t want people to stay over.
Twyla Tharp has an apartment on Central Park West with a studio; Paul Taylor had a house on Long Island; Lar has a nice apartment here, one in Chicago, and a house upstate that he shares with Rob. What’s my problem? I’ve never been ambitious in either a real estate way or a competitive way. We never even got that Hoboken loft fixed up enough to make it into a magazine! When the company went to Brussels, I suddenly found myself in a glorious apartment with three bedrooms, and friends as housemates. When I returned here on tour from Brussels, Mr. Baryshnikov offered me his beautiful four-thousand-square-foot loft, complete with housekeeper and a big white piano, whenever I came to town. When that finally sold, Nancy found me this apartment, in the Murray Hill area of Manhattan, of which Bobby Bordo said, “Nobody lives there but flight attendants,” and I’ve been here ever since, nearly thirty years. Things are wearing out a little, as is its occupant. I should throw a lot of things away and fix some others. Or Guillermo should. He comes over and helps with the odd jobs.
I’m lucky. I could go away to a number of my friends’ beautiful houses. So I stay here, with this one orchid that’ll be dead by the time you read this.
I’M NOT WORRIED therefore about myself, but the company needed somewhere to work.
Originally we had been looking in Manhattan rather than in Brooklyn, and at one point we were close to sharing a large hangar (where they made the floats for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade) with Annie Leibovitz. The idea was we’d fit up a couple of studios, one for her, one for us, and she’d use it as a home base—a wonderful idea that never quite got going. Then we were asked to come in on the ground floor—project-wise rather than physically—of the New 42, the studios on Forty-Second Street (before the area became all Disneyfied). The project was a smart idea, and the offer was generous, but there was a problem that turned out to be a deal breaker—the layout of the studios meant we’d have to share dressing rooms. We needed greater independence. Besides, can you imagine an entire company going to work every day at Forty-Second Street and Times Square, dodging life-sized Elmos and Woodys as they try to get you to pose for a photo with them? That would result in frustration or tragedy.
Then a piece of land turned up in Brooklyn, distant, unpopular Brooklyn, back when a Manhattan taxi wouldn’t take you there. The first possibility was a little triangle of dead space around BAM that had a gas station on it. That space, a block away from where we ended up, now boasts a skyscraper, like every square foot of Fort Greene.
When we first saw the building we’re now in, it was vacant (next to a parking lot), having originally been built as a bank in the 1840s, and most recently used as a state-run mental health outpatient clinic. Anyone who had ever been to a show at BAM had tried not to step in it. We mounted a capital campaign, for which there’s a nice little ten-minute promotional film of me in the shell of this building, standing in inches of pigeon shit, tiptoeing through the condoms and hypodermics. I could hardly breathe. Many of our best friends and supporters contributed to the movie. Yo-Yo called the building “not a luxury, but a necessity.” The New York state senator Velmanette Montgomery said, “The community is waiting for this to happen.” Misha simply said it was “a really sensational idea.” And it was. The film ended with the following statements:
Renovation of the existing structure at 3 Lafayette Ave in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, will begin January 1999.
Once completed, the Dance Center will provide three studios and support space for the creative and educational activities of the Mark Morris Dance Group.
These facilities will also offer much-needed rehearsal space to local arts organizations.
The Campaign goal: $6 million ($5 million—renovation and construction, $1 million endowment).
Completion of the Dance Center is scheduled for Summer 2000.
We acquired the ruin and, full of funding, approached the architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle, which had just completed the renovation of Grand Central Terminal. (I’d always loved it because, when we did The Hard Nut for the first time away from Brussels, Anna Wintour and Vogue threw us a big party there. A blizzard meant that half the people couldn’t get to the show, though they did miraculously manage to make it to the Vogue party, for which a special subway train, called the Pirlipat, was arranged to ferry us from the Atlantic Terminal to Grand Central.) The architect was Fred Bland—it was his look—but Nancy and I had very firm ideas about everything, from the materials onward, a vision that had emerged from our thorough analysis and appraisal of the shortcomings of every studio we’d been forced to work in over the last few years.
For example, we thought it a good idea that, when you came in to work, you had to walk past people and therefore greet them, whether you wanted to or not. The dancers walk through the office to get to the dressing rooms, and everyone passes me, so if my door’s open, say hi! There were a hundred little ideas like that. Experience told us that where a dancer dropped his bag on the first day of rehearsal would be precisely where it went every day for the rest of time; you make that a habit. We knew, for example, that nobody ever uses those little cubbyholes by the dance barre, so why have them?
Barry’s particular contribution was the dressing rooms, which is why they’re so great. Being a baseball nut, he’d based them on the Yankees’ locker room, on which they may even be an upgrade. Dancing is a serious vocation, a full-time job, yet any gym in the world has a nicer dressing room than the average dance studio. American Ballet Theatre is home to perhaps seventy-five dancers, gorgeous, beautiful professional dancers who are there every day, yet the men’s dressing room has torn carpet and a broken urinal hanging from the wall, half the sinks don’t work, there are rat traps in the corners, the metal gym lockers are broken like in an underfunded high school, it smells horrible, and there are uncomfortable skinny benches. We wanted someplace where you’d feel at home, or at least not like an unwelcome visitor, where you didn’t feel you had to live out of your dance bag, where you had somewhere to eat lunch, charge your phone, work on stuff, or watch a video. We wanted to make it easier for dancers, even launder their towels for them. That’s not too much to ask of a dance company’s headquarters.
It had always been my intention for our building, when we finally had one (if we ever got one), to be a dancing school of some sort, a version of Verla Flowers Dance Arts. George Balanchine famously said, “But first, a school!” by which he meant that before you can have a dance company, you have to teach people how to dance, and that was back when nobody was doing classical ballet in New York. New York City Ballet still gets all its dancers from its school, the same School of American Ballet that Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein founded. Nowadays, our ground floor, with its classes and studios, has become a defining and vibrant part of the community aspect of the building.
Given the mass move to Brooklyn, I’d envisioned adult and advanced professional classes, but it became immediately evident that the adults wanted classes for their children. I shouldn’t have been surprised—Brooklyn is so fecund. The dream did come true, and in the most Verla way possible: kids everywhere!
ANOTHER DEVELOPMENT, not very long after we opened, involved the Brooklyn Parkinson Group, which contacted us to ask whether we’d send someone over to teach a movement class. Nancy said, “Why don’t they come here? We’ve got studios!” John Heginbotham and David Leventhal (an excellent dancer with me for ten or so years) taught the class, ten people once a month. They figured out a syllabus based on my work, and ideas developed organically, into a curriculum designed in coordination with the Brooklyn Parkinson Group.
The idea is to improve the well-being of people with Parkinson’s. The class makes them feel better. It’s precisely the same techniques and point of view I use to teach class for my own dancers—holding hands, looking someone in the face, people simply singing and dancing to music. That’s my esthetic. They’ve put on some very joyful shows, sometimes performing excerpts of my dances. I jokingly compare it to a carwash—they come in looking one way and then leave shiny and sparkling. It’s therapeutic but it’s not therapy per se. They sing and dance. If you want to watch the class, you have to take the class. You’re not allowed to study it; none of the participants wants to be scrutinized.
Over the last seventeen years, this has become a worldwide phenomenon: for example, it’s now sixty to seventy people in class at the dance center, and that’s just one of ten locations in New York City. David, who goes all over the world to give workshops to train potential teachers, is head of the program, and the board of advisors is full of neuroscientists. Frankly, it’s nearly a bigger deal than my company.
BUT NOW, if you’ll follow me, let me take you past the school, and past the offices on the third floor, all the way upstairs, because the fifth floor is the glory: a giant column-free sixty-foot square studio, doubling as a theater. There were plenty of creative ideas for this, but I didn’t want anything clever or original, just a square studio with high ceilings and a sprung deck. I wanted neutrality, a blank space, as much natural light as possible, a certain height of ceiling. I didn’t want barres attached to the wall (though dancers prefer the stability), because it had always been my desire to have performances in the studio space, and I wanted it to convert easily into a theater (which it does, but it doesn’t, because you have to put in lights, 150 seats, and risers, and it’s a lot of work). It works almost perfectly and hemorrhages money.
We’re subsidized, so we can rent the studios for cheap. And we don’t, for example, charge for auditions, which unbelievably some people are cynical enough to do; I’m not sure who started that trend. Oh, right . . . Twyla Tharp. Young hopefuls, having traded their work shifts, had to pay ten or fifteen dollars to hear immediately after one move, “Thank you! You’re not what we’re looking for.” To me, that was insulting to all dancers, particularly hard-up dancers (which is all of them).
The irony of Mark Morris, by which I mean the building rather than myself, is that even people who aren’t my greatest fans—and I say that diplomatically—are dying to rent the best studios in town for ten dollars an hour.
THE SOFT OPENING of the dazzling new building—a gala dinner for the fine and the fabulous, the donors who’d given most generously—was on the night of September 10, 2001. You know the end of this story. But that evening was truly celebratory, drinks among the concrete and tarps on the ground floor, still completely raw, and then upstairs for a delicious dinner in the finished studio, a before-and-after of the work in progress for those who’d helped us make the dream come true. We were to start classes right away.
Very early the next morning I had a Pilates session at my friend and teacher Clarice Marshall’s studio on Forty-Fifth Street and Tenth Avenue, and I was already there when the two planes hit at 8:46 and 9:03 a.m. Barry called me to let me know what was going on, and Clarice and I listened on the radio. From there, not knowing quite what else to do, I went to a scheduled meeting with Adrianne Lobel about the sets for the forthcoming production of Purcell’s King Arthur at her place right by the Joyce Theater on Twenty-First. We looked down Eighth Avenue at the burning buildings. It was a beautiful day, and the large Greek columns in her designs seemed eerily appropriate. Over in Brooklyn, Nancy and Johan christened the new building by handing out bottled water to people fleeing over the Manhattan Bridge to safety.
The next day, the New York Times chose, for some reason, to put the World Trade Center, as opposed to the opening of our dance center, on their front page. But there was an article on the front page of the Arts section, MARK MORRIS DANCE CENTER ADDS LUSTER TO BROOKLYN. Not a mention of the terrorism and tragedy of the previous day, of course, since it had all been written on the tenth: “‘It is beautiful, it’s great,’ an exuberant Mr. Morris said, as he paused for a cup of coffee in a blindingly green office that still looks half lived in. ‘It is sort of perfect.’” All true, despite the bad timing.
Finally, a place to call home.
Mark Morris Dance Center, 2008.
EVEN AS WE CELEBRATED the majesty of the new building, things started going downhill with Barry.
Barry had made good money for years as the face of the Mark Morris Dance Group. He’d always wanted to be an entrepreneur—Sol Hurok Presents—and that is what he’d worked toward. He was connected, and we’d been very successful, but his vision had started to diverge too much from mine. I felt he was leading us up undesirable garden paths and I couldn’t allow that; plus they just weren’t very good ideas.
Other difficulties were more practical. Barry, as a Deadhead with impaired hearing, liked music louder than I, and he’d say the shows were boring unless the music was blaring. So we’d have a tech rehearsal at which, among many other things, I’d set the sound levels. By this time, I was watching shows more than I was performing in them, and when I’d go into the house for the second half, the music would be much louder. I’d have it turned down. In the middle of the show, Barry would charge up the aisle, hissing, “Turn it up!” And I’d leave the auditorium because I couldn’t stand the volume. We were going through soundmen like The Capeman went through directors. Barry was also giving advice where it wasn’t required, telling dancers, for example, to go for bigger laughs. I want no one to do that ever.
Nancy was in denial about the deterioration of the relationship. I’d never say “I told you so” to Nancy about anything, but she was late realizing that it was an insurmountable problem, the healing of which could never happen. Nancy and Barry had been not only a team but close friends, closer than I was with either of them—I was the talent allowed to get on with his work—and though Barry and I had started as very good friends, I was done with him a couple of years before she was. For the last year, we communicated only through her. Nancy’s attitude was “If you’d just stop arguing and realize that you’re after the same thing, everything would be fine.” But it was irreparable. In the end, he went too far with me and I couldn’t work with him.
Suddenly, he was obsolete; his charm was fading, and though he was good friends with producers around the world, with people who hired us, Nancy was having to do all the heavy lifting. He traveled with the company still, ate the buffet (as usual), did the schmoozing, and greeted people in the lobby, while Nancy ran the business end. But he was only there to attend the reception, drink the drinks, then leave.
Barry felt emasculated in more ways than one, but the root of the problem was less metaphorical. As the company got bigger and he got older, Barry didn’t retain the same sexual magnetism he’d previously enjoyed, and he never came to terms with that loss. He regularly borrowed money for drugs from the dancers, and he took advantage of some of them in the worst way (and he was married to more than one of them). He fucked a Don Giovanni list of women. The company, sadly, was enabling this and it had to stop, though he wasn’t going to like us wresting power from him.
By the time we moved into the new building, he was basically finished, but still it went on. He’d be gone for months at a time, his office door locked; no one ever saw him. If he was there, he was on the phone, smoking cigars, jerking off, whatever. By the end, it was tragic. He had nothing to do with the company. He’d come to a show purely to hate it, then walk out, which he did every time. The music wasn’t loud enough, or he didn’t like somebody’s dancing, or he disagreed with some other aspect.
Then things totally fell apart; his parents died in close succession. The big change finally came in January 2005 when he returned from Susan Sontag’s funeral in Paris, and we wondered whether some new addiction had kicked in there. He was never quite the same. It got to the point where we were forced to cancel his credit cards and change the locks on the doors, by which I mean we didn’t just “change the locks on the doors,” we literally changed the locks. Barry disappeared into the arms of a millionaire.
The separation agreement was signed in May of that year, and a poker-faced press release went out in June: “General Director Barry Alterman has resigned for personal reasons. . . . ‘Barry will be missed by all of us, but we know that he will be a success in his next chosen pursuit,’ said MMDG Board Vice-President Mark Selinger. Alterman’s vacated position will be consolidated with MMDG Executive Director position now held by Nancy Umanoff.”
There was a concern that Nancy might not have the wherewithal to take over, but the truth is she’d been doing Barry’s job for years, covering for him to an extent even I had underestimated. She’s now one of the most revered people in her job, the dance company executive director that everybody either knows or knows about. People call her when they have a problem, because she’ll have the answer. She’s beyond anything you can imagine.
Outside the toilets with Nancy, Ventura, California, Ojai Music Festival, 2013. (Johan Henckens)
Misha and Barry had been close friends, hanging out, enjoying high times in Vegas. (Misha has for a long time been a wonderful parent, producer, and friend, but he was a bit of a playboy when I first met him, a little spoiled and, coming from Russia, fully capitalist.) So Misha, feeling sorry for Barry, mercy-hired him to work for the newly founded Baryshnikov Arts Center, because Barry needed the money. There was some trouble. Now if you mention him, Misha only hisses, “Fuck him!”
Barry did come to the twenty-fifth-anniversary performances at BAM in 2006. He remarked to Nancy that Cargo was a piece of garbage, but that Candleflowerdance, to Stravinsky’s Serenade in A, was really something. It didn’t go unnoticed that this dance was dedicated to Susan Sontag.
THINGS HAD BEEN changing for me too.
All dancers must finally stop. For many years, I could warm up for ten minutes to dance for two hours. Then, at a certain age, let’s say forty, I realized I was warming up for two hours to dance for ten minutes. The payoff was wrong. After a while, I didn’t want to warm up at all anymore; I’d done it enough. And I was never one of those people who worshipped that ritual. I was still dancing well, but it was getting harder, and I didn’t want to spend all the time I wasn’t dancing recovering from dancing.
I remember asking Nancy if I was too old, fat, and ugly to dance, but not smart enough to realize it. I feared that, next to my younger dancers, I might be beginning to look like the creepy uncle, hanging around in my van near the playground trying to lure them in with a puppy. Peter Sellars once asked me bluntly, “Why are you even in that dance? You’re so much older than everybody else!” I didn’t want to be, in English terms, mutton dressed as lamb.
So I stopped.
I felt an immediate and terrific sense of release. I could have extended my dancing career if I’d wanted to, without doubt, but I have no regrets about it, because I’d have had to put myself through the agony of endless gym, which I’d hated ever since school. I never wanted to stay in that kind of shape, and I gained weight. I don’t miss dancing for a second, and I love watching other people do my parts. I’m not looking for a comeback. The Hard Nut—there’s always room for one at that party (and it’s good for box office)—and From Old Seville are the ideal exceptions, though when I recently did that little sevillana, I had to pull myself together and my knee hurt terribly.
But it wasn’t the case that I decided to give up because my body couldn’t do it, though it now can’t. It was more that my body could only do it if I worked at it and killed myself working at it and that there were other, better ways to spend my time.
I’d rather make up dances for other people.
They can do the dancing instead.
LOU’S SERENADE FOR GUITAR, a tender and finely webbed late piece for guitar and percussion, was the last dance I made up for myself: a solo, in 2003. I called it Serenade.
Lou’s music was in five movements—a round (the only piece with no percussion part), an air, an infinite canon, an usul (a system of rhythmic modes used in Turkish traditional classical music), and a Scarlatti-flavored sonata. The theme was metal and wood: a guitar and a gong played by the two musicians, and the “props” that I used—castanets, a hand fan, finger cymbals, and a metal pipe (in tribute to an old boyfriend of Lou’s, the wonderful choreographer and illustrator Remy Charlip, who in his sixties did a beautiful dance with a shiny copper pipe that caught the light perfectly). The finger cymbal part was notated, so it was fair enough for me to play that, but I thought the sonata could perhaps use some castanets, even though Lou hadn’t written any in. I meant to call him to ask his permission to play those castanets, since it essentially added another rhythm element to his score, but I didn’t get around to it. A day or two later, Lou died on his way to a festival celebrating his own music in Columbus, Ohio.
I took his silence as tacit approval. I’d imagined him giving me a long-distance eye roll, accompanied by a sigh: “Go ahead if you must; you’ll do it anyway.” So I strapped on my castanets and danced to his memory and to his unequaled influence on the Great Big World of Music.
I probably knew this was the last piece I’d do for myself, one dancer alone on the stage in a very private conversation with the two players. I viewed it as a set of five separate vignettes, stories to be told around a campfire: here’s the story with the fan, and now the one with the copper pipe. It was appropriate that Lou wrote the music for my last dance. I don’t do the dance anymore, but for whoever dances it, I play the castanets. I’ve had luck bringing various pieces back from the tomb (though I never look for a trip down memory lane, as I’d rather just make up a new one), and Lesley Garrison danced Serenade gorgeously.
After he died, I got one of Lou’s bolo ties.
Hail Lou! Hail Terpsichore!
AROUND HER EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY, in 1997, Maxine, my mom, had started showing signs of confusion.
She’d come to a Vanity Fair party with my sisters. She’d lost a little bit of weight by then, and it happened that her stockings fell down her thighs without her noticing. Guillermo was there, with a couple of other dancers; they immediately covered her as he got down to his knees and pulled her stockings up. Maxine just stood there. She hadn’t noticed. That wasn’t necessarily a sign of dementia, but she wasn’t getting any younger.
My sister Maureen and her partner, V’kee, took care of her in the house where we’d always lived. What they did was heavy and amazing. I made a mix tape of her favorite tunes, including the ones we’d sung on those summer drives to Montana. Though she was eventually beyond speech, she’d get up every morning to “Seventy-Six Trombones” and, later in the day, dance to “The Beautiful Blue Danube.”
Ten years later, when she was about to turn ninety, I was at work on Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which poses some interesting questions about death. Leon Botstein, a terrific fund-raiser and the conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra (famous for premiering various lost works of music), had asked if I’d be interested in choreographing it, with the caveat that he conduct the opening night at Bard, a condition to which I should never have agreed.
The ballet had a fraught history. Prokofiev had disowned the score, which had been Stalinized beyond recognition. Simon Morrison, the great Russian music and ballet scholar, found the sketches for the original production in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow—a considerable scoop—which revealed that the Soviet committees had reordered, edited, and orchestrated the music (originally in the scale of his classical symphony, a small orchestra, Mozart-sized), turning it into epic cinematic sweeping romantic bullshit it was never intended to be . . . and this on top of the changes Prokofiev himself had already wrought on the plot.
He was required to adhere to Shakespeare’s original tragic ending to get the ballet approved, but his Christian Scientist faith dictated that he also reimagine it. Everything goes along quite as one might expect until act 4 when, after Juliet has taken the sleeping potion, things get weird. From my synopsis: “Romeo returns. He goes to Juliet, sees that she must be dead, and makes to kill himself. Friar Laurence intercedes. Juliet gradually revives. Friar Laurence summons the townspeople while the lovers slip away. Everyone rushes into the empty room. Friar Laurence indicates the direction in which the couple have fled. Montagues and Capulets rescind their old vendetta. ELSEWHERE.—Love triumphs. Juliet and Romeo live in love forever.” Romeo and Juliet themselves are missing, but not dead. They’re in Eternal Love Land, dancing. It’s a tricky ending.
In order to figure out how on earth (as it were) to present this, I had a long session with Peter Sellars, a lifelong Christian Scientist—all religion is suspect, and Christian Science is no weirder than all the others—to discuss what it meant, in a Christian Science sense, to be not dead. Christian Scientists don’t believe in death, which is why they don’t believe in medicine. The point is that you don’t die; you’re transformed. I wanted somehow to capture all this. There was some original Prokofiev music that hadn’t been heard before, including that of this climactic apotheosis featuring some of the familiar themes, but higher and higher, with bells, simpler, quieter. Celestial. Infinite.
I went to Botstein’s first orchestral read-through of the new score, which had been painstakingly realized by Gregory Spears, at Riverside Church in New York City. The streamlined orchestra was meant to be only thirty musicians, but there must have been seventy-five at rehearsal. The maestro assured us that this was just for the read-through, that in performance we’d use a smaller band (though in the end we used seventy-three at the premiere and fifty-five on tour). But then what was the point? I wanted to hear the music. It was immediately obvious to me that Botstein, who seemed to be sight-reading, beating it half speed like the old version, hadn’t done his homework, perhaps hadn’t even opened the score. My dance didn’t stand a chance.
It was all about Botstein. He conducted the first night at Bard on July 4, 2008, having barely watched rehearsal, and never quite knowing the tempi. But there were other things on my mind.
It was getting time for Maxine. I’d spoken with her on the phone before the show, though she could only listen, and afterward I found out from Maureen that she’d died during the performance. The show ends with the lovers alive, dancing a duet in heaven on earth, in infinity. Straight after the premiere, Leon Botstein insisted that I honor a commitment to talk at the big gala fund-raising party right then. Nancy advised him that though I would attend, I wouldn’t, for obvious reasons, be making any speeches. So we went. But after his own comments, Botstein ambushed me, more or less forcing the microphone upon me.
I said: “I hope everyone has a good time, and here’s to Maxine.”
It was horrible.
MERCE CUNNINGHAM SENT me a postcard that I keep next to my desk in Brooklyn: “Dear Mark, I am sorry to hear about your mother. She asked me to dance with her one time. I was forced to say ‘no,’ and have regretted it since, all the best, Merce.”
Maureen wrote, “She didn’t have to die to go to heaven. Because she could hold a cat and she would be in heaven. She could see Mark dance and be in heaven. She could watch her grandkids build a fort or put on a show. . . . Her life was Heaven on Earth.”
With my mother, Maxine, on the porch. (Harley Soltes/The Seattle Times)
Maxine is the reason I had any possible contact with or interest in dancing. For years, I always thanked her on the back of every program for every performance: “Thanks to Maxine Morris and god,” in that order and those cases.