Banana stalks as tall as three men, boasting great bunches of green fruit and, hanging from a ropy vine, the cup of the blossom. Cocos, round and green, mounded in a shady corner near the stars woven of palm. All the shades of green-nayaa, fresh, unripe, still living; biguie' take root in the houses of mourning. You will call the dead, to join their breath with ours and make the circle whole againthis one day when neither invitation nor acceptance can be refused.
turn presented them all to her adoring audiences. "How an artist feels, with quivering antennae of the heart," she recorded-and this is the heart of the book-"the waves that sweep across the footlights from the audience! Before the first dance was half performed, Vienna [or Caracas or San Antonio] and 1 were in love, as ideally, audience and artist can be. In the warm sea of this love I could have danced forever" (p. 75). And dance she did, endlessly. As the autobiography proceeds, the style of writing becomes more discursive, the sentences more polished, and the account less exciting. Correspondingly, the details are more informative and the observations more thoughtful. After World War II, descriptions of the always frantic work and assumed superhuman accomplishments alternate with analyses about the state of the art of dancing, especially the kind of dancing La Meri did-what she at one point called "neo-ethnic." These pages-thoughtful, unique-reveal a La Meri who ponders on, as well as runs headlong through, her life. But it is the depiction of her headlong ride that is the virtue of this book. La Meri succinctly sees this ride as one on horses both real and imaginery: "... the pink horse of the social whirl" (p. 17); ".. . the red horse of sports" (p. 17); "The pale horse. .. music" (p. 19); ".. . that pinto just over there,.. . Euterp" (p. 22). And then at the end of her book, she summarizes: Besides [she writes after beginning life, for the third time, on Cape Cod], I chose this road myself and chose
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