Kelly Bishop (0:09)

All fans of the TV show Gilmore Girls will tell you this every time of year is amazing in Stars Hollow, but there's something special about fall. The falling leaves in the opening sequence set you squarely in the autumn mood to evoke the picturesque best of New England. The focus on hot coffee at Luke's Diner feels just right for cooler weather. And of course, the cozy vibes of Gilmore Girls are unmatched. So it's seems just right that one of the most essential people in the Gilmore Girls universe, Kelly Bishop, otherwise known as Emily Gilmore the matriarch herself, would put out her memoir in the fall. Emily Gilmore is, of course, one of the most complex and fascinating characters on Gilmore Girls. The stakes are established in episode one, where she agrees to fund private school tuition for her granddaughter Rory, but only if her estranged daughter Lorelai, played by Lauren Graham, will come to dinner every Friday night. At first, Emily Gilmore seems controlling, snobby, rich, even a little cruel. But with Kelly Bishop's nuanced portrayal over the course of the show's seven season run, it becomes clear that she's so much more than that. She struggles to express her emotions, she manipulates situations to her advantage, but she also stands up for Lorelai in surprising ways. And it becomes clear that sometimes they clash, specifically because they are so alike. Of course, Kelly Bishop has done much, much more than just Gilmore Girls. She's a trained ballerina. She's been a working actor in film, theater and television since the 1960s. She's a legend on Broadway. She won a Tony for A Chorus Line and originated the of Sheila. Do yourself a favor. Google Kelly A Chorus Line and the clips will add years to your life. They are that enjoyable. She's been in everything. Bun heads, the marvelous Mrs. Maisel. She is the mom in Dirty Dancing, for heaven's sake. In this excerpt, you'll hear the first chapter of Kelly Bishop's new memoir, the Third Gilmore Girl, read by the amazing author herself, where she tells the story of being cast in A Chorus Line and how it changed her life forever. So dive in and imagine yourself at a Friday night dinner with the Gilmore Girls. It'll be a great way to prepare for sitting around the Thanksgiving table with your own imperfect, complex relatives. And you'll even hear some juicy behind the scenes Broadway drama, including what happened when some guy dared to point at her and laugh. We hope you enjoy this sneak peek of the Third Gilmer girl.

Jackie Danziger (2:26)

To Lee Leonard, who knew me better than anyone else on earth and loved me anyway. Chapter one Looking back, it still fascinates Me how a single, seemingly ordinary phone call changed my life. It wasn't accompanied by a heavenly chord from a choir of angels or a sudden beam of sunlight bursting through the overcast sky into my apartment window. Not so much as a twinge of awareness on my part that something huge was happening. Just a call from my old friend, Tony Stevens. It was 1974, a typical cold, bleak January day in New York City. I'd been working as a chorus dancer in New York and around the country since 1962. I was very good at it, and while the money wasn't great, shows had come along steadily enough that unlike so many of my fellow dancers, I'd never had to supplement my income with side jobs such as a waitress or a cashier or an office temp. I'd been in love with the joy and the freedom of dancing since I was 8 years old. Now I was just weeks away from my 30th birthday and the average shelf life of a chorus dancer was right around 35 years. I was yearning to make the transition into acting into principal roles, playing actual characters with actual names. Actresses, after all, could keep on working as long as their health held out and someone was willing to write parts for them. I'd given myself a two year deadline to start turning down chorus work and either broaden my skills as a performer or say goodbye to show business and move on to something else. And with my marriage disintegrating at the same time, I was ready to move pretty much anywhere except where I'd been when I picked up the phone and I heard Tony's voice. Michonne Peacock and I have an idea I'd like to run by you, he said. Tony and Meshon were Broadway dancers. I'd worked with Michonne and liked her, and I knew Tony very well. He was a terrific human being and a terrific dancer who'd also done some choreography. A fun, funny, energetic guy who loved being around other really good dancers. Whatever idea those two had come up with, I was already interested. Broadway was struggling in 1974. Shows were becoming more and more expensive to produce. Many of them flopped, and the backers were looking elsewhere for places to invest their money. As a result, a lot of wonderful dancers were out of work through no fault of their own. Tony and Michonne had been talking about that and about the fact that whether a show was succeeding or failing, Broadway producers were the ones who historically called the shots, made all the money and got all the credit, while we dancers were, to quote Tony, the blue collar workers of the performing Arts. The question was, what, if anything, could be done to shake things up, level the playing field a little, maybe even get some control of our lives. So what Michonne and I would like to do, he said, is gather a group of gifted, experienced Broadway dancers and see if we could organize some kind of a company in which everyone gets a chance to explore their other interests in the business. Writing, directing, set design, costume design, whatever completes the sentence. I've been dancing for years, but I've always been curious about exploring. Fill in the blank. We'd love for you to be part of the group, just to get together, throw some ideas around and see what comes out of it. What do you think? Thinking wasn't necessary. Tell me when and where and count me in. Tony had already secured access to a dance studio called the Nicholas Exercise center on East 23rd street, so we'd be meeting there. And he called me back with a date and time. Still no choir of angels, no ethereal beam of sunlight pouring through my apartment window. Just the thought that it was nice to have something potentially productive to look forward to and to distract me from being unemployed and headed for a divorce that probably should have happened months, maybe even years ago. Tony called back a couple of days later. The meeting was set for Saturday, Jan. 26, at 11pm A few of the 19 dancers who were coming were doing shows, and they couldn't be there until after the shows let out. I was writing it in my calendar when he casually added, by the way, Michael Bennett heard about this, so he'll be there, too, just as an observer. Oh, God. Michael Bennett was well on his way to becoming a Broadway legend. As a writer, director, dancer and choreographer, he was brilliant. We liked each other. We admired each other's talent. We'd also butted heads over the years. In my opinion, Michael was a master manipulator, someone who could instinctively spot and play on people's vulnerabilities and get them to do whatever he wanted. I sensed that from the moment I met him. I saw it in action and I was having none of it. He resented me for that, but I think he kind of begrudgingly respected me for it, too, and appreciated the challenge. Michael and I first met in 1967 when I auditioned for a chorus job in a show he was choreographing, a first class production called Promises, Promises, music by Burt Bachrach, lyrics by Hal David, book by Neil Simon, starring a fantastic singer, actor named Jerry Orbach. Michael had already established himself as a respected Broadway dancer and choreographer in the 1960s. And I was excited to be introduced to him. He was nearly a year older than I was, maybe 5 foot 8, with dark hair and a sexy, impish face, very flirtatious, with a twinkle in his eye. I remember thinking, I want to work with this guy. And I was excited when the call came in that I got the job. Promises Promises had its Broadway opening at the shubert Theater on December 1, 1968. It was hard work. I loved it. And Michael and I were getting along glitch free. Until one day a few weeks into the run, during what's called a cleanup rehearsal. When you've been doing the same show for a while, eight times a week, repeating the same steps over and over, you can tend to get a little sloppy sloughing off. A step here and a step there to make it easier on yourself. Michael and his assistant, a lovely guy named Bob Avion, were standing at the lip of the stage watching us do the number called Turkey Lurkey Time. That ended the first act. When I saw Michael look at me, lean over and say something to Bob and then point at me and laugh. I immediately stopped dancing while the other dancers and the pianist kept going. And I planted myself at a dead standstill, staring at Michael. He noticed and stared back at me, confused. Is there a problem? I asked him. He was caught off guard, clearly not accustomed to being confronted. He mumbled, some version of what. In the meantime, the dancing and the music had gradually trailed off until the only sound on the stage was me demanding an answer from Michael Bennett to my perfectly reasonable question. You're standing there six feet in front of me. You whisper something to Bob and you point at me and then you laugh. You have some correction to give me. Give it. You want to tell me I'm doing something wrong, I'm all ears. But don't point at me and laugh and expect me not to mind. He was visibly embarrassed. So was Bob. Neither of them said a word. They just stared down at the floor. So the other dancers and I picked up where we left off and the rehearsal resumed. Michael and I ended that day as if nothing had happened. But that brief little face off set the tone for the relationship between us. Testy as that moment was, it never stopped the two of us from deeply respecting each other's work. He even hired me when he was choreographing the Milliken Breakfast show, an annual two week event held at the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue. Every spring since 1956, the Milliken Manufacturing Company had been staging musicals for its buyers to launch A new season. They spared no expense, sometimes spending more than the cost of a Broadway show and hiring major stars like Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, Tommy Tune and Donald O'Connor. It was a very big deal, very prestigious, paid very well, and Michael did an extraordinary job. It was the first time I noticed a new quirk of his. During rehearsals he'd walk up behind a dancer, get very close and lean in to quietly say something in their ear. One afternoon it was my turn. He walked up behind me, leaned in and murmured, talent turns me on, and walked away. I'm not sure what response he was going for, but all he got from me was a subtle eye roll and a casual okay, thanks. And now he was coming to Tony and Michonne's gathering just as an observer. I didn't buy that for one second. Michael never just observed if he weren't intending to be God, by the time we were through, he couldn't be bothered. I actually considered not going. But then I thought, you know what? You're in a good place. You're getting a handle on your life. You're a fool if you let Michael Bennett stand in your way. Besides, I made a commitment to an old friend and I wasn't about to let him down. Saturday, January 26, 1974, 11pm The Nicholas exercise Center we unemployed dancers did some warming up exercises while we waited for the working dancers to arrive. They eventually filtered into the room along with Michael Bennett, who settled on the floor with a reel to reel tape recorder. People he'd worked with a lot like Donna McKechnie and Priscilla Lopez, who loved and were devoted to him, quickly gathered around and before long a large circle of about 25 or 30 of us had formed. I headed straight for the opposite side of it, the 6 o'clock position to Michael's 12, and nestled in among another group of friends, all of us feeling the curious excitement that was building in the room. None of us had a clue where, if anywhere this gathering might lead. But I was already glad I hadn't given in to my impulse to back out and stay home. Michael kicked things off with a speech about dancers lives being so interesting and worth telling that we might even be able to make a show out of this. Whether that happened or not, it was imperative that we be wide open and honest with one another. He followed that up by asking us to go around the circle, say your name, your real name, if it's different where you were born and when. Then he added, although you girls don't have to give your ages. I couldn't let that pass without speaking up. Wait a minute, Michael, I said. You just told us how important it was that we'd be open and honest. And then you followed up with the women, not having to give our ages. So which is it? Even in 1974, it got on my nerves that the female singers in the show were referred to as women while the dancers were girls. Point taken. He changed the instruction to okay, everyone say their birth name, birth place, their birth date and year. And for the most part, we all did. A couple of the women were a year or two older than they always claimed to be. But in a dancer's life, a year or two can make a real difference. Once that preliminary roll call was over, the meeting gradually evolved into one of the most unforgettable nights of my life. We'd all worked together over the years. We were comfortable with one another, and God knows we had a whole lot in common. We just started talking. Our dreams beyond being dancers led to how we became interested in dancing in the first place. Our families, our childhoods, our joys, our heartbreaks, our private fears and insecurities. Growing up abused and neglected and abandoned. Tragedies, loss, divorces. What we liked about ourselves, what we wanted to change about ourselves. No subject was off limits, and there was no judgment or criticism in that room, just tears and laughter and learning about friends and colleagues we'd been sure we already knew. The story that moved me the most that night came from Nicholas Dante, a beautiful Puerto Rican dancer and writer who grew up in Spanish Harlem. He'd always been insecure about his sexuality, which ultimately led him to becoming a drag queen in a touring company of female impersonators called the Jewel Box Review. He kept that part of his life from his parents until one night when the review was about to go on tour and they showed up at the venue where the revue was appearing. Nicholas came on stage dressed as Anna Mae Wong, I think he told us, and was horrified to see his parents sitting in the audience gaping back at him. By the time he got to the end of his story, when his father turned to some other drag queen in the revue and said, take good care of my son, Nicholas was weeping, and so was everyone else in the room. That first tape session was so compelling and so moving that I was completely unaware of how many hours had passed until I heard church bells ringing somewhere in the distance and realized that somehow, impossibly, it was morning out there. When we finally wandered out into the bright sunlight to head home, we were all in a state of what I can only describe as wonder and fulfillment. It felt incredible. A few weeks later there was a second session also on tape, mostly the same people, along with a handful of other dancers who hadn't been available for the first session. We practically raced into that room and threw ourselves on the floor, excited and eager to get started. Oddly, we found ourselves slogging back out there three or four hours later with a whole new understanding of the word anticlimactic. It seemed as if none of us had anything more to add after the almost spiritual magic of that first session. The newcomers were coming in cold and didn't seem to have given the concept a lot of thought, if any. The organic spontaneity and flow of the first session didn't exist, and the conversation never got off the ground. It was very disappointing. But disappointment wasn't exactly unfamiliar to any of us, and learning to move on was simply an inevitable part of the business. To the best of my knowledge, by the way, tapes of those sessions have never been released in their entirety, and the reel to reel tapes themselves have been preserved among Michael Bennett's papers at Yale's Beinecke Library in New Haven, Connecticut. All of which led to nothing for more than a month. I had kind of given up, although there was nothing definitive to give up on, when I got a call that Michael Bennett wanted to do a five week workshop based on the tapes of those sessions. Apparently he'd listened to them over and over again and started thinking that we'd spent all those hours essentially auditioning our lives for him. Out of that came his unformed concept of putting a stage show together based on dancers experiences and their audition processes. Once the idea had taken enough shape for him to articulate it, he called Joseph Papp, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and a huge theatrical producer and director. By then Michael had already won two Tony Awards, so Papp was more than happy to take Michael's call. Once Michael had described the Broadway talent he'd assembled for that first tape session and the concept that had evolved from it, Papp was intrigued by Michael's idea and gave him enough workshop time to see if he could organize those random puzzle pieces into a viable project. With the prestige and gravitas of Joseph Papp's support in his hip pocket, Michael was able to round up a world class team to give that viable project its best chance. Nicholas Dante and playwright author James Kirkwood Jr. To put together a story from the interviews. Bob Avion, who'd worked with Michael on the European tour of west side Story, to help with the Choreography and Academy Award winning composer Marvin Hamlisch to write the score with lyricist Ed Kleban for a show that many, many months later would be given the working title, A Chorus. I remember the first time I heard that name. I asked Michael, why not just Chorus Line? Because he patiently replied with a subtext of duh. When an alphabetical list of Broadway shows is published in newspapers and trade magazines, A Chorus Line will come first. I would never have thought of that. Occasional clashes aside, the man really was a genius at what he did. And we were lucky that Michael, just an observer Bennett, had decided to get involved. The group of 25 or so dancers who had attended that marathon tape session was reduced to a dozen or so of us for the first workshop. It was an exhilarating five weeks. The material was still in an extremely rough draft stage. But it was impossible not to get excited about the potential of A Chorus Line. So when Michael announced after that first workshop that he had to shut down the project until he could raise more money to keep it going, it was like having the rug pulled out from under me in more ways than one. I related to the need to raise money all too well. My marriage was limping toward the finish line and my soon to be ex husband, a compulsive gambler and not a good one, had cleaned me out. All I had left to my name was two weeks of unemployment, which would have been more than enough if my cats, my German shepherd and I hadn't become so attached to little luxuries like eating and having a rented roof over our heads. I literally couldn't afford to sit by the phone with my fingers crossed, waiting for Michael to call and say that the show was funded and that we was time to get back to work. I was frightened. I had to do something sooner rather than later. Like it or not, many months earlier, I'd been asked to audition for the national tour of a show called Irene. Debbie Reynolds was playing the title role and they'd been touring the major markets around the country. San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, et cetera. After rehearsing in Los Angeles, I went to see the show and the part I'd be auditioning for, one of Irene's two best friends. To be honest, it seemed like an old tired musical to me, something I would undoubtedly hate doing. And I passed on even auditioning or giving it another thought. Then, not long after the workshop ended, the Irene team called again. This time they wanted me to audition for the same role in a second touring company of Irene, now starring Jane Powell instead of Debbie Reynolds and playing in lesser markets like Denver, Houston, Flint, et cetera. My first thought was, oh God, please no. Immediately followed by a second thought, it's the dead of winter. Nothing is happening in New York City. No shows, no auditions, no nothing. And you're flat broke. You have no business saying no to the possibility of a paycheck right now, so pull on your big girl pants and deal with it. So off I trudged to an audition in a cold, barren rehearsal hall. There were only two other dancers in the waiting room. Obviously there wasn't a stampede going on for the opportunity to play this role. I was pleasantly surprised, though, to see the wonderfully talented Peter Gennaro there replacing Gower Champion as the choreographer of this Irene tour. I went in, I did some dancing, struggled through a few bars of a song despite my lack of singing talent, and went through the motions of whatever they asked me to do. And sure enough, they offered me the job. I was dreading it, but I was also relieved to know that I'd be making a touring wage of, I think, $550 a week and wouldn't have to sell everything I owned to feed my pets and myself. After all, a friend offered to take my two cats to live with her until I came home, and I took my German shepherd, Venus with me. I have to admit, given a choice, with a handful of exceptions, I tend to prefer the company of animals to the company of people. Animals are honest. There's not a hint of pretense about them. They just unapologetically are who they are, and their capacity to love and be loved outshines ours by about a million. Venus was the most perfect travel buddy I could have asked for, with the effortless power to transform even the barest, bleakest hotel room into home. When I was on the road, we rehearsed in Los Angeles, and then we were off to Denver for two weeks of previews. Venus and I got there about 6pm it was dark, it was freezing cold, and it was Christmas Eve. I grew up in Denver, so I wasn't surprised to find that almost everything was closed, giving the city a certain ghost town atmosphere. I managed to find a little bodega near the hotel and pick up a couple of days worth of food for Venus and me, and we settled into our room. We ate some dinner and took a walk past several blocks of perfunctory holiday decorations. I kept wanting to feel some sense of home, but I didn't. I kept wanting to feel some sense of hope and satisfaction that at least I was finally working again. But I didn't. Instead, I can still feel a deep, hollow place in the pit of my stomach when I think back to what I'm sure was the most depressing Christmas Eve, possibly even the most depressing night of my 30 year life. The rest of the cast and crew arrived the day after Christmas. We rehearsed and we performed previews to appreciative audiences. I never fell in love with my character or with the show itself. But playing Irene's funny sidekick wasn't awful. What was awful was that during those two weeks in Denver, I started hearing rumors. Something about Michael Bennett putting together a workshop in New York that might turn into rehearsals for a new show. Oh my God, I thought he found the money for A Chorus Line. They're going ahead with it and I'm being left behind on the road under contract to a show I couldn't care less about. Devastating as the idea of that apparent probability was, I mentally propped myself up as best I could. After all, this Irene job came along just when I needed it. I took it because I had to. I had no right to complain. In fact, I had to be grateful for it and trust that for some reason I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I had no business feeling sorry for myself. I had to suck it up and say thank you. I had those talks with myself so often they almost became a mantra. And they helped. Sometimes. Other times, not so much. The rumors about A Chorus Line were getting more and more intense and harder and harder to ignore. By the time we moved on to Houston, I admit I was preoccupied with them to the point where I thought I was imagining things. When Venus and I got back from a post show walk one night and the hotel clerk handed me a note on my way past the front desk, it simply read, call Michael Bennett. My heart was pounding when I dialed the phone in my room, trying unsuccessfully not to get my hopes up. Michael answered quickly and, as always, got right to the point. Where are you? Houston, I said. What are you doing in Houston, Irene? There was an audible groan in his response, quickly followed by, how long is your contract? I hated saying it. Six months. Getting out of tour contracts back then was hard to do, not to mention expensive. You had to reimburse the production company your whole salary for the length of your contract. If you signed onto a tour, you better mean it. He asked where I was going next. Flint, Michigan. He groaned again. Then, after a brief silence, he offered a desperately needed sliver of hope. When he added, okay, let me see what I can do. It wasn't something I could count on. But it meant that I hadn't been forgotten about after all. I'm sure Venus wondered what prompted me to dance her around our hotel room that night. Poor Flint, Michigan. It was economically depressed in the middle 1970s. And I knew exactly how it felt. All of us in the company found it hard to keep our spirits up. It helped, though, that we seemed to be showing our audiences a good time. We were at the end of our first week in Flint. When I found another message waiting for me at the hotel. Call Howard Feuer. Howard was the producer of Irene, A nice young guy I liked. The minute I got to my room, I grabbed the phone and called Michael instead. I just got a message to call Howard. Fewer. What's going on? I think I got you out of it in the time it took me to realize that, yes, I'd heard him correctly. He went on to say, you know, I don't mind what it's going to cost me to buy you out of that show. What I do mind is that now I owe Howard Feuhrer a favor. I explained to him that I was dead broke when I got the Irene offer. And A Chorus Line was no guarantee. So I just done what I had to do. You could have borrowed the money from me and spared me all this, he shot back. Not a chance. I'd been married to a gambling addict. I'd watched him get caught up in a vicious cycle of borrowing money to repay gambling debts. Until he owed pretty much everyone in town. He was financially drowning, and he was pulling me under with him. I knew more about death than I ever wanted to know. And as I told Michael, I don't borrow money. I have to earn it. That settled, I hung up and returned Howard Feuer's call. Bless his heart. He'd been on the receiving end of Michael Bennett's powers of manipulation. An hour or two earlier. And he sounded almost apologetic when he assured me. I would never do anything to hurt your career. And with that, the necessary arrangements were made. And it was farewell to Flint and good night, Irene. Venus. And I gratefully went home to New York. And I returned to work on what I'll always think of as the show that opened the door to the rest of my life. Thanks to the money from the Shakespeare Festival. And an extraordinary patron of the arts named Lewester Mertz. A Chorus Line was re energized and in full swing. When I reunited with my friends and castmates. Our second workshop turned very quickly into rehearsals. And I immersed myself in the transition from Chorus dancer to a principal role. My first real long awaited acting role of Sheila Bryant, one of the chorus line hopefuls vying for a job in an upcoming Broadway musical. Sheila was very much me, with a lot of added sassiness and tough girl attitude, and I loved her. Another personal statement about that transition happened the day that Michael interrupted a rehearsal to have us take paper and pens, sit in the Shakespeare Festival public theater seats and spend a half hour or so writing our biographies for the play Build, something we chorus people were routinely asked to do. I sat there looking around at my 16 castmates other than Priscilla Lopez, Deanna Morales, Pam Blair, Val, Donna McKechnie, Cassie. They were dancers who, like me, were experiencing their first principal role in a theatrical production. Everyone else was writing away like crazy while I sat there trying to imagine listing all my chorus jobs since 1962, when it suddenly hit me. None of that mattered. That was then, this is now. As of 1975, I wasn't a chorus dancer anymore. I was an actor, and it was time to own it. I picked up my pen and paper and completed the assignment in less than a minute. Michael took one look at it and laughed. That's Sheila Bryant right there, he said. And to my absolute delight, he published it in the playbill exactly as I'd written it. Carol Bishop, Sheila has survived in show business for 12 years. Working on the Sheila Bryant character was a joy and a challenge. I knew I was one hell of a dancer now I had my heart set on becoming one hell of an actor. The last thing I wanted was for people who knew my work to walk out of the theater after the show saying things like, oh, well, she tried. Or the dreaded she wasn't half bad. In the original script of A Chorus Line, Sheila had a monologue, much of it taken from what I talked about in the first tape session. I worked for weeks and weeks on that monologue. It was beautifully written and a lot of it was me. I wasn't about to shortchange it or myself. That opportunity I'd been praying for, to really act, was right in front of me. Blowing it wasn't an option. Which made it all the more horrifying when Michael came up to me one day and broke some awful news. With Marvin Hamlisch and Ed Kleban involved, they were understandably adding songs to the show. So we're trimming your monologue a lot, turning it into dialogue instead. And then Sheila's going to sing a song called at the Ballet. I gaped at him while every drop of blood drained from my face, I came as close as I've ever come to begging. As I reminded him, michael, you and I both know I don't have a good singing voice. You might want to rethink this. He gave me a minute to get my panic out of my system before he calmly added, it's going to be a trio. Oh, there would be other people singing with me. That was better? A little. Okay, I finally conceded. I guess that'll work. And then, for the first time, I heard at the Ballet Daddy always thought that he married beneath him. When he proposed, he informed my mother he was probably her very last chance. And though she was 22, she married him. Life with my dad wasn't ever a picnic. More like a come as you are. When I was five, I remember my mother dug earrings out of the car. I knew they weren't hers, but it wasn't something you'd want to discuss. He wasn't warm. Well, not to her. Well, not to us. But everything was beautiful at the ballet Graceful men lift lovely girls in white I was happy at the ballet that's when I started class Up a steep and very narrow stairway To a voice like a metronome it wasn't paradise, but it was home. Mother always said I'd be very attractive when I grew up. Different, she said with a special something and a very, very personal flair and though I was 8 or 9 though I was 8 or 9 I hated her. Different is nice but it sure isn't pretty. Pretty is what it's about. I never met anyone who was different who couldn't figure that out. So beautiful I'd never lived to see but it was clear, if not to her, well, then to me, that everyone is beautiful at the ballet Every prince has got to have his swan. I was pretty. I was happy at the ballet I was mesmerized. That exquisite music carried those hauntingly familiar lyrics right into my soul and took my breath away. They weren't just lyrics. Many of them, maybe even most of them, were quotes. My quotes, word for word from that first long, intimate tape session over a year ago. I hadn't lost my beautiful monologue after all. It had simply evolved into something far more beautiful and far more memorable. Impossible as it seemed, Marvin Hamlisch and Ed Kleben had written a song called at the Ballet that told the story of my childhood.