The Holding Pen

LAINA and the VAMP

There once - and not that long ago - lived a dancer named Laina.

            Laina had a crowded life with many manic moments and many depressive ones.  Dancing is a life only a passionately obsessed person would choose.  But Laina never thought of dancing as an obsession.  To her dance was a way of life - one that would stand up to time, one that she could never live without, and one in which she would most likely live alone.

            When Laina of the thirties mouth, the languid-lidded eyes, the voluptuous curls, and the love-it-or-hate-it face was in her teens, her wardrobe for two years consisted of five identical black dresses, two pairs of black Capezio flats, and several black leotards.  The black phase, not accidentally, happened to coincide with a classic collegiate depression several years too early.

            By the time she was twenty she had already lived in Paris, Los Angeles, the Caribbean, and New York City.  She spoke several languages fluently.  She had begun her first year of psychoanalysis; she had become a vegetarian; and she had developed an overwhelming fear of the dark.  She intellectualized that fear of the dark was nothing more than an arrangement of fifteen amino acids, a mere protein, easily synthesized in a laboratory.  Yet, with her flannel nightgown and her waist deep hair to shroud her, she would sit on the floor in her room, hug her knees to her chest, stare at a wall hung with windows and mirrors, and allow herself to ruminate all night long with the special thrills of misery.

            Having already danced the Tango in Paris, at the Folies Bergeres, and 'precision' at Radio City Music Hall in midtown Manhattan, all that she truly desired was to dance a slow cheek-to-cheek with the brightest star in the midnight sky.

            One day while Laina was sashaying through a wide open meadow she came upon an extraordinary objet d'art, a black onyx box that she could easily spin into an extraordinary Art Deco Grand Piano - with pearly white keys and long taut strings.

            She threw a leg over one side of it and running the tips of her fingers lightly but firmly up and down, did a short piano exercise on the very lid of the box.  And with this pulsating activity, a symphony played in her head, the insects pollinated everything in sight, and a million bright yellow dandelions swayed side-by-side in the warm late summer breeze.  She smiled to herself.  This is exciting!  She pointed her toes and kicked one of her long legs up and in the direction of the hot sun.  She kicked up her other leg and stretched.  The sun shone down refreshingly hot, and that gorgeous black box sparkled - the rich black suddenly strikingly white, a reflector for the sun, as if a mirror to the center.

            Drenched in the hot sunlight, and unaware that Vladimir dozed on her underside, she spread her legs and stretched her torso forward, bending and stretching out to the wide expanse of wildflowers and greens.

            "Mother," she whispered to the universe, "thank you for this beautiful day."

            And with thi