Anne with an E, and Dance

It took me all these years to read ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, and now I am wondering how I ever lived without. I feel her on my shoulder, wherever I venture to now. I hear her insisting on the imagination, think of her faced with a newly bloomed peony, run off to the street, as I'm sure Anne would have done, whenever the Clydesdales are brought down my way at dawn, set free from their tents at the transitory horse show. Anne with an E seized upon the possible. She insisted on living each day as a last. She went about her world enthralled—looking for, hoping for goodness.

Saturday Anne was with me, too—with me and a few hundred others as Dancing Classrooms Philly conducted its Spring 08 finals competition at Drexel University. The foxtrot, the merengue, the rumba, the tango, the swing had transformed these young dancers from West and North Philadelphia. The glitter on their skirts and ties, the sunset peach above the young girls' eyes, the flowers perched, the shirt tails in, the reverberatory cries of the crowd as Pierre Dulaine urged the spectators on. The teaching artists, too: They had transformed these kids—they had changed the way they walked and stood, the way they honored one another, the way they dreamed. It was hot, and it was crowded, and the whole place throbbed, and as I took photograph after photograph of angled arms and intertwined hands, I felt Anne near—the irrepressible pulse of her.

Dance is a gift given. It is the self, rising.