The Ballerina Bedspread
When I was a girl, I loved ballet very much. I rarely saw anyone actually dance; I just looked at the pictures of dancers in library books. So ballet to me was a series of beautiful but motionless poses, and I thought that ballerinas could stay on their toes forever.
I was thrilled when my parents brought home from the store for me (around 1965) a lovely bedspread with sketches of four different graceful ballerinas. I have a particular reason for showing them to you. Here they are:
The pink kneeling girl was the only one I named: she was Daphne.
I loved the girl tying the ribbons on her slippers: I had a great fascination for toe shoes. (And one day I owned pairs of my own, but that's another story.)
A third girl was the one below, caught in a jump whose name I do not know--maybe it is made-up, as it looks fine in the air but seems like it would be tough to land gracefully. Well anyway, there she is. For our purposes today, we don't need a picture of the fourth ballerina. Though some day I may come back and add her, just for archival purposes.
So now you've seen them all.
A few weeks ago at the library, I was working with a book truck full of old Vogue magazines from the 50s and 60s. They had been bound only in cheap cardboard covers, and we were about to send them off to the bindery to have them re-bound in sturdy, gorgeous red covers that would support and protect them better.
And of course, no person could resist looking old Vogues, can she? I couldn't. I opened up an issue from 1958 and idly turned the first pages...Now this is the part where fate steps in, where worlds collide, where, to be less drama-queen about it, a coincidence occurred. Because, over an ad for tampons, this is the picture I saw:
Now I have noticed that for some reason, other people are not as bonkers about coincidences as I am. So we will gloss over my likely being the only person in the building (city, country, world) who knows about the 1965 ballerina bedspread and has seen the 1958 tampon ad. Instead, I'll just say, if I could draw as beautifully as this artist could, and I saw those ballerinas in a tampon ad, I would have wanted to immortalize them too, or at least improve their venue. And I would have been glad to know they made a little girl happy.
Comments