Excerpts from a Conversation between Phoebe and Joan

PN: Lovely to hear from you! Since you have started writing (good for you!) I have a question — where are you beginning? Somehow, I feel a need to provide a bit of backstory before the Wilson period, to understand just how strange my dance story is. Yet it’s hard to say how any of these thoughts will be useful to Wilson students— the times have changed so drastically. To get through college without being in debt wasn’t a thing back then, and it was possible to live young and poor in New York City. AND there were places to take classes and spaces to rent for rehearsing. Dance has really lost its habitat, aside from a few places where people were lucky enough to buy. For me the stressful side was my crazy romantic life - both before and after a marriage! That period was a weird Golden Age (contraceptives and no AIDS yet) but looking back on it after 20+ years of marriage and living here I feel as if it’s stranger than fiction.

JM: Stranger than fiction indeed! I definitely feel I need to provide some context as I also have a bit of a backstory. But it's also tangled up with emotional issues and family dynamics etc. And, as you say, it's hard to imagine how this will be useful to current students. But in a way, you never know... So, to answer your question, I want to go back to how I started dancing in the first place, that “how” I definitely think is an important part of the "story."

PN: …What we have accomplished DESPITE our lives is important to communicate—it just might give somebody the courage to take their own leap! What happened to us at Wilson was important and made a MAJOR difference in our lives, even though we ended up leaving the college… I’m fascinated that we did something so similar, and yet so different….