"The nurses told Darci Kistler that she couldn't go into George Balanchine's hospital room, it was past visiting hours. It was Friday evening, April 29, 1983. He had been in Roosevelt Hospital for many months with endless numbers of doctors and specialists parading in and out of his room, unable to diagnose the 79-year-old choreographer's condition. Ms. Kistler started to cry, sat down the hallway and refused to leave. Finally, one young nurse, who knew Balanchine would want to see her, let her slip into the room."
This is the most beautiful obituary I have ever read, and it's not even, strictly speaking, an obituary. Tonally perfect, anecdotally rich, humane, sensitive, elegiac, fiercely, finely principled--it is less a consideration of Balanchine and his last ballerina, Ms. Kistler, as it is a poem pressed into the service of a dance.
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