A dancer in the night

She was tall, lithe and beautiful, with dark hair cascading down her back. She wore a long skirt and glossy pumps – the epitome of elegance, so rare in today’s sweatpants and sneakers world.

She stepped out into the warm, humid East Coast night, walking lightly, gracefully.

I had been heading back inside, knowing that I would pay the price for lingering out here with pollen rampant in the air. But the sight of her stopped me immediately. Allergies be damned!

She was a dance teacher – I recognized her from the first half of the program, a nightmarishly long children’s dance recital which I had consented to attend for the sake of a young participant in my family.

She lit a long white cigarette and exhaled into the breeze. Just three intense drags, then she stepped off the sidewalk and dropped the partially smoked cigarette into the dust and stepped on it. Firmly. Decisively. No ember would survive the determined press of her dancer’s sole. Again, a gesture from days of yore – today, smokers are almost 100 percent “flickers” in an everlasting hurry. Perhaps to escape the health freaks who are omnipresent and condemnatory anytime a telltale wisp of smoke is seen anywhere.

I wondered if she did thus simply because the recital was being held at a high school, where the sight of burning butts upon the sidewalk might have brought opprobrium upon the dance group. I hope not.

She danced beautifully, when her turn came on stage, in between the cute but awkward performances of the children.

I saw no antismoke bigots that night, the kind of people that have cropped up like crabgrass in this new century, who like to go around giving smokers dirty looks or even telling them – perfect strangers -- to quit. I saw no one deprecating this dancer for her indulgence.

And I’m glad. Truth be told, a woman who keeps her body in the state of fitness required to be a dancer, and who loves the genre enough to teach it to children, and a woman who takes pleasure in the simple art of dressing up now and then, will surely live longer and better than the majority of the unpleasant, boorish busybodies who point fingers at her smoking but haven’t gotten a moment of exercise since they sat on a swing in second grade, and who couldn’t tell a dress from a dirigible.