Now I’ll never have a chance to impress Arlene Croce.
Croce, who died last month at 90, was the dean of American dance critics during the heyday of American dance. I started my writing career as a dance critic, too, and for many years that’s all I ever dreamed of being as a writer. My first sixty-plus published articles were dance reviews, and their intended audience consisted, in its entirety, of Arlene Croce. She was the lodestar, the queen, the presence around which the field arranged itself. I’ve wanted few things more in life—wanted it with the ardor of youth and the thirst for praise of the apprentice writer—than to win her approval.
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