When Patricia Wilde was in NYC earlier this month to accept the Dance Magazine Award, I naturally buttonholed her for a little interview.
Or course she had many insightful, interesting things to say about ballet, about herself, about her colleagues.
But nothing could have been more revelatory than Wilde’s recollections of the life and times of her poodle Brandy, a true dance-world celebrity. (Martha Graham didn’t want to go on stage without a visit from him.) When Wilde first acquired the little creature in Italy in 1953, on tour with New York City Ballet, her then dressing-room mate Tanaquil Le Clercq, helped sate the frisky one’s appetite by letting him chew on her old pointe shoes.
You heard it here first.