When I was a child, I was ballet mad, like many little girls.  We lived in a small town in eastern Kansas, and now and again famous troups would come to Kansas City and my dad would take me on the train to watch them.  Of all the dancers I saw, the one who most enraptured me was Alicia Alonso.  I never would have guessed when I saw her move so weightlessly across the stage that she was nearly blind, that she had spent a year in bed unable to move in hopes of correcting her vision–dancing...