As the recital approaches, I keep my costume in a box in my dresser drawer and take it out for frequent examination. The marvelous hat gleams on the dresser, poised all night before its double in the mirror. I dance in the costume just once before the performance, for a dress rehearsal, which goes without a hitch. And that evening is, indeed, flawless: the adoring audience of parents cheers, right in the middle of the dance, while I am doing a series of time steps, my arms circling around and around me in the air, my attendant sylphs twirling their brains out. The applause intoxicates me. My dance feels timeless to me, as if I’m weightless, an astronaut in a space capsule; I can float in the air over the darkened recital hall, over the spotlight in which my body executes, without a hitch, the timed and clattering steps of the dance. This is what becomes of the firebird, drugged and trained: everyone adores him.

My father likes The Lawrence Welk Show, an awful bore of bland music and constant smiling, and The Ed Sullivan Show, which is more interesting, since it offers bits and pieces of disparate worlds: some circus, some Hollywood, a little Broadway. One evening Agnes Moorehead is featured, reciting a passage from Proust.

She wears a long chiffon evening gown with many filmy layers which wrap her throat and arms; they’re bluish gray, like everything on our TV screen, but you can tell from the context that the studio audience can see that Miss Moorehead is swathed in mauve, since the passage she is reading is in fact a celebration of mauve. The speaker is walking down a street when he spies Madame Swann, in her carriage, and what transports him is her complete enwrapment in that color; she has become a sort of ambassador for mauve, mauve’s priestess and celebrant. It’s as if the color itself has gone out riding in a carriage, to take the air, to give the admiring world the rapture and benefit of its charms.

Miss Moorehead is transfixed by her text; she is all enunciation, long vowels, consonants emphasized by the sure, firm movements of tongue and teeth, arms lifted and turned so that her own mauve veils move in a breeze of her own making.

Then comes Topo Gigio the talking mouse, or a man who spins dozens of plates on sticks at once, but who cares? A new seed’s planted in my head, a new constellation of elements: chiffon, elocution, “mauve” (wonderfully unnecessary word, putting on airs, making “lavender” seem ordinary). Something to be savored, unwrapped: Proust.