Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

City Lights

New York City

December 1951

When Dena was seven her mother got a job at Bergdorf’s in New York City and sent her to boarding school in Connecticut. She hated it—long, empty, dark halls and waiting to see her mother again. After about two months, the Mother Superior wrote a letter to her mother telling her that Dena was not mixing well with the other children. “We expect a certain amount of homesickness from our boarders, especially when the child is an only child, but I am afraid Dena is a hard case. It is clear that the child simply adores you and is terribly unhappy here. We usually encourage parents to allow their children time to get used to a new surrounding, but I am going to make an exception in our policy, and I wonder if she might have more weekends at home?”

Dena loved her mother’s new apartment. It was off Gramercy Park on a pretty street lined with trees. She would sleep on the living room couch. The apartment was on the ground floor with the windows almost at street level. At night the light from the streetlamp on the corner would fill the room full of lacy black patterns on the wall as a breeze caused the leaves to ripple back and forth and dance in the light. Lying there late at night she could hear couples walking past the windows, the hard clunk of a man’s foot and the sharp click of a woman’s high heels hitting the sidewalk as they passed. She could hear their soft muffled voices, the deep voice of the man and the woman’s laugh. Sometimes she would hear the music on a radio as a car swished by, shining its headlights through the ornate black bars on the windows and turning the small living room into a magical light-and-sound show. She was full of dreams and curiosity. She always wondered where the people were going and where they had been and dreamed of all the wonderful places she might be going someday. She longed to someday live in a white house like the one she often dreamed about. White against a green lawn, and her mother was always smiling. That Christmas her mother had let her come for a whole week. It had been a wonderful visit. Her mother had taken her to Horn & Hardart’s for lunch, where they chose their food out of little glass windows, drank hot coffee, and ate pie. They walked all the way up Fifth Avenue, looking at hundreds of people, Santa Clauses on each corner, and windows full of miniature things swirling and moving to music, then on to Radio City to see the Christmas show, and she sat there with her mouth open, mesmerized by the spectacle of it all. She had never seen a live camel in her life and the Rockettes were dressed in red and gold uniforms and looked like live toy soldiers. She could hardly breathe watching all the lights, fascinated by the way they changed from one color to another, again almost like magic. While other children were watching the show, Dena had turned around in her seat to look at the spotlights that came beaming down all the way from the very back of the auditorium to form perfect circles of bright white light on stage and on the curtains. And if that wasn’t enough, her mother astonished her when she told Dena that she knew one of the Rockettes and that they were going backstage to meet her.

When they got backstage, her mother’s friend, a nice lady named Christine, gave them a complete tour from the huge mirrored rehearsal hall to the dressing rooms. Backstage was teaming with Rockettes, musicians, stagehands, and other costumed ladies but Dena wanted to know only one thing: Who made the lights way up in the curved ceiling of the auditorium change from one color to another and how did they do it? Christine had laughed at the question coming from such a small girl and introduced her to a man named Artie. He took her over and showed her the main control console, with its 4,305 colored handles that controlled the amber, green, red, and blue lights, and told her about the 206 spotlights. Dena stood listening, enthralled. Later they had dinner with Christine in the private Radio City Music Hall cafeteria, where all the dancers and the staff ate. That night Dena’s head was still whirling. She had never been so excited in her entire life. She slept with her mother and held her hand all night and dreamed about the lights. Then, two months later, without warning, her mother suddenly quit her job and moved to the Altamont Towers apartments in an older section of Cleveland, Ohio, and Dena didn’t see her at all until the summer. But she never forgot that night at Radio City and had been fascinated with lights ever since, any kind of light, sunlight, moonlight, lamplight, so much so that it was the lighting that first attracted her to the theater. She started working with the lights in college and was amazed at how she could change the mood of the stage set from a light and cheery room with pure white sunlight pouring through the windows to a dark, shadowy, scary room by just pulling a lever. She would sneak into the college theater in the middle of the night and play with the lights for hours. She learned how to create any mood she wanted. It was that year that she became totally obsessed with light, and eventually the light became obsessed with her. It was the first time she ever really felt in control of anything in her life. And the lights had pulled her all the way back to New York.