<Begin Segment 48>

SY: It must be hard, a hard thing to love, you love your mother, to love dance even more. Must be a hard thing, in some ways?

MN: Well, I've often thought I should go to a psychiatrist and tell him this problem that I have, and they probably could solve it for me. But because it's, it's a pressure, I mean, is to wake up in the middle of the night, and say, "Oh, I wish I'd done it differently."

SY: Yeah. It makes me think about a lot of artists, or people who've, in some ways, sacrificed their life, almost like martyrs, to make a change in society. And it's a -- I think it's a lonely place to be.

MN: Yeah. Because Eleanor King was kinda my person who I looked up to, and she gave up her family and gave up... well, I don't know whether...

SY: Marriage?

MN: But I mean, I think she had boyfriends, but she didn't ever get married, because... and then the dancers that I, that I had danced with, or danced for me, if they were married and had children, it was hard for them to come to rehearsal. And there was one gal that just loved to dance, and so she'd bring her two children. And she'd bed 'em down in the back room, and then we'd rehearse. The darn kids tore all the covers off my books. [Laughs] And there's this, this one girl that danced in "Transit into Dormancy," her little girl would cry every time at the end. She'd cry on that dance, because I guess it was sad to her, to see the dancers go down on the floor.

SY: Oh, so she was getting the message, too.

MN: Yeah, this little tiny girl.

<End Segment 48> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.