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Metropolitan Diary
‘I Moved Away, Yet She Continued to Call on My Birthday Every Year’
A Manhattan friendship endures, a clown to the rescue and more reader tales of New York City in this week’s Metropolitan Diary.
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April 26, 2026,
5:02 a.m. ET
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For a Dancer
Dear Diary:
Fresh out of college in 1990, I moved to the Upper West Side. I became friendly with a former New York City Ballet dancer who lived in my building and mostly went out between dusk and dawn.
Her career had ended in the early 1970s, and because of damage to her knees from dancing, she usually traveled by wheelchair to Fairway or to swim at the Reebok Sports Club.
I took her to Cirque du Soleil and dinners out. She took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she seemed to know every guard and secret passageway.
As the ’90s ended, I moved away, yet she continued to call on my birthday every year for nearly 25 years.
I often let the calls roll to voice mail and didn’t always respond promptly. Still, every year, there would be her same sweet Southern voice.
Three years ago, she was hospitalized after a fall, declined rapidly and wound up on life support. She had never married and had no children, and the family she did have lived out of state.
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