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36 house by dinnertime every night. We usually ate at 8:00 PM. Most of the other kids had dinner with their families at 6:00 PM and then went out again. But my sister and I had our own ways of compensating for our aloneness. I used dance and music. My bedroom had French doors that led out onto my own private balcony. I thought of that balcony as my own elegant stage much in the way I had thought of our front porch as my stage when I was just a little kid in Missouri. In the meantime, mother bought me a piano and offered to let me take lessons. I yearned to take the lessons and promised to practice until I learned to play the Moonlight Sonata. She’d told me that I could quit lessons or keep taking them after I’d learned the Sonata. That wasn’t a hardship for me. I really got back into music. I memorized music from records, song sheets and operas. I also danced. Each night I put some of my classical music records on my stereo, then danced alone for hours, . ta sometimes in my room but more often on my second floor balcony which connected to my bedroom. I was so driven to dance under the moon that I rarely missed a night. While the other Will Rogers kids, my classmates, were driving up and down Peoria Avenue, going to movies, drinking rootbeer at Weber’s drive-in or just being teenagers in general, I felt compelled to dance, sing and play music in my bedroom. Sometimes I was allowed to join my friends for a movie or some other fun but that was a es ee ee OP a rare occasion. Mostly I stayed home. I tried to be content, to keep my mind away from the fun my schoolmates were having. One of the things I required myself to do was to assume dramatic poses while I looked at the stars and sometimes I felt as if I were in love with an unknown man not yet met. Barbara Bartholic as told to Peggy Fielding had made the rule that my sister and I were to be in our or as if I were feeling a longing for a person whom I had