What do you want to be when you grow up?

A nice lady interviewed me the other day and wanted to know what I might have liked to be if I weren't a writer. When I was ten years old, I said, I wanted to be a ballerina. And there are a number of other choices I feel I would like to have made, now that I'm grown up: opera singer, movie director. But I have no noticeable physical grace, no voice, and no Hollywood connections.

The one thing I never wanted to grow up to do was anything that involved making a lot of money. I don't know why that is. I like spending money; I like having money. But there always seemed to me to be something nasty about making money.

Being a ballerina is the anti-rich person choice. Dancers have even less chance than writers of ever making a buck. All the dancers I ever knew were broke all the time. But I tell you what. A great dancer, or even a moderately good dancer, has something that no amount of money can ever buy, and that's the ability to create fantastic, ephemeral beauty just by showing up and moving around. Mere rich people can't do that. It's not even a gift. It's an ability dearly bought with hours of arduous daily practice.

Some years ago Harold and I attended Celtic Week at the Ashokan music camp in the wild woods of New York State. He took his famous Irish fiddle, of course, and I brought my English concertina, which I play about as clumsily as I dance. There was dancing. There were serious dancers. Several of them put on a show on the last evening. I was particularly struck by one, a dark-haired girl doing charming things with a red chiffon scarf. She looked like the queen of the world.

Next day I ran into her in the parking lot as we were packing up to go. We chatted, and she revealed that she had no way to get home to New York City and no money for a cab. I was stunned. "I could never do that," I said, by which I meant go somewhere for the sake of art and create ecstatic beauty with no way to get home again.

She thought I was criticizing her for her lifestyle, but it wasn't that at all. I was dumb with admiration. Dancers. They're like butterflies. Seriously, would you sooner be a dancer or a hedge fund manager?

And speaking of ephemeral beauty, Amazon is offering the first episode of BUCKER DUDLEY, which I put up on Kindle this week, for free to Kindle owners. If you don't have a Kindle, leave a halfway cogent comment on this or another of my blog posts over the next couple of weeks and I'll put your name in the hat for the drawing. I'm going to be giving away a Kindle.

Kate Gallison