Margot

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A strange dream last night. I was at a huge rally – James Mason the actor was on stage building up the hype and then he morphed into Winston Peters who launched into an anti-Asian speech and attacking whanau ora. Someone unfurled a swastika and all mayhem broke loose. Shots were being fired. People were running in all directions. I was young and fit again

The origins of that dream are manifold. I’m reading Larssen’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest a novel about the Swedish SIS. The TV news had a clip of Winston speaking on whanau ora. And another one on a pro-Nazi rally in the United Kingdom. We watched a DVD on Margot Fonteyn last evening. The thought flashed across my mind that her Panamanian husband, Roberto Arrias, reminded me of James Mason and I must look at some of his old movies. The assassination attempt on Arrais left him crippled.

The excerpts of Fonteyn dancing were the highlights of the film. Her passion, grace and lyricism made her a great artist. Away from the choreography of the stage her life was more chaotic. People make gods of stars forgetting they are but human beings who excel at some art or sport. Think of Tiger Woods.
And we almost lost her. See my blog of 13 June last year. Had she been killed in Holland she would have been a brief paragraph in the history of her company. Instead, she survived to become a world famous personage. The scenes of her dancing with Nureyev were breathtaking. I would have been better off dancing with her in my dream but that was not to be.