Oh, I’m so sad. The judge I clerked for following law school, Sylvia Pressler, just died. She was only 75 and had only retired a few years earlier. Of course, she worked until the last possible moment a judge could until mandatory retirement under New Jersey law.

She was head of the Appellate Division (New Jersey’s intermediate appeals court), and had a reputation for being very intelligent, very formidable (but sweet!), and very liberal. She’s responsible for a good many important civil rights decisions, involving mainly gender equality, sexuality equality, and the death penalty and due process. Apparently, if I’d been born a New Jersey resident, I would only have been able to play Little League (as I did in Phoenix) because of her. (Btw, New Yorkers just love to condescend to New Jerseyians, but Hoboken, you know, is the birthplace of baseball… and Frank Sinatra. And, New Jersey law tends to be far more progressive).

I remember the year I was there our flashy, press-attention-heavy due process case involved a high-school’s extreme last-minute decision to prevent a student from graduating because she’d gotten into some kind of vague fight with another student earlier that day. The appeal was emergent (since it needed to be decided right then, the graduation ceremony being just about to happen), and Judge Pressler determined in a few precious moments that since the school had failed to give the student a hearing beforehand, they’d violated her due process rights. The student graduated. Her photo was in the paper the next day waving about her diploma, wearing a huge smile. The school board was not happy, but the student and her family sure were. Judge Pressler was always a champion of the underdog.

The several judges who shared our Hackensack building would often take all of us law clerks out to lunch together. Judge Pressler was one of only two female judges (I think I remember her saying she was the only woman in her entire class at Rutgers Law), and by far the most liberal, and she managed to be both sweetly likable, and formidable (she was the head of the entire Court after all). She’d start going off on some conservative politician (usually Giuliani ) and the male judges would sit there biting their hands, dying to say something but too intimidated to speak up. It was great — we were in awe!

According to the Times, she died at her summer house in Sparta, which I remember from our end-of-the-year judicial panel party (and which I always thought sounded very balletic). It’s out on this beautiful lake, where there were many swans. I remember approaching one (which I’d never seen in person before) and realizing they’re beautiful and elegant, but if you get too close and they get threatened — especially if they have babies around — they can be very aggressive, which I guess makes sense.

Anyway, I was very honored to have clerked for her. Below is a photo of her swearing me into the New Jersey Bar — one very cool thing she’d do for her law clerks (as did most of the other New Jersey judges; in New York, I got sworn in along with about a thousand other people in a gigantic room by a nameless, faceless someone).

She has a son, Noah, and a daughter, Jessica, who is a writer. I think Jessica writes for New York Magazine.

Thank you Harriet Klausner!

My novel is finally up on Amazon. Eeek, am kind of freaking out a bit…

SLSG has been named a top law blog in the criminal law category by Attorney.org, likely for my previous coverage of the Sean Bell shooting trial and some other related posts. This is particularly exciting because my soon-to-be-published novel is in part about the life of a young female criminal appeals attorney. I also plan to write more about the Sean Bell case. So I’m very honored!

And apropos of criminal defense attorneys, the movie Disturbing the Universe is a must-see. It’s a documentary about the life of civil rights / criminal defense attorney William Kunstler, made by his daughters. Since he was involved in practically every major trial of his time — disorderly conduct sit-ins protesting racial segregation, the Chicago Seven, the Attica Uprising, the standoff at Wounded Knee, the Central Park Jogger case, the trials of those accused of the 1993 WTC bombing — it ends up being, above all, an immensely informative history of late 20th Century race-relations in this country.  See it!

I haven’t been watching SYTYCD this season (I don’t watch the auditions anymore), but my friend and former Latin ballroom teacher, Jacob Jason, just posted this on Facebook!!!!!

Last night I read from my new novel (which is still VERY much a work in progress) with the Writers Room at the Cornelia Street Cafe, and it actually went okay! Better than I expected! Several of my wonderful friends showed up to give me much-needed encouragement and support (maybe someday I’ll be confident enough actually to post here ahead of time when I’ll be reading…) and they all seemed genuinely to like the piece I read. And several people I didn’t know came up to me afterward — including a filmmaker who gave me her card! — to tell me how much they liked it. One woman said she wanted to read it as soon as it was out! Though she told me the way she didn’t want it to end. I assured her it didn’t So, I just have to write the rest of the book now…

But I was so worried because the subject matter is kind of controversial and the character whose piece I read from is a young black man with a certain kind of voice that my face and body certainly don’t in any way fit, so I worried I just wouldn’t be able to pull it off. And I am a horribly sucky reader and always will be — I’m just shy and I’m not an actress and that’s just that. But people still got what I was trying to convey through the actual words, so I am extremely happy about that. That’s all I can ever ask for!

Anyway, funny thing is that there was this guy sitting up front who looked just like Christopher Wheeldon. Seriously, just like him except about 10 years younger. And it really freaked me out because then I started thinking of this. And then I started thinking what if someone reacts to me like that! I mean, you can’t please everyone of course, and there are always going to be people who don’t like you, but, well, all I can say is that the more I write (and the closer my first novel gets to publication), I am feeling a lot less critical, at least of new works

Anyway, now that this all-too stressful event is over, I’ll blog about the Natalia Osipova / Herman Cornejo La Sylphide at American Ballet Theater Monday night. She was good, he was insanely excellent. It’s like with Kathryn Morgan the other night in NYCBallet Dancers’ Choice — I don’t know if there are words to describe him. If you want to see sheer perfection, go see him in something — anything. I can’t imagine anyone better in all the world. I mean, every great dancer brings something to the stage, and he simply brings perfection, in the Webster Dictionary definition of the word: “an exemplification of supreme excellence.” One of my Twitter friends (who’s a very established ballet dancer) told me he’s a “dancer’s dancer,” which I can totally see. He’s a non-dancer’s dancer too

Anyway, more tomorrow, I mean later today. I have to sleep now.

(Photo from TVGrapevine)

Yesterday afternoon, I received some shocking news: that a reader and frequent commenter here, Sharon Balik, had passed away that morning suddenly and unexpectedly. She commented here under the name BDC_Sharon and had just left a message over the weekend on my most recent SYTYCD post.

I’m still in shock and can’t stop thinking about her. She found my blog a couple of years ago and we’d become very good friends. She became enamored of ballroom dancing after Dancing With the Stars premiered. She began taking lessons with her husband, Tim, and when DWTS pro dancers Maks Chmerkovskiy, Elena Grinenko, and Tony Dovolani founded the Ballroom Dance Channel website, she began to work for them, researching and writing articles about various aspects ballroom dance, writing recaps of the dance shows on TV, leading discussions about such issues as whether DanceSport should become an Olympic sport, and helping to promote the website’s online ballroom dance lessons. She kindly linked to my blog and my HuffPo reviews, and brought me a load of new readers. She really became a tireless promoter of all things ballroom.

When she began writing for BDC, she’d email to ask me questions about the ballroom competition scene since she knew I had experience with that. And we just became friends. She was one of those people who’s so easy to befriend, who’ll listen to you go on and on and will end up offering you all this really well thought-out, sound advice. Whenever I had a problem with dance or with a heckler here or an angry artist writing me nasty emails about a critical review, she naturally became one of the people I’d send my “Help!” email to And of course she always had such funny, clever, thought-provoking, opionionated things to say — both in response to those emails and here on the blog. I am going to miss her so much.

It’s funny how close you can become to someone you’ve never met in person. People who say you only make superficial connections on the internet are so wrong. I am really going to miss you, Sharon.

Read the tribute to her on TVGrapevine, where she posted frequently as well, here.

By posing questions like, “how old am I?” And, “who am I?”

Karina Smirnoff, Blackpool 2006, photo by Tonya Plank

Regarding the first: apparently 10 years old, as I just became ridiculously giddy on Facebook’s pronouncement: “Tonya is now friends with Karina Smirnoff.” My longtime Latin ballroom IDOL

Regarding second question:  one of my new FB friends asked me, “Hey, what’s up with all this Miami City Ballet stuff? Are you a dance critic?” (My status updates lately have been about going to see Miami City Ballet, where I spent the past two days).

So, hmmm. I honestly don’t know. Do bloggers = amateur (or in some cases pro) critics in this new media world? I guess it depends on the blogger and how s/he defines him/herself.  I guess I want to be taken seriously as someone who gives her honest opinions and assessments of things and certainly don’t want to be seen as a lackey to any dance company, but I also try to make my connection with dance personal in a way that a newspaper critic really can’t. Ie: writing in a bit of a persona, calling dancers I really like by their first names, etc. Makes it more interesting albeit less “objective” I think.

I also want to try to avoid being too hard on an artist. I have been and it’s really upset a couple of them. As someone who’s really trying to segue from a career in law to a career as a writer — and especially a writer of fiction — I can relate to and have a deep respect for how difficult the artistic process is and how much you are really putting yourself out there when you subject yourself to public scrutiny. But then again, we all need to have thick skin if we are doing that. And writers do have to keep in mind that our readers are relying on us for our honest opinions; we’re not writing for the artists but for other dance-goers. I do make a distinction between creators who it seems are primarily interested in entertaining and maximizing profit above all else. That’s why I don’t feel badly about being harsh on the TV show producers

Oscar Wilde says a critic is a kind of artist.

So, I basically didn’t answer my the second question at all… Anyway, any other thoughts on the roles of blogger vs. critic in the age of new media, or on critic as artist?

Hope everyone had / is having a happy holiday. I went to my friend Alyssa’s last night for Christmas Eve dinner. She made these delicious orange-peel-infused Manhattans.

And a duck with chestnut stuffing, which Alison is carving.

Alison’s salad of endive, pomegranate seeds, apples, and bleu cheese. And Kathy’s coquitos (Caribbean drink that tastes deceptively non-alcoholic!) in the background.

I think I’m the only one who brought something store-made (wine)! Oh well… food is not my forte.

From night before, Alyssa’s holiday party at Bowery Wine Company. She made these delic gingerbread cupcakes with peppermint-marshmallow frosting and candy cane bits sprinkled on top.

And Bowery Wine Co. bartender made us Cookie Dough martinis. Cookie dough martini FYI = vanilla Vodka, Frangelico and some pink stuff in a bottle labeled 43, which I’d never heard of before. Very tasty!

And after party having some pizza in the Village. Above, Alyss with some random guy we picked up and dragged off with us No, he’s not a random guy; he’s a BWC regular and his name is Dan. Funny, but when I mentioned my blog he revealed he’s friends with the people who run Gaynor Minden pointe shoes.

Okay, happy long (hopefully, for everyone) weekend, you guys!