Robert Brassel

Always a Dancer: A Memoir Robert Brassel

This is the story of a young boy who wants to be a professional dancer. Surmounting the inevitable obstacles of parental rejection and the advice of guidance counselors, with stakes set against one starting training as late as seventeen, he ventures to New York City in hopes of dancing in West Side Story. Instead, he discovers his true love is Classical Ballet, not Broadway. In his first year with the Joffrey Ballet, he is drafted into the US Army. Changing from dance tights to M-16 rifles, he encounters one of the more remarkable periods of his young life. Miraculously avoiding assignment in Vietnam, he returns to the ballet career that then takes him to twenty-five countries on five continents. Along the way he meets and marries his favorite ballerina, Linda DeBona, and together, they dance the great classical repertoire on the world's stages, meeting and working with many of the great names in music and dance. Upon becoming a father and changing careers, he sees new opportunities. In his work as an insurance broker, he is able to give back to his former profession in the form of creating a disability insurance product for dancers: a first for the insurance industry and for the professional dance world. A new stage has been set, this time with the audience across the table. Finally, he finds his way back to dance by developing the health club industry's first adult ballet class. He is back in his element reminding one and all that he is first and Always a Dancer.