Free Madonna by Mark Bego Page A

the University of Michigan’s dance department who traveled to Durham, North Carolina, to participate in the annual summer dance festival at Duke University’s East Campus. During a break between performances, Madonna stepped outside the auditorium and sat munching granola she had mixed into a carton of Dannon lemon yogurt.
    At the time, Richard Maschal was a thirty-four-year-old reporter with the Charlotte Observer . Covering the dance festival, he was eager to interview one of the dancers when he stumbled into nineteen-year-old Ms. Ciccone. According to Maschal, “She had a beautiful face, the image, I immediately thought, of a Renaissance madonna. As writers will do, I began composing a story in my head about a dancer as beautiful as a madonna. We sat on a bench, and I asked her name. ‘Madonna,’ she said.” He found the girl to be “remarkably self-possessed for a teenager and incredibly self-absorbed.” 47
    â€œShe spoke to me about wanting to quit school in Michigan, and heading for New York to audition for the Pearl Lang dance company,” Maschal recalls of his chance meeting with the future pop music siren. She complained to him about the lack of nightlife in Durham and described her tenure as a dance student as “pretty draining and demanding. You spend all your time dancing, every day—day in and day out.” 47
    Maschal says it was her facial features that most impressed him; he felt she had the kind of face that belonged in a fresco on a church ceiling: “Round eyes, arched eyebrows, finely drawn mouth—Da Vinci would have loved it.” 47
    After she returned to Ann Arbor following the Duke dance festival, Madonna began to formulate a new plan: she was going to blow off college, take the money she saved from her bar tips, and head for New York City to seek her fortune. This was not a plan she arrived at solely by herself; it grew out of seeds that Christopher Flynn had been constantly and consistently planting in her fertile young mind. “He encouraged me to go to New York,” Madonna recalls. “He made me push myself.” 29
    With Flynn’s nurturing encouragement, that very summer Madonna put her ambitious new plan into action. The real stumbling block was her fear of her father’s reaction. Could she really toss the scholarship aside and run off to New York City? “I was torn between taking the grant and going to New York,” she says, recalling her dilemma at the time. “University meant pleasing my parents and getting money and security.” 48 Finally, she figured she had nothing to lose—and everything to gain.
    With this new goal in mind, Madonna began to store up her tips from waitressing at Dooley’s. She had a book about the New York Ballet Company, and in it she would stash her extra cash. Linda Alaniz remembers Madonna showing her the money she kept in the book for her eventual trip to New York.
    After a year and half of college, Madonna announced her plan to her father and stepmother. Predictably, Tony Ciccone totally freaked out when he heard what his oldest daughter was planning. He wanted her to go to college. Dancing, in his mind, was a hobby, not a profession.
    It was one of those now-or-never situations. In her mind, if she stuck around Ann Arbor until she graduated she was going to lose her momentum. When she danced, she felt as though she could conquer the world.
    â€œBefore I started dancing, I felt really physically awkward,” she proclaims, “not comfortable with my body.” Dancing satisfied two needs in her life: for mental and physical strength. “I feel superior. I feel like a warrior.” 11
    The warrior was about to take on Manhattan and the world of professional dance. Madonna recalls her college days with fondness, but when it was time to leave, she was more than ready to go. She had saved enough money to purchase a one-way ticket to New York City, and in spite of