The Radio City Rockettes' shtick has always been uniformity--women of similar heights and weights do synchronized moves in identical costumes--and it wasn't until 1987, after six decades in existence, that New York City's fabled kick line was ready to welcome a dancer with dark skin. That dancer was Jennifer Jones, who told her story for kids in the picture book On the Line, and now she tells it for adults, with brio and humility, in Becoming Spectacular: The Rhythm of Resilience from the First African American Rockette.
Jones, the daughter of an interracial couple, was born in 1967 and raised middle class in New Jersey. As a child, she took tap-dancing lessons, and she realized that the stage was home while performing the jitterbug in her fourth-grade recital. Jones continued to take dance classes into adulthood, and in 1987, she saw an ad in Backstage magazine announcing that the Rockettes (Jones "didn't know who they were") were auditioning dancers. She showed up ("I saw that ethnic minorities were encouraged to attend") and made history.
Becoming Spectacular is a survivor's tale: along with professional disappointments, Jones weathers male predation, a thorny divorce, financial trials, and a medical crisis. The book contains some formulaic writing, but readers will surely be moved by Jones's unstinting honesty, including about the fact that she didn't become a Rockette with intent to blaze a trail: "I couldn't get caught up in the symbolism of what my inclusion meant, because I had a job to do." Becoming Spectacular is a diva-free production. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer