I’m reading dancer Maya Plisetskaya’s memoir, I, Maya Plisetskaya. She was a great ballerina, primarily with the Bolshoi, her life filled with drama and extremes, both positive and negative — the negative mostly a function of operating as an artist under Soviet socialism, with all of its petty bureaucrats, power-lusters, obstructionists, and other semi-humans.
A wry comment early on when she was thinking about the unlikeliness of her doing her own memoir — a ballerina writing a book! — and the dangers of doing so under socialist censorship:
“It reminded me of an old joke. When a huge ship, practically the Titanic, sank in the ocean, only two passengers survived, because they could float: a government minister, because he was such a big turd, and a ballerina, because she was an airhead.”