Remembering Pete Miltz (1965-2019) As I Knew Him in High School

In junior high I was the studious tomboy with braces who never went to parties, and Peter was the unkempt, irreverent charmer who could make anybody laugh. We encountered each other multiple times each day—English class, Latin class, theater productions, the Indiana Players, even an Industrial Arts class. Absorbed as I was in playing sports and flute, I wasn’t part of the dating scene, and Pete seemed like the first guy to begin noticing me as girlfriend material.

In ninth grade we learned the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and performed it for our English class. We made a short film with some sort of anti-abortion message that featured the words of an in utero fetus—I believe I wrote that script. Then there was the horror film parody, “Night of the Living Gloves,” filmed in my bedroom by Pete and Matt Salerno using Ian Gallanar’s Super 8 camera and starring Lisa Burkey, which then and now seemed like mostly an elaborate ploy to get Lisa unclad in the shower—she insisted on wearing a bathing suit but was otherwise a good sport about her role.

For our Latin class in 10^th grade with Mrs. Fredericks, there was a field trip to Italy and Greece. Pete couldn’t go, but he persuaded his family to let me take their expensive camera overseas. This necessitated lengthy photography lessons from him beforehand, delving into the finer points of F-stops and shutter speeds. Shortly after I came home from that trip, Peter officially became my first boyfriend, with a kiss in the Dairy Queen parking lot.

For the next year and a half, we were inseparable. Hour-plus-long phone calls every night—what in the world did we talk about? The ineffable meaning of life as depicted in Franny and Zooey, Stanislovski’s acting method, but also lots of poking fun at teachers and Pete’s efforts to turn me on to the music he liked—Grateful Dead, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, U2, the Talking Heads, and the Beatles. I preferred the soothing, literate harmonies of Simon and Garfunkel but appreciated his efforts to find a window into my tastes through orchestral-scale rock, especially Genesis and Yes.

That summer between 10^th and 11^th grade we’d swim at Mack Pool and walk home sunburned, stopping at Guadalajara for chips and salsa before heading to his house. Once there, we’d ascend past the endless piles of his father’s hoarded books and newspapers to Pete’s attic bedroom, where I delighted in teasing him with my tan lines and what lay beyond. That summer we attended an I.U.P arts camp together, Peter for theater of course, I for flute, modeled after the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, where we’d both applied and been rejected,

We had all of 11^th grade together, which included Mime Club, A Capella Choir, and unending theater productions. I never got a single juicy role, whereas Peter starred in nearly every play and graduated high school with a perfect record of significant or starring roles in 12 productions, 4 per year in 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th grades. I know he stayed up late memorizing lines at the expense of his schoolwork. It was the year our town celebrated the 75^th birthday of its most famous son, Jimmy Stewart, and our high school teachers made sure to acquaint us with Stewart’s most iconic roles. At the highly impressionable age of 17, Pete was exposed to films such as Destry Rides Again, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and The Philadelphia Story. He could do such a spot-on impression of Jimmy Stewart that the ghost of Stewart seemed to hover indelibly over his performances forever after.

That fall my parents brought Peter with us for a sacred family tradition, a college football game at Pitt Stadium, where Dad had once played. From the afternoon game through to our dinner at Tambellini’s, Peter was a bit of a fish out of water but rose to the occasion and comported himself well. Other than their ability to make me laugh, these two, Dad and Peter, could not have been more different. Hard to believe they’re both now gone.

By spring semester we shared the joy of both finally gaining acceptance to the Pennsylvania Governer’s School for the Arts, five glorious weeks of arts immersion on the campus of Bucknell University. I loved the idea of attending this camp with my boyfriend, but we agreed we didn’t want to be constrained by our relationship and decided to keep it from our fellow campers. It was like a secret office romance. That lasted about three days before we settled comfortably back into our dual identity as a couple. All of the friendships we gained there, the people whom we stayed in touch with throughout senior year and beyond, were friends to both of us and another bond that Pete and I shared.

By August, camp had ended, and I was feeling restless about our looming senior year. I felt like I wanted to date other people. Though I initiated our break-up, Peter did not seem heartbroken and found other girls. He and I remained friends throughout senior year, all of college, and well into our twenties. Anytime I came home to Indiana we’d hang out, sometimes with Markus, sometimes with Dan Murphy, often with Ann Maderer. When all four of us could be together—Peter, Markus, Ann, and me—it felt kind of magic, especially one night in Pittsburgh with acid and the Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense. Much later, in our 30s, I remember going out for drinks, just the two of us, after Pete had performed in an Indiana Players production. Our rapport was unbreakable. After Peter, I wanted every other boyfriend and husband to make me laugh as hard as he did, to understand me as well. He formed my expectations, because you never forget your first love.

The Consolation of Rocky

 The terrible inverse of Baby’s First Christmas has got to be Mother’s First Holiday after Divorce. Mine was a year ago at Thanksgiving, when my sons were 12 and 14 and their father had recently moved to another state. In our work and school routines we hummed along without him, and thank God we had a plan for Thanksgiving dinner, but on Thanksgiving eve no amount of industrious prep-cooking could shake the gallows mood.

We needed a holiday movie, the cultural equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life around Christmas, something to watch together with the same sense of ritual and renewal. That November 2015 a Rocky sequel of sorts had been released, Creed, highly praised and putting everyone in mind of the original. Reach back though all the sequels to that summer of 1977 and the first time I saw Rocky with my parents at the Jersey Shore. Its storyline hinges on the fanfare surrounding the American Bicentennial, and the filmmakers managed to release it during the exact timespan it depicts, November–December 1976. Forty years later, the film still speaks to me.

Seventies movies are renowned for their gritty depiction of urban life, and Rocky is a prime example of this aesthetic. Going to the movies on vacation is a double dose of escape, but Rocky seemed more real than any movie I’d ever seen. Those streets of North Philly looked nothing like my hometown of Indiana, PA, population 15,000, a Bedford Falls of sorts and the actual hometown of Jimmy Stewart. Like It’s a Wonderful Life, the plot of Rocky arcs towards redemption, but it takes a long while to get there. A day in the life of Rocky Balboa out in the streets of North Philly means a pile-up of petty conflicts: with the stingy fight manager, with the loan shark Mr. Gazzo exhorting Rocky to let him do the thinking, with Gazzo’s snarling driver. Even 13-year-old Marie, the neighborhood girl whom Rocky counsels to have more self-respect, is having none of his piety: “Screw you, Rocky!” she says.

All of this mean-spiritedness abates only in the pet shop, in the company of Adrian, the clerk so shy she cannot make eye contact with our strapping protagonist. Earlier we saw Rocky alone in his apartment rehearsing jokes about his pet turtles, and now we know for whom he was inventing these lines. Adrian smiles in spite of herself at Rocky’s turtle jokes and is promptly ordered to the basement by her boss to clean the cat cages. The pet shop is all about cages: in a later scene Rocky finally asks Adrian on a date while she’s tending to a birdcage on the counter between them, an impassable barrier. Adrian is so discomfited by his invitation that she can’t respond, and Rocky gives up and leaves with no answer—the first of two pivotal scenes where a character shuffles offstage, everything unresolved, a hallmark of the movie's realism. Butkus from his cage on the floor witnesses all and surely knows in his dog wisdom that by the end of the movie they’ll all of them be sprung and united as a family.

Rocky Balboa and George Bailey suffer through a lifetime of bad breaks, economic struggles, and emasculation, too goodhearted to lash out in anger, lost until they meet their angels, Clarence and Apollo Creed. Rocky’s only friend, Paulie, is the sort of character you can imagine voting for Trump, far angrier than Rocky about his meager opportunities in life. He reluctantly aids Rocky in courting his sister Adrian, with remarks about her “dried up,” “old maid” status, remarks that in 2015 seemed like dated misogyny but in 2016 are less so. We’ve seen Rocky repeatedly humbled in this twilight of his fighting career, and in Adrian he finds a downtrodden compatriot in her own seeming twilight of marriageability, both arrived at that particular late-twenties moment when you feel on the old side of young. More cruel than Paulie’s taunts, however, what plunges a knife in my heart now, after years of cooking for a husband and two children, is when Paulie reaches into the oven on Thanksgiving day to impale Adrian’s roasting turkey and hurl it out the window into the alley. Her meal ruined, Adrian flees to her bedroom, weighing, behind the closed door, an awkward first date with Rocky vs. an evening with her loathsome brother. 

Rocky prevails, but have there ever been more inauspicious circumstances for a first date? They decide to go ice skating, but the rink is closing and the manager has to be bribed, allowing them just ten minutes. As they circle the empty ice together, Rocky jogging in his street shoes and Adrian knock-kneed in her rental skates and frumpy coat, the fluorescent rink lights reveal a vision of misfit harmony. I wonder if Talia Shire really couldn’t skate well, or if that’s an ingenious bit of business from John Avildson, awarded an Academy for his direction. They speak of why boxing lefthanders are called South Paws, why Rocky’s parents told him to use his body since he lacked brains, and how Adrian’s mother told her the exact opposite. Rocky will later sum up their bond with impeccable logic: “She has gaps, I have gaps, together we fill the gaps.”

The evening ends in Rocky’s apartment, once shocking in its squalor but now seeming almost homey, with a sleeveless odalisque Rocky beckoning Adrian to join him and his muscles on the tattered couch. This erotic display unnerves Adrian, and she asks to call her brother. Rocky maintains his dignity in revealing that he can't afford a telephone, without exactly saying so. One of the great Hollywood kisses is their eventual embrace and slow collapse to the floor, with Adrian still wearing her enormous coat.

I relived this romance between Rocky and Adrian for years, playing the soundtrack in my bedroom at night. “The heralded celibacy of the fighter-in-training,” as Joyce Carol Oates called it, evidently made a chaste Rocky into the ideal heartthrob for an eleven-year-old girl. Forty years later, what grips me harder is the scene where Mickey asks to be Rocky’s manager. “What you need is a manager,” growls Burgess Meredith, the legendary actor in his own twilight, a genuinely ferocious, scowling, very old man. If you look for a crack in that façade to reveal a lovable curmudgeon, you won’t find it: his mood is relentlessly foul. But Mickey knows boxing. We meet him on the day he’s changed the lock on Rocky’s gym locker to assign it to a younger fighter, the ultimate insult; the next day, Rocky is announced as Apollo Creed’s opponent for heavyweight champion of the world.

Suddenly everyone wants a piece of Rocky, and Mickey shows up unannounced at his apartment to make his case. Ineptly, Mickey begins by insulting Rocky’s pet turtles, saying what good soup they’d make, then shows Rocky photos of himself in his prime and the gruesome injuries he sustained as a result of . . . not having a manager. The overture is five years too late, but Rocky is too kind-hearted to openly gloat that the tables are turned and now he gets to do the rejecting. He escapes to the bathroom, and to the sound of flushing Mickey shuffles out, twice, forgetting his hat the first time.
 When the apartment is finally empty, Rocky explodes out of the bathroom in a wounded rant along the lines of “What about my prime?” while the camera cuts to a defeated Mickey descending the staircase, hearing every word. Then, in a leap of grace, his anger spent, Rocky forgives. He jogs down to the darkened street to catch up to Mickey, shown in a streetlamp-lit long shot. We never hear their words, but we see that Mickey is hired after all. It’s one of the most cathartic sequences of hurt and forgiveness that I can think of in any movie. The next day their training together begins, the montage that launched a thousand workout videos, ending famously at the top of the stairs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as if Stallone were saying, this is where my movie belongs, because it’s a masterpiece.

What is it about boxing movies—On the Waterfront, Raging Bull—and their taxonomy of regret? Above all other sports, boxing asks for the largest measure of courage and returns the greatest degree of damage, an irresistible metaphor for life. How to celebrate a holiday in the aftermath of damage is a challenge we all eventually face, sometimes observed by our children, and certain classic movies that offer both darkness and redemption can light the way. A year ago on Thanksgiving eve I cooked to the Rocky soundtrack, thinking of Adrian and her ruined turkey, how it led to something much better. My sons had never seen Rocky, and so we watched it together, and I was consoled.

Nothing Blue Can Stay: The Platoons of Kentucky Men's Basketball

courtesy of www.Under-Main.com, where first published in December 2014



Each year it is with some reluctance that I transfer my affections from the University of Kentucky football team to its men’s basketball team. Their seasons’ overlap in November is uncomfortable for me, adjusting from the wide martial arc of football to the dogfights of basketball. This tempo change is aggravated, in the John Calipari era, by the prospect of an entirely new roster of starters each year, fab freshman whose ever subdividing stages of recruitment—unofficial and official visits, verbal commitments, Letters of Intent—I do not happen to follow. There is a limit to how much time one can squander on sports news.

           I did however witness the pinnacle of recruiting theatrics from Nerlens Noel, who gave proof of his outsized personality and heart when he announced his choice of UK on live TV by swiveling around in his chair to display the UK logo shaved into his nape. We had him for half a season.

       Good relationships take work, and it can be hard caring about a brand new team every year. Longtime fans are accustomed to watching players develop over three, four, sometimes five years. I didn’t set foot in this state until my thirties, and without any  birthright to the Big Blue Nation, my enthusiasm relies on an interest in the players, their strengths and weaknesses, histories, personalities, and how they compete. In UK basketball, with so few returning starters each year, I was becoming jaded with the one-and-done business, despite Calipari’s laudable “players first” philosophy, which I completely embrace. In 2011–12 I revolted, vowing not to tune in until conference play, and not really watching until February, thereby missing the early-to-mid-season progress of a phenomenal team and the NBA’s brightest young light, Anthony Davis. Lesson learned.

         So, after the incredible tournament run of the 2013–14 team and its loss in the national championship, I rejoiced along with the rest of BBN when multiple starters announced their intention to return. We knew another amazing freshman class was on its way to town, and we wondered, who would start? We trusted Coach Cal to work out the details, and he did, inverting Donald Rumsfeld and going to war with the army he had, which was twice as good as the army he may have wished to have. Calipari invented the system, named the system, and suddenly, the fairly urgent problem of too many star players was transformed into an endlessly fascinating new array of tactics and tempos for everyone involved. With the platoon system, we are watching something entirely new: no division 1 team has ever sustained it, because they haven’t needed to, because it’s a new problem, a now inevitable-seeming outcome of Calipari’s recruiting genius.

           But Coach Cal isn’t just a recruiting guy, a marketing guy, a carnival barker as one sporstwriter dubbed him: he can also coach. Pre-season, everyone smelled blood, eager to see a clash of personalities as this plethora of star newcomers and veterans would be required to set aside their entirely reasonable expectations for games with 30–35 minutes of playing time and the resulting big statistics. Instead, they’d get 20 minutes and smaller stats through which to pursue their NBA dreams. Yet, these have become in every way salubrious platoons—for the players, the fans, the media, and the sport itself.

Ample make this team.

Make this team with awe.

In it wait till March Madness break

Excellent and Fair

Be its passes straight

Be its foul shots round

Let no rivals’ yellow noise

Interrupt this ground.

—with apologies to Emily Dickinson

The platoon system solves several basketball problems. First, it’s regrettable that such a fun game to play and watch has the smallest roster of any team sport, only 5, versus football’s 11, soccer’s 11, lacrosse’s 10, baseball’s 9, ice hockey’s 6. That basketball is the smallest-roster team sport is a recipe for heartbreak beginning in middle school, in this town where basketball is a religion and so many youth are highly skilled at the game and expect to make their school team. “He’s one of the toughest kids in the school, but when anyone talks about the try-out, he starts tearing up,” reported my 6th grader in illustration of the widespread agony around try-out time for those who didn’t make the team.

Basketball is also the sport most vulnerable to selfish playing styles, such as ball-hogging and offensive showboating. Yet it seems that the founding articles of Calipari’s platoon system are unselfish play and attention to defense. We must credit his leadership for building a team of 10 starters who are off the charts in numbers of assists and blocked shots and opponents’ low shooting percentages. “The best defensive team in the modern era of college basketball” is what the Eastern Kentucky coach declared, having lost 82–49.

Platoons change the game, for players, opponents, and even fans. With so many games in a season, there is the temptation for busy fans to tune in only after halftime. Doing so this year would mean missing the exquisite drama of the Blue Platoon, who start the game, warming up the opponent for 4 minutes, probably with some blocked shots and alley-oops, until around 16:00 when Blue exits en masse to be replaced by the White Platoon, who also block shots and alley-oop, and so forth throughout the game in roughly 4-minute increments. Wonder which team gets tired first?

The White Platoon, which starts the second half, has just one starter from last year, Dakari Johnson, plus three freshman, Tyler Ulis, Trey Lyles and Devin Booker, and last year’s bench warmer Marcus Lee. Lee had one break-out half in the tournament last year, when he scored 10 crucial points vs. Michigan, securing him a spot in BBN’s hearts forever. How terrible it would have been, without this platoon system, to see Marcus Lee only warming that bench again this year! Thank you, Coach Cal, for finding a way to consistently play Marcus Lee. And Dakari Johnson, who stepped into a starting role after Willie Cauley-Stein’s injury last year, has accomplished very good things already, but he would likely be the 6th man again, behind Cauley-Stein and Towns, were it not for these salubrious platoons.

The Blue Platoon is returning starters Andrew Harrison, Aaron Harrison, Willie Cauley Stein, Alex Poythress, and the extraordinarily talented, well-spoken, and huge freshman Karl-Anthony Towns, whose name accurately conveys the grandeur of his person and prospects. Now all those amazing buzzer-beaters by Aaron Harrison, the reassuring game management and dribble-drives of Andrew Harrison, the nimble eccentricity of Cauley-Stein, the periodic explosiveness of Poythress: their remembered feats make fond penumbras around the new season.

Much has been written about Alex Poythress and his season-ending ACL tear on December 11. He was a team favorite, a fan favorite, and a coaches’ favorite for his achievements and character on and off the court. There is even a Twitter tribute account worth visiting, @APTheTypeOfDude, affectionately mocking his straight-arrow personality, in which every tweet begins the same, e.g., “Poythress the type of dude to use the clear nights we’ve had lately as a chance to finally test out his new telescope.” Poignantly, its tweet on December 12 was, “Poythress the type of dude to come back from his injury better than ever, whether it’s with UK or the NBA. He’ll be back.”

I asked my friend Whitney if she ever mentally assembles her favorite players into a hypothetical starting 5, say the best players from each platoon. “No,” she said, “because the platoons are so well balanced.” It’s true: scoring and other stats across both platoons bear this out, and that’s no coincidence. Balance is fundamental to sustaining the platoon system. Otherwise, if one platoon significantly outperformed the other, it would be untenable to continue giving equal minutes to both platoons. Time will tell if the balance endures, and certainly Poythress’s vacancy is a challenge to the system. “I’m on a mission to make this work for each of these kids,” said Calipari pre-season, and if the firehose of talent is to continue gushing our way with each new recruiting class, it must.

Meanwhile, fans are in a state of ecstasy, not only because we’re 12–0, but because we have twice as many players to love. Coach Cal didn’t invent platoons to enhance the fan experience, but he surely knew that Big Blue Nation and its attendant media could easily absorb a double helping of greatness.

 

Abandon in Sochi

Like thoughtful criticism of a thriving arts scene, the nourishment we receive from Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir’s commentary is a sign that the state of Figure Skating is strong. Did Thursday not live up to the years of anticipation and hype for the marquee event of the Sochi Olympics? Having three skaters within .8 points of each other after the short program made every medal a toss-up. But nobody thought the dark horse Russian, Adelina Sotnikova, upstaged by her younger teammate in the team competition, would seize her diva “don’t stand in my light” moment—as Johnny Weir phrased it—and grab gold.

 Those of us who follow figure skating knew that Johnny Weir was a force of glittering nature, but little did we know how articulate and measured he could be. And Tara Lipinksi? As was said of Tina Fey after her stint of Sarah Palin impersonations: My darling, where have you been? Their partnership was so consistently fabulous that people have called for them to launch their own talk show or host the Academy Awards. Perhaps, but half of what makes Tara and Johnny such brilliant commentators is their formidable knowledge of skaters and skating, deployed with every consideration for the skaters themselves. They empathized with those who faltered and reveled in those who excelled, always educating viewers about the finer points of jumping technique that we’d never perceive on our own. We expect them to be catty but they rarely are. Mom and Steve both noted Johnny’s tender attentiveness to Tara's every comment, a dynamic caught in the photo above. Their foil Terry Gannon (whom some called their “babysitter”) was terrific too and kept referring to them as “the inseparable Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir,” their chemistry evidently extending well beyond the broadcast booth.

Fun facts about Johnny Weir: he began skating late, at age 12, but was talented enough to catch and surpass his peers, winning three U.S. Championships in 2004–06, and placing 5th and 6th in the Turin and Vancouver Olympics, respectively. A sometime target of animal rights activists for wearing fur off the ice, in his signature programs on the ice he wore feathers: “The Swan” and “Fallen Angel,” which best embody his classically pure style. A lifelong Russophile, he became fluent in the language by watching Russian movies and seeking out friendships with Russian skaters and coaches. Since his marriage in 2011 to a Georgetown Law grad of Russian descent, his legal name has been Johnny Weir-Voronov. He visits Russia 5–6 times a year and is so popular there that his wedding was front-page news. Johnny had hoped his love of both skating and Russia would culminate in his competing in the Sochi Olympics, but at age 29 the training became too arduous, and he announced his retirement last October. He was quickly hired to announce, and in the months leading up to Sochi, became an energetic advocate for not boycotting the Olympics in protest of Russia’s treatment of gays, arguing that it would be the worst possible outcome for the athletes.

Having Johnny and Tara announce these Games was reminiscent of Adam Lambert’s season on American Idol: a big part of your anticipation is wondering, “What will they wear today?” And they never disappointed, in contrast to the notorious plague of sequins among the skaters. I was intrigued by a Washington Post writer’s proposal that, to earn more credibility as a sport, figure skaters ought to take a cue from gymnasts and wear a team uniform. A seemingly air tight theory that, in practice, would be joy-killing even for a non-fashionista like myself. For every accomplished skater undermined by a ridiculous costume, there is an elite skater in an outfit that delights. Or perhaps great skating sells a costume: who can unravel the alchemy? But a team uniform would undoubtedly trigger the bridesmaid effect: some skaters would look lovely, and others it wouldn’t suit. Further, since gymnasts perform just one event to music—the floor exercise—their endeavors have much less in common with dance than figure skaters’ do. Figure skaters are dancers on ice, obviously, and music and costumes are essential to both. That we make figure skating into a sport with judging causes discomfort to certain sports purists, yet judging and competition are every bit as intrinsic to the performing arts as they are to judged sports. At the highest levels, all professional dancers and musicians and actors have risen through the ranks via auditions, prizes, and evaluation by directors. Instead of criticizing figure skating for being too artistic, why not make all of the performing arts into sport?

These days it’s tough to argue that all this attention to fashion in figure skating is misplaced, given Oregon college football’s varying uniforms or the ceaseless redesigning of basketball shoes. But only in figure skating do we find ourselves critiquing make-up. Am I the only one who applauded the fresh-faced natural look of Russians Yulia Lipnitskaya and Adelina Sotnikova? While Gracie Gold’s lavish frocks were tasteful, her make-up and that of many others seemed garish. They wouldn’t have looked out of place on a cheerleading squad. By contrast the Russians had more gravity: Yulia’s “girl in the red coat” costume had narrative heft, her evident nervousness sadly cohesive with the grave Schindler’s List theme, and Adelina’s Ballanchinesque modernism in the dance vocabulary of her long program worked beautifully with the muted grey dress. 

Ultimately, the skating-and-fashion alchemy prevailed in my favorite competitor, “Queen” Yuna Kim, whose mesmerizing skating and loveliest dresses had no storylines other than the embodiment of beauty. I am still overcome every time I replay her “Send in the Clowns” short program in the yellow dress. It was not enough for the judging rubrics, weirdly, thus launching figure skating’s newest scoring controversy. I would have been thrilled to see Yuna repeat gold from Vancouver, but I was persuaded by Tara and Johnny that Adelina deserved gold for skating the most difficult program almost flawlessly and with—as Johnny put it—“abandon.” Let the gold medals be spread around, perhaps.

Watching Yuna Kim's programs over and over to console myself, I am struck by the irony of her song choice in “Send in the Clowns.” This poignant hit from the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music is sung by a regretful actress in her twilight, with the lyric: “Isn’t it queer, losing my timing this late in my career?” At age 23 Yuna may have felt that Sochi was her twilight. Yet Tara and Johnny said she was better than in Vancouver, and I observed more maturity and substance to her skating, the girlish vamping from her Vancouver programs wholly absent in Sochi. Skating to an instrumental version of “Send in the Clowns,” her timing was inspired: as violin and cello richly bowed each chord, at the perfect moment of its gorgeous sustaining came the whoosh of blades cutting ice as Yuna launched into her jump, awestruck applause scattering in her wake. Suzanne Farrell was Ballanchine’s preeminent muse for her exquisite timing, which she also miraculously combined with abandon. We see the impossibility of this in the contrasting styles of Adelina and Yuna. Will such all-encompassing artistry ever take the ice?