Dancing in the Light Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the nine hundred-odd pages that were ultimately cut down to 372! Betty and her husband, Ian Ballantine (the grand old man of publishing), took me under their wings and encouraged me to have heart when I feared that the New York intellectuals would ridicule me. “Just write your personal experience,” they would say. Or, “It’s your reality. Be honest about your own experience and let it grow out of that. We want to read how it happened to you.” So I did. I began to call Ian the Gremlin because he could invisibly maneuver any situation into a positive reality.
    “Well, there you are,” said Betty, walking toward me with her arms outstretched and her snow-white curls winding around her heart-shaped face. “Many happy returns, dear heart,” she said, beaming as though she had said something particularly significant.
    “Thanks, G.A.,” I said. “Why do you look as though you’ve just eaten a canary?”
    “On,” she laughed, “I’ve been thinking andthinking what to wish you on your birthday and it suddenly struck me.” She looked at me intently.
    “Many happy returns,” she said again, with emphasis. “It’s an old saying. What do you think it means?”
    Many happy returns, I said to myself and then the penny dropped.
    “Do you mean that it could relate to each incarnation we choose to return to earth with?”
    “Could be,” she said. “Anyway, I thought it a particularly appropriate wish for you.”
    I thought again. “I don’t know. Couldn’t it mean that you hope someone is happy every time their birthday returns?”
    “Well,” she countered, “maybe, but we’re already here, so what does the return part mean?”
    I stood stock-still in the hallway. “Well,” I said, “you’ve just given me the title of the next book I want to write and I think I’ll begin it on this birthday.”
    “Good,” said the Gremlin, who had invisibly appeared behind me. “When can we have it?”
    “As soon as I close my show I’ll begin. I’m supposed to do a picture, but I think I’ll postpone it. I’ve been waking myself up at night with ideas. I just didn’t know how to structure them. I think I know how now.”
    The Gremlin beamed and rattled the change in his pockets.
    “You two are once again responsible for making my agent a very unhappy man!” I chided. “He thought he had finally gotten me back into show business and then you pop up again.”
    We put our arms around each other and I knew that it would be another year before I went in front of a camera again. When I saw something clearly that felt right for me, it didn’t take me long to make up my mind.
    Jack Romanos, publisher at Bantam, and Stuart Applebaum, chief of publicity, who had accompanied me on my book tour the summer before, walkedtoward us. “Everyone is ready,” said Jack. “Let’s go on in for your birthday presentation.”
    I walked into the main conference room, where several dozen intelligent, literary-type people stood with champagne glasses in hand waiting to see what I was like.
    Jack stood on a chair and talked about how apprehensive some people at Bantam had been before Limb came out, then said that if the response was any indication of what people wanted to read was a case of how the public was ahead of the publisher. Lou Wolfe, Bantam’s President, then presented me with a dozen roses and two beautifully leather-bound books, one of the hardback and the other of the paperback edition of my book, housed in a magnificent keepsake box. The crowd from Bantam applauded, then asked to hear from me. I looked at my watch. It was 3:55 P.M . In two minutes it would be my birth time. A spiritual guide had told me that the energy one inherits on one’s birthday is very powerful, because the sun and its complementary planets are emitting the same aligned energy that they did the moment you were born. You “own” that energy. It is yours to use in projecting whatever you want of it for the following years. In 1983 I had