She told me that Rudolf Nureyev was coming to the Providence Performing Arts Center, and I said yes before I had any idea what that meant. Ballet wasn’t part of my world. Neither were symphonies or jazz concerts or any of the things she seemed to move through so naturally. But I trusted her sense of things, and by then I trusted her completely.

We had about a month before the performance. One night she asked me what I was going to wear. I told her I hadn’t thought about it. She smiled and said she had. People would come dressed in all kinds of ways, she said, but we weren’t going to do that. She was going to find the most beautiful gown she could, and I was going to wear an Edwardian tuxedo. Not modern—Edwardian.

That was the beginning.

I found the tuxedo. It fit perfectly, like it had been waiting for me. I called Fran, and she said she had just the thing—a collapsible top hat, elegant and a little theatrical. Then I went out and bought a cane. I was twenty-one years old, still figuring out who I was, but I knew I wanted to step into something larger for this night.

My mother joined in. She loved the idea of it. She helped me make a full-length cape, something dramatic but also precise, something that carried a sense of history. By the time it was finished, I could feel the shift. I wasn’t dressing up. I was entering a role that felt real.

The night came, and Regina was stunning.

It wasn’t just this night. There were many like it. She took me to the symphony, to Swan Lake, to see Dizzy Gillespie at the Newport Jazz Festival. Even going to the movies with her carried the same intensity. We were the kind of couple who, after a film we loved, would sit without moving, without speaking, until the last line of the credits disappeared from the screen.

We didn’t drift through these experiences. We entered them. Each one opened something in me, widened the field of what I thought life could be. I began to understand that these weren’t separate events, but part of a way of living—of paying attention, of committing fully to the moment.

She had a way of inhabiting beauty without effort, like it was simply her natural state. When we arrived at the theater, people turned. Some were in jeans, some dressed nicely, but no one had taken it as far as we had. We stood out, and instead of shrinking from that, we leaned into it. We had created an experience before we even sat down.

Inside, everything became quiet.

Whenever I was with her at a performance, we didn’t talk. We didn’t whisper or comment. We gave ourselves over to it completely. I learned something that night that stayed with me for the rest of my life—that art doesn’t need to be explained to be understood. You can let it enter you fully, let it move through you, and trust that it will find its place.

The performance was extraordinary. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I didn’t need it. I felt it.

Afterward, we heard that Nureyev sometimes came out the back to greet people. We went around and found the door. We were the first ones there. A few others gathered behind us, but we had our place.

Then he came out.

He wore a long fur coat, and he carried himself with a kind of authority I had never seen before. He wasn’t just a performer at that moment. He was the embodiment of everything we had just witnessed. Presence, discipline, beauty—it was all there, concentrated in one person.

On the way home, something settled into me. It wasn’t something I could name then, but it stayed. I had seen what it meant to shape a moment completely—to enter it, fully, without hesitation, and let it become something larger than life.

Years later, I would find myself on a cross, in front of an audience, fully committed to the moment. That kind of work doesn’t come from nowhere. It begins in nights like this.

That night, I stepped into a version of myself that I hadn’t known before.

And I recognized him immediately.