“By The Summer I Was About 80 Pounds.” A Look Back at Gelsey Kirkland’s Story

Mikhail Baryshnikov (left) and Gelsey Kirkland (right) dance in “The Nutcracker” in 1977.

I watched “The Nutcracker” with Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland on VHS when I was a little girl. I remember that my mother, who had been a ballet reviewer during Kirkland’s heyday back in the late seventies, was unimpressed by the Baryshnikov “Nutcracker.” She thought it was too full of Freudian symbolism involving the main character Clara’s sexual…