To everything there is a season

Alicia Graf embraces a new life after her storybook ballet career.

There are ways to tell, if you pay close attention.

Instead of a dancer's mangled toenails, she's got a perfect pedicure, nails neatly rounded on top and squared off on the sides.

She downs hamburgers and ketchup-covered french fries without the slightest hint of anxiety.

Her plie is a little less pliable and every now and then, her perfect knee - hidden under slim jeans - will puff like a baking biscuit.

But if you were just to see her, tall and graceful, walking the streets of New York with her headphones on, you'd never know that 22-year-old Alicia Graf will never dance another ballet.

The sages say that in this life, there's a time to laugh and a time to cry, a time to mourn and a time to dance.

Not so long ago, fate determined that Alicia's time to dance had ended. Suddenly, it seemed, her perfect knee and slender, pivoting ankle were cursed. Where Alicia had been strong, now she was sore. What had been elegant and majestic was now loose and wobbly.

The deterioration of her joints happened quickly, a matter of months.

It was in a staggering turn that the graduate of Howard County's Centennial High School and once-youngest soloist for the prestigious Dance Theatre of Harlem said goodbye to pointe shoes and tutus, European tours and glowing New York Times reviews.

By the time the curtain went down on her last Kennedy Center performance, Alicia's dancer dreams had been all but replaced by tears.

That was 1999.

As 2001 tiptoes away, Alicia Janelle Graf has decided that she's had her time to mourn.

She's declared this a new time - a time for learning and healing, a time for new challenges and fresh hopes for a new life in dance.

The journey to the top of the dance world was challenging but swift for Alicia, a 5'10" beauty who began training when she was 2 years old.

Exceptional at an early age, she was wooed by many great dance instructors. When Arthur Mitchell, founder and director of the Harlem troupe, called her parents at home one evening and pleaded for Alicia, the high school girl packed her bags and left for New York in the middle of her senior year.

In her first year, she was elevated from apprentice to corps de ballet performer. In that same year, at 18, she became the youngest soloist in the company.

Mitchell used Alicia in every major performance he staged. She not only danced lead, but could also be spotted in the background of pieces, outshining seasoned dancers with decades more experience.

Her reviews in major newspapers across the country were so complimentary, it was as if she had written them herself. Writers called her "serpentine," "charming and coltish," "a natural," with "perfect proportions, flexibility and feet."

"At that point in my dance career, I was at the peak of where I wanted to be," she says. "And I knew it was a matter of time before I really arrived as a complete artist. It would have taken still a lot more work and a lot more training, but I was in the right place, and I had the right people and the right mentors."

In December 1997, Alicia, then 18, was featured in The New York Times as one of the 10 most influential dance performers of the year. The next year, a headline in the Los Angeles Times gushed, "Alicia Graf's Emergence has Taken Dance World by Storm."

In March 1999, Dance Spirit, a leading dancers' magazine, featured her on its cover.

"That was my first love. That was my first passion, and everything I did was for that. Every moment of the day I was thinking about performing and how I could better myself as a performer," she says.

On April 4, 1999, Alicia danced her last professional ballet.

Unexplained swelling in her right knee and pain in her right ankle had silently plagued the young dancer for months as she toured the United States and Europe, dancing challenging solo leads in noted ballets, such as Balanchine's Bugaku.

Ambitious and driven, Alicia never mentioned a word to anyone about the swelling that imperceptibly shortened her stretches and pained her when she bent. On the outside, her style and technique were flawless. Inside, she prayed the pain was temporary.

"You're used to having your toes bleed through your shoes. You're used to being thrown around. You're used to waking up and feeling broken," she says. "So I didn't tell anybody. It was so important to me, the show was so important. But it got to the point that it kept on swelling. It wouldn't go down."

After what she felt was a powerful Kennedy Center performance in April 1999, Alicia confided in her parents - who had watched awe-struck from the audience as their little girl become a woman on stage.

"I remember her being very proud ... " says her father, Arnie Graf, of Ellicott City. "But she said she had to see the doctor. She was in a lot of pain. We went in for an MRI, and they said something was wrong with her knee."

Alicia now describes that period of her life as a storm.

For awhile, Alicia and her family held on to the hope that her body would heal, that she just needed some rest, and she'd dance again soon.