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MEGAN SCOTTAmanda Weingarten has yearned for years to dance professionally in New York. She is getting close.
PALM HARBOR - The day she got her pointe shoes, she was so excited she slept with them.
And even when her toes bled after the first time she danced wearing them, she still believed classical ballet was a beautiful thing.
Sixteen-year-old Amanda Weingarten of Palm Harbor has been on pointe for nearly five years. She has been dancing for more than a decade.
And her dream has always been the same: to dance with the New York City Ballet.
"If I don't take a class for a week, I'll just start dancing in the house or I'll give myself a class just because I love it so much," she said.
Amanda is not dancing with the New York City Ballet yet. But recently, she was accepted into the School of American Ballet, the official training academy for the New York City Ballet.
More than 2,000 intermediate and classical dancers from around the world audition to attend the summer program each year. Only 10 percent are accepted.
Then of those 10 percent, the academy invites 20 to 30 students to stay for the year and become full-time students, said Amy Gordy, spokeswoman for the School of American Ballet.
"It's typical kids will come for two to three summers before they're ready to be asked to stay," Gordy said. "Not that many achieve that. Those that do, it's not instantaneous."
Choreographer George Balanchine and Lincoln Kristein founded the school in 1934. It is located at New York's Lincoln Center. The school's alumni include Suzanne Farrell, Arthur Mitchell, Maria Tallchief and Broadway legends Chita Rivera and Hinton Battle.
"The School of American Ballet is one of the best in the country," said Roni Wright, who owns The Florida Ballet School with Mary Devine in Palm Harbor, where Amanda took lessons for several years. "Amanda is such a beautiful dancer. She's very talented."
Amanda has attended a five-week summer program on scholarship at the School of American Ballet for the last three years. But this time, when she comes home on Monday, she won't be going back to Tarpon Springs High School. She will buy some winter clothes, say goodbye to her family and friends and visit the beach one last time.
She is headed back to the Big Apple on Aug. 31.
"Last summer, I really wanted to stay, and even though they didn't ask me I still tried again the next summer," Amanda said. "They don't ask everybody. If it's your goal, you keep coming back because you want to so badly."
Amanda has wanted to be a ballerina since she was 2, said her mother, Darlean Weingarten. She saw a performance of the Nutcracker and immediately fell in love with the classical form of dance.
Her mother told her she had to wait until she was 5 to take lessons, so Amanda spent the next few years dancing around the house. When she was 5, her mother enrolled her in the de Paris School of Ballet in Clearwater.
The school was owned by Beatriz de Paris, who died in 1996 of an incurable liver disease. Wright and Mary Devine are former students of de Paris and opened the Florida Ballet School a couple of months later.
"We saw something very special in Amanda," said Wright, 47. "It's nice to see success, seeing someone grow from 8 years old and now she has the opportunity to dance professionally. It's thrilling. We're proud."
Amanda, who is going into her junior year of high school, will live at the school, take ballet courses and attend a private or public school in New York that will work her academic schedule around her ballet courses. There are about 65 ballet students who live in the residence hall.
It will be intense, but she's used to it. When she's home, she takes ballet six days a week at the Classical Ballet Training Academy at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, maintains a 4.75 GPA and is involved in her church, Tarpon Springs United Methodist Church.
"This is what I like to do," she said about her ballet. "It just happens to be a demanding thing. It's difficult. But the ballet really teaches you a lot of discipline. And you have to stay on top of it."
Neither of Amanda's parents "dance a step," her mother said, but they gave Amanda her good genes for ballet. Amanda is 5-feet-5 and weighs 105 pounds.
She is very dedicated. She keeps a journal of what her ballet instructors tell her. She writes down the correct positions for her head, her arms, every part of her body. It helps her improve.
"You tell her something, she remembers it the next day," said Kay Mazzo, co-chair of the faculty at the School of American Ballet. "Which means that she progresses the whole time. She's a very good student. We're happy to have her."
There's more to learn about ballet, Amanda said. There's always one more turn you can do. The leg can always be a little higher, the arms more rounded.
For Amanda, dance is "like expressing yourself without words," she said. She can see steps in her head. Browsing in the classical music section at Barnes and Noble, she starts to dance. She studies the Balanchine technique, a modern style of classical American ballet.
"When I'm dancing the Balanchine technique, I feel like I'm performing," she said. "I feel like it's more for the audience. It's more dancy. It's beautiful."
The 10-month program at the American School of Ballet ends in June and then Amanda hopes to attend another summer program in ballet, more than likely somewhere else. About 20 students from the school receive contracts with major professional dance companies each year. That's a a possibility, but Amanda does have a backup career goal just in case: to be a journalist.
But first she wants to dance her heart away in the city that never sleeps. She's become pretty New York savvy, having lived there the past three summers. Coming back to Palm Harbor for a few weeks before ballet school starts is like ending a vacation in New York, she said. She looks forward to going back, even though that means more hard work.
"Some students get to the point where they stop working," Wright said. "Amanda has always wanted to be better. You have to be that way with yourself. You have to expect more from yourself and demand a lot because there is so much competition out there."
- Megan Scott can be reached at 727 771-4303 or mscott@sptimes.com