ENTERTAINMENT

from Fine Lifestyles Santa Fe & Albuquerque Volume 8 Issue 4

SPORTS, REC & TRAVEL

Small Town, Big Dreams Indeed

Nancy Zeckendorf shares her story in a charming new memoir

Nancy Zeckendorf has shaped Santa Fe’s performing arts landscape. While board chair at the Santa Fe Opera, she raised $21 million to build the world-renowned Crosby Theater. Working with her husband, Bill, she raised $9 million to turn a timeworn downtown theater into the thriving Lensic Performing Arts Center, where she continues to serve as board chair.

How does she make things happen? It comes down to her passion for the arts, a lifelong belief in the rewards of hard work, and a trait she acknowledges in her new memoir, Small Town, Big Dreams (Goff Books, written with Jane Scovell). Nancy is reflecting on “escaping” her tiny, “culturally comatose” hometown in Pennsylvania for a glamorous life in Manhattan, where she became a professional ballerina. “I don’t fool myself,” she writes. “There are many others from small places who go to New York and make it. I am not unique. I am, however, relentless.”

Thirteen-year-old Nancy (then Nancy King) was so determined to take ballet lessons that she hitched rides to the nearest studio, 27 miles away, on a U.S. Mail truck. At 17, she moved to New York and auditioned until she found a place that believed in her. That place happened to be Juilliard, where she trained under Margaret Craske, Anthony Tudor, and Agnes de Mille.

Nancy joined the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in 1954, beginning a ten-year career that put her on stage with opera’s greatest stars. When she wasn’t at the Met, she traveled the world performing, and she danced two seasons (1961 and ’62) with the Santa Fe Opera. Here, we learn, she met founding director John Crosby, who would later become a good friend. And while having lunch at Bishop’s Lodge, she met her future mother-in-law. Irma Kolodin thought Nancy should meet her son, newly single Manhattan real estate developer William Zeckendorf Jr. When Nancy was back in New York, Bill asked her for a date, and the rest is history.

Nancy is characteristically frank and funny as she recounts her many adventures, from parties with Maria Callas to too-close encounters with auto magnate Henry Ford II. She’s honest, too, as she reveals her seven-year romance with a married, well-known figure in the opera world, which evolved while she was dancing at the Met. (His name? Read the book to find out!)

The Small Town, Big Dreams chapters on Nancy’s return to New Mexico, in the 1990s, are especially fun to read. She describes her experiences on the Opera board, her work on re-opening the Lensic, and the work she did with Bill to develop the Eldorado Hotel and Los Miradores. When Bill retired, the couple moved here full-time, and Nancy calls their two decades here “the best years of our lives together.” The book’s cover features a photo of Nancy atop a building at Los Miradores, where she served as a project manager. Dancing in her cowboy hat and boots, she looks incredibly happy.

NANCY ZECKENDORF DANCED WITH THE METROPOLITAN OPERA BALLET FOR TEN YEARS. PHOTO BY RAD CASCONE