Syosset's Dance Diva Celebrates Milestone

Glance to the left in the waiting room of Martha Merideth's dance studio and you'll see a portrait of an exquisite beauty who reached the pinnacle of her craft. Loosely affixed in the bottom right portion of the frame is a black-and-white pic of three cherubs who took their initial plunge into ballet under Merideth's watch. 

The little girls on either side have their feet well-positioned, while the one in the middle has technique more butchered than a Boar's Head deli.   

Yep, the one in the middle is Alexandra Ansanelli, who posed for that stunning portrait somewhere between principal dancer stints at the New York City Ballet and Royal Ballet of London. 

Maybe that's why Merideth is celebrating her 50th year teaching dance on Long Island, 48 of those on Ira Road right next to the Syosset LIRR stop. Some people tend to see opportunity where others would snicker.

As a child Merideth counted her brother Arnold among the former. Growing up in Spanish Harlem he loved dance, but as she says plainly, "In our neighborhood if a guy took dance he was gay and he was going to get stoned."  

That didn't keep him from working three jobs to support her pursuit, a fact she still marvels at. "How did this brother of mine look at me, fat, short, with kinky hair, and see a ballerina?" she laughs. 

But some things are meant to be. Her first dance instructors went bankrupt and ran off with Arnold's hard-earned 100 bucks. Fortunately, they stunk. "When I got there they had the students slide and jump, and when the people landed they sounded like an elephant," she remembers.

Elizabeth and Don Oscar Becque took over that school on 72nd Street, and instead of just focusing on knee bends (pliés) Merideth found herself improvising as Paul Revere galloping away as the British were coming. It's a tack Merideth utilizes to this day, sitting in a circle with her youngest charges as they dip their hands into a magical pond and reach for fairies on their shoulders.

"Everybody gets a chance to speak, to be heard, to be imaginative, and from there to be transformed into a creative way of thinking," she says.

Merideth's early dance experiences, as she puts it, "breathed new life into my lungs." She trained six days a week and cut back on adolescent goodies. Expert instruction just couldn't add inches to a frame that maxed out at 4-foot-7 1/2 inches. (Even back in the day, the minimum height for the now-statuesque Rockettes was in excess of 5 feet.)

But Arnold turned to be as good a matchmaker as he was a motivator. It was at a party he was having that Martha met Howard Merideth. A couple of months later they were married, and they found their way to Syosset, where he became a curriculum director in the school system.

Howard, who passed away from colon cancer in 1995, encouraged his wife to turn an old laundromat into a school--and she honors his memory by not slowing down. While others her age apply for handicap parking permits, she without prompting lifts her leg at a height and angle that would put most into traction. A few minutes later a friend comes in to work out with her, hears about her stretch and deadpans, "You've been showing off again, haven't you?"

There's still so much to do, whether it's serve as second vice president for the Town of Oyster Bay Arts Council or drum up business for recently introduced hip-hop classes that not long ago were ballet school blasphemy.

"I lucked out," she admits. "How many people get to do what they really want?"