Saturday night, a ballet dancer used his profession’s athleticism to save a man who’d fallen onto the subway tracks.
That is according to the New York Times. A member of the corps de ballet at the American Ballet Theater, Gray Davis hadn’t danced that night but was leaving a performance by his wife, soloist Cassandra Trenary. Police have already arrested a woman accused of pushing a man they say is homeless onto the tracks after an altercation (which she denies). That is where Davis got involved:
“At first I waited for somebody else to jump down there,” said Gray Davis, 31, a dancer with American Ballet Theater, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “People were screaming to get help. But nobody jumped down. So I jumped down.”
Davis hoisted the unconscious man to safety, handing him to others on the platform. Then he had to get himself back to safety, as he heard a train coming and couldn’t tell which track. He admitted, “I never realized how high it was,” but: “Luckily, I’m a ballet dancer, so I swung my leg up.” Well, luck or decades of incredibly hard work. Whichever you want to call it!
“I don’t know if I had time to process it until I saw my wife coming down crying—then I realized it was scary,” he added.
Of course, a close encounter with a subway track is a primal fear of many New Yorkers, right up there with getting hit by a falling air conditioner. Nice to think you might be rescued by a passing ballet angel.