According to many skilled dancers, knowledgeable critics, and essential lovers of ballet, Gelsey Kirkland is one of the most well-known and admired American ballerinas of our time. She was born on the 29th of December in 1952, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Jack Kirkland and Nancy Hoadley. Her father Jack was a play writer, known for his production, Tobacco Road. During the making of Tobacco Road, he met his fifth wife Nancy, who played one of the leading roles for the production. The couple married and began living together on the outskirts of New York before entertaining the idea of raising their family on a farm in Pennsylvania, Gelsey’s birthplace. Due to Jack’s previous marriages, he had a large extended family that lived on the farm with them, which made for a very busy and rather chaotic household. Within this extended family, Gelsey had an older sister Johnna, a younger brother Marshall, a half-brother Christopher, and two half-sisters Robin and Patricia. “For a good number of Kirkland’s early years, approximately from the age of two, she remained speechless to the point where her family began to consider her a mute. Although this was later found out to be false during an incident in which she cried out in the desire for a relative to remain at the farm longer, this set the precedent for Kirkland’s life of making a career out of being ‘seen but not heard.’”…