The Journal Herald from Dayton, Ohio • 23

C.CENT A April 23, 1983 THE JOURNAL HERALD Dayton, Ohio 23 Cindy Donavin Rory Metcalf trr rvT 7 v. October 19, 1981. She was the bored (lancer with the clumsy date in Fast Company, the passionate woman dressed in brown in Romance and the mischievous Bluebell Fairy in Sleeping Beauty, And every morning at 7:30, Cynthia Donavin was at the barre in Dayton Ballet's studio above the Victory Theatre warming up before class and rehearsal just as she had warmed up with the Joffrey Ballet in New York, the Louisville Ballet and the Milwaukee Ballet, all the while "striving for a perfection a perfection that will never be." But now Cindy Donavin is boning up on physiology at a community college in Virginia and busily packing her trunks, bound for the University of California at Berkeley to work on a degree In either sports medicine or physical therapy. What happened? "I'll never forget It," she says. "It was a miserable Sunday; the whole company was feeling kind of awful.

The last thing on the schedule was a Sleeping Beauty rehearsal. I was doing Aurora's entrance, and I came down from a grande jette, and I felt something pop." She told choreographer Stuart Sebastian she couldn't finish the rehearsal. The stage manager had to carry her down the stage steps. Ms. Donavin emerged from Good Samaritan Hospital wearing a knee brace that spring day.

Later, surgery revealed that her knee was filled with shredded and gravelly pieces of cartilage. She was 25 and had already had two knee operations and three or four Injuries each professional season. "I think always in my career, I knew this was inevitable," she says. "And as I became more and more I just accepted the fact that something had to change. I don't think I will ever and maybe I'm wrong find anything that will totally consume me the way dancing did.

When you can come home at the end of the day and be totally worn, depleted, and yet feel such satisfaction." After bravely hobbling around Dayton on crutches, Ms. Donavin returned home to Virginia last summer. She teaches interpretive dance at an exercise studio and spins records at a dance club "which Is hysterical because when I first came, I didn't know anything but classical music." But she's not been able to. assume the spectator's role yet. In December, "I went to the Washington Ballet here, and I left at Intermission because I started crying.

I was surprised." She sighs. "Oh, I think knowing that I could have been up there I was just filled with a sense ofloss." ii i WhS- i rx lis By Janet Filips Staff Fiilurt WrMr A year or two ago, each of these peo ple sat and answered questions, revealed bits of themselves which were recorded, for one brief black and white December 31, 1980. Rory Metcalf, depressed about getting turned down for jobs she didn't want anyway, decided she may as well gamble for meatier stakes. After sending a flippant resume to the executive producer of the sudsy Ryan's Hope with lines like, "I read a lot of Kafka, so I know a lot about guilt" the producer telephoned Ms. Metcalf in Troy and invited her to write a test script.

Eventually, Ms. Metcalf, 24 at the time, moved to Manhattan in November 1980 to freelance scripts for the show. A week ago, from her mid-Manhattan apartment 10 blocks from the theater district, Metcalf reports soon after the newspaper story ran, she got a contract as an associate writer. Shortly afterwards, a new character was introduced: E.J. Ryan, a journalist.

"I spent three years writing for the Wright State paper, so she automatically had my personality," says Ms. Metcalf. The way soap operas work Is that a head writer gives an associate writer a sketchy outline. In one of Ms. Met-calf's most beloved scripts, E.J.

was pursuing a story about "air rights." A person who owns property can buy the air space over a building next door, then construct a tower that overhangs the neighboring space. In the outline, E.J. was at a party and met a man who sold air rights for the city. He seemed unsavory, and E.J. wanted to dig deeper without him knowing she was a reporter.

The outline simply directed, "E.J. Invents some personna," so, says Ms. Metcalf, "I had her talk about conceptual art and rave on and on about various projects, which included 12 people milling around a glass booth entitled Traffic, and Panhandlers on Strike which she said got local news coverage. That was fun because I know some artists in the city, and I live right across the street from a municipal garage that has 10 windows that are used as gallery space. There are always little bits of conceptual art floating around." But, In fitting melodramatic form, Ms.

Metcalf was laid off Jan. 24 when the show rehired the original head writers and returned Its tangles to within the Ryan family. Even though she sometimes wonders in a squeaky voice "what will become of all is not dismal. Two weeks ago, she won a Writer's Guild award for Ryan's hope; she has an agent; she's receiving severance pay; she's collaborating on some long-term projects and, she emphasizes, she loves New York. moment, in the newspaper.

You threw out the paper, time scampered onward and the once-scrutinized subjects carried on with their hopes. Maybe you cared about them for a moment and wondered where the twisting yellow brick highway would take them. Here Is what time has told. FUe photos I Right, Cindy Donavin; clockwise from above are: model Nancy Dutlel, Cathy Furst and daughter Stephanie, writer Rory Metcalf; Jean and John Ogg with Steven, and farmer Russell Garber Russell Garber 1 VI rl 1 Jl 111 I I It A 1 immmmmm October 27, 1980. After a morning of riding his combine across the fields of his 152-acre farm In Greenville, Russell Garber ate lunch In the kitchen of the 14-room house built by his great-grandfather and, with his wife and some of their 12 children clustered around, talked about his other farm: 1,980 acres in Brazil, 7 miles from Rio de Janeiro, where he (lew three times a year to plant and harvest pineapples, coffee, oranges, rice, bananas, peanuts and soybeans.

"We're still In Brazil," Garber said a few days ago. But the complexion of the South American farm has changed. "We went mainly to cattle now. Oh, we still raise a few crops, and we still do a lot of custom combining for other farmers, but we put In a new corral, a big corral there. And we sell milk.

We milk about 40 head now. Of course, they milk by hand. We sell it to Nestle's." The hired hands, he says, "like to go off to the corrals in the morning, drink the milk fresh from the cow, warm like that. Some will drink it straight, and others will put a little coffee In It. Like I'd told you, the coffee is really strong coffee." He just returned from Brazil last week, and the gravel road between his farm and Rio de Janeiro has been paved 12 kilometers 18 to go before reaching his property.

The road was laid after he bought the land for $25 an acre In 1974, and the value had shot to $300 an acre by 1980. By moving from crops to cattle, he's been able to St -T Vr, "Vf cut his employees down to four from 12. Their wages total only a month. "Going down there, you don't get rich quick," Garber says. "It is making us money now.

I think as far as a long-term investment, financially, it's all right. The part I didn't like about it was being away from the family. I used to go down three times a year. In spring, I'd spend two months; July for a couple of weeks, a fall for planting, spend a couple months. I've cut out the July trip altogether and spend six weeks twice a year." And last summer, he branched into another longdistance venture: raising melons in Kentucky near the Tennessee border.

A. I Nancy Dutiel Steven Ogg I I i i i i preferably, she adds, within driving distance of New York. She needed to see what New York could offer, she says, before she could turn her back on It. She is disheartened by certain things: battling buses and cabs, shopping in small crowded markets, enduring exorbitant prices. She pays $250 a month just to harbor her Volkswagen Rabbit convertible In a garage, for instance, and that still doesn't guarantee security.

On a Sunday afternoon, when the car was 5 weeks old, she left it out on 63rd Street for 20 minutes. When she returned, she found her windshield smashed and her tape deck ripped "In New York, everybody has to be a survivor," she says. 'The best antidote in New York is to keep your sense of humor. Almost every day there's some incident that could get to somebody who was January 1, 1982. Steven Ogg, 14, was 31: years into a fight with the most brutal of enemies.

Cancer. A rare, aggressive form that ravages cartilage, muscle and skin, then spreads throughout the body. In August 1981, his Cincinnati family found out about the Hippie Laboratory for Cancer Research in Kettering. By cloning Steven's malignant cancer cells, the Hippie Lab discovered that a drug called Vincristine, In the words of director Dr. Martin Murphy, "just blew 'em out of the dish." It dramatically improved Steven's condition, and in mid-December 1982, Murphy said "his prognosis is guardedly great." Steven Ogg died the 19th of Febru- November 7, 1980.

Nancy Dutiel returned to RIke's, not as the sales clerk she had been in high school, but as the face that, since 1977, had been synonymous with Lancome, a line of French cosmetics. Until then, the Lancome line had never been sold in Dayton. In her parents' home in CentervUle, Ms. Dutiel one of only a handful of New York models who has an exclusive contract with a makeup line talked about life as a model. Sometimes, she'd said, she felt like a marionette, and would "feel like throwing my hair down, saying, This is my face, my lips, my Last September, Lancome announced that it had contracted Isabella Rossellini, daughter of the late Ingrid Bergman, as the company's image-maker.

"I'm still under contract," Ms. Dutiel said from Manhattan a few days ago. "Several months ago, we did a new shooting," but her 7-year arrangement ends in 1983, and Ms. Rossellini "will be taking over things." But Ms. Dutiel, 29, is planning ahead.

Three weeks ago, she began twice-weekly acting classes In hopes of landing speaking parts in television commercials. And she's less bothered by the marionette aspect of modeling. "It's become more relaxed in a way," she says. "That's the way the client wants me to look, and he has hired me. Although I have a difference of opinion about my best look, I'm not the client." A few years ago, when the world was fascinated by 15-year-old bushy-eyebrowed Brooke, Ms.

Dutiel sometimes worried about the passage of youth. No more. Ms. Rossellini is over 30, as are Lauren Hutton and Cheryl Tiegs, so "it doesn't necessarily mean that your career is over as a model." She doesn't, however, want to model ad Infinitum. Over the past 10 years, Ms.

Dutiel worked throughout this country and in Mexico, Japan, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, England and on just about every Urge island. "All the places I've been, never would have been able to go," she says. "And the people Tve met the famous, the unfa-mous, it doesnt matter. Having attained all of it, I know I dont want it" She laughs, then continues. 1 think New York is too fast-paced, a dirty city.

I prefer to be where I have a yard and flowers, and to be able to get in a car and drive to the grocery store" ary. "As far as the Vincristine went, it worked, but the tumor itself changes," his mother, Jean Ogg, explained slowly on Tuesday night. "So It changed again on us. The tumor builds up a tolerance. And we just didn't have anything to fight back with at that point.

He had been doing fine. It was Christmas Eve night that I noticed the tumor looked different. It just got worse and worse. We went down the 26th of December to have it checked, and then they weren't sure what it was doing. We had a little hope then.

"But then, it was everywhere. It was everywhere. He couldn't walk, it was in his underarms, his neck. It was just devastating. We couldn't believe anything could grow that fast.

I don't think he knew what hit him." Her husband works for Borden, and last year, the company donated to Hippie Lab. Mrs. Ogg thinks the Borden Foundation will continue to make a yearly donation. In honor of their son, who was an A student, the Oggs started a $300 scholarship fund for a high school senior who enters the medical field. Each Sunday, the Oggs and her par-' ents visit the cemetery.

The one time she has felt Steven's presence was a sunny day last May. A butterfly lighted on their car, then sat a long time on her mother's finger, then her own finger, and finally, on a bouquet of flowers. "And then he flew to a tree. And I felt comforted, because a butterfly Is a symbol of free spirit." It may not sound like much, Mrs. Ogg acknowledges.

"But after you've lost someone, you have no contact at all. So any little thing." Cathy Furst sent off a booklet to Princess Diana. The Princess' lady-in-waiting sent a handwritten reply. "I guess" says Mrs. Furst, "I always have these dreams of, 'Oh, she'll tell England it was in the royal A deal she was trying to swing with the babyfood grinder company never materialized.

"The way the booklet is now, people dont see the marketing potential," she says. "People like to have a big Gerber baby smiling on the front But all I'm selling Is information." She's netted $9,000 profit, she figures, and while "we haven't been able to buy a pool or a Seville, the money has helped us a lot." And she's still mailing them to anyone who sends $3 to Babyfood Recipe Booklet, Box 2196, Streetsboro, Ohio 44240. television shows" including Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit concocting her recipes. In her eyes, the iasLnb'w was the peas knees: a 9-minute egment on Hour Magazine with Gary Collins, taped Jan. 19 and aired last month.

The syndicated show flew her and the family out to Los Angeles, picked up all their expenses from taxis to two nights in the Sheraton at Universal Studios all of which, says Mrs. Furst, was "really great." Orders for the 3,750 booklets sold thus far have come in from throughout the United States and Canada, Greece, Turkey, Spain and Japan. Mrs. Furst and a Japanese mother exchange letters and photos of their children. And when news of the royal pregnancy came from Buckingham Palace, Mrs.

Furst Immediately July 31, 1981. Cathy Furst was bent on parlaying puree into millions of dollars. After a few months of being full-time mother, Mrs. Furst a former Dayton resident thought she would go Insane without a diversion. She turned the same old grind into her salvation: Armed with a $5 babyfood grinder and her knowledge as a home economist, she put together meat 'n' potatoes, basic information 20-page Babyfood Recipe Booklet.

Two months after its June 1981 printing, she had sold 600 copies from her home In northeast Ohio. "I don't know that I'm ever going to get rich on this, which I at one time had dreams to be." she said last week from Streetsboro. "Can 1 let Stephanie say 'hi' to you? She's 3 now. But since you did the story, I've been on 12 or 13.