Photo of the Day: Site of 1,000 Dreams

Today, Radio City Music Hall is catty-corner from my office, and when I saw several Rockettes outside the legendary entertainment emporium a couple of years ago, they seemed of ordinary size, and less than half my age.

Nearly 40 years ago, however, when I came to the New York City landmark on a class trip, it was entirely different. We were there to catch the movie musical “Tom Sawyer,” starring Family Affair’s Johnny Whitaker in the title role and, as Becky Thatcher, an unknown girl named Jodie Foster.

But I was dazzled by the Art-Deco detail everywhere I looked, and onstage the Rockettes seemed, to a still-pre-adolescent boy, impossibly mature, flamingoes in human form, from another world that consisted of synchronized movement and dazzle.

Obviously, millions have felt something similar, and even more, as testified by the many young women who every year try out for this chorus line and are ready to brave countless hours of bone-weary practice to make their dreams— and awaken those of still more at the annual Christmas show— come true. Not for nothing is this hall one of the iconic black-and-white images in Woody Allen’s famous opening sequence in Manhattan.