"In January 1962 [sic] I shared a concert with Fred Herko at the Maidman Playhouse on West 42nd Street. My half included my first three solos plus Satie for Two and Grass, a duet with Dariusz Hochman, a Polish-born ballet-trained dancer. Freddie presented a Waring-like half-hour mélange for a large group. Fred Herko was an extremely gifted dancer. Trained in ballet, he performed in Broadway musicals, with Jimmy Waring, and in some of Warhol's early films. He also taught a ballet class, which I took, in the studio on 2nd Avenue that I shared with Jimmy and Aileen. Perhaps everything was too easy for him. By 1964 he had burned himself out on amphetamines and under the influence jumped out of a window to his death. For years I thought of Freddie each time I executed a particular leg warm-up during my daily barre workout.
"It says something about my stamina in those days that I performed all five dances on the Maidman program under the duress of a fever, having been in bed for the preceding five days with the flu. Later Bill Davis told me that for the next week he laughed out loud whenever he thought of the finale of my solo, Three Seascapes, with its maniacal screaming and thrashing, the last thing one would have expected of a modern dancer in those decorous times. All of the dances at the Maidman, both Freddie's and mine, received devastating reviews."--Yvonne Rainer. Feelings Are Facts: A Life. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.