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Dancing 2,600 miles from home.

Article Excerpt
In January, then 14-year-old Samantha Stevenson left Petaluma, California, forty-eight miles north of San Francisco, headed to the airport, and boarded a Canada-bound plane alone. Six hours later, the sandy-brown-haired, leggy ninth grader returned to school in Toronto's downtown neighborhood of the Village. The National Ballet School, the state-run, residential feeder school for the National Ballet of Canada, has an excellent reputation as a ballet training center, and Samantha wants, more than anything, to be a ballerina. There, she took ballet six days a week and had a rigorous academic course load, plus music theory, singing, and body conditioning.

It's a long way to go just to go to school--2,600 miles to be exact. Yet Samantha made the trip to NBS several times a year, until deciding in summer 2003 that it was time to rejoin her family. In September the 15-year-old's commute decreased to a mere half-hour jaunt south of Petaluma, to San Rafael's Marin...

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