The July 1946 issue of Dance Magazine carried a full-page cartoon titled "One Ballerina's Day," credited to Mary Ellen Moylan — a ballerina who, at 21, was already well into her professional career. The magazine's archives show the piece 80 years on as an odd, revealing artifact: a working dancer sketching her own routine in verse.

The cartoon follows a stick figure in a tutu through a full day. "Early to rise, to class she flies. After lesson rests her feet, fruit and yogurt what a treat," the text runs. The verses track the dancer through a springtime walk in the park, a singing lesson, a wartime-era dinner — "Meat is scarce—but here's a ham!" — and finally the theater: "Curtain time, thank you, ma'am. It's quite a day, you will allow. And now our dancer takes a bow."

Moylan's credentials gave the cartoon its bite. An early student at the School of American Ballet, she had begun performing principal roles with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo as a teenager, while George Balanchine served as resident choreographer. In 1946 she stepped away from the Ballet Russe to work with Antony Tudor on the Broadway musical The Day Before Spring, then joined Ballet Society, the predecessor of New York City Ballet. That November she debuted the role of Sanguinic in Balanchine's The Four Temperaments. Maria Tallchief would later call her "the first great Balanchine ballerina."

The cartoon did not appear in a vacuum. It ran between an article on foot care by Dr. Horace Worrell, a podiatrist who specialized in treating dancers, and a short essay by the dancer and choreographer Anton Dolin answering common questions from parents of young dance students.

The rest of the issue mapped the dance world of mid-1946. One feature went behind the scenes with a dozen dancers assembled by Jack Cole, all under permanent contract with Columbia Pictures to appear in the studio's film dance numbers as needed. Reviews covered programs by Alicia Markova and Dolin, La Meri, Pearl Primus, Anna Sokolow and Merce Cunningham. A brief profile introduced the nightclub act performing under the moniker Mata and Hari.

The document is one of the few traces of Moylan's hand outside the stage record — a dancer who helped launch Balanchine's most enduring choreography, doodling her working day for a magazine readership. Eighty years later, the Archives offer it as both period detail and self-portrait: rationing, class, rehearsal, curtain.