Behind The Footlights -- Pnb's Patricia Barker Left Kennewick At 16 To Seek Stardom In Ballet. Now, 14 Years Later, She's The Darling Of The Company.

Act Three, final scene.

A black stage tinged with deep blue light, empty of all but Cinderella and the Prince. Wide-eyed and hesitant, her old and tattered blue rag transformed again into her ball gown of the night before, she takes his hand.

They dance.

A final note, then the heavy curtain falls to cover Cinderella, in the arms of her lover. But come curtain call, there is Cinderella, center stage, flat on her back with her leg in the air as she massages a tired foot.

The Prince sighs. Another long dress rehearsal comes to an end.

Patricia Barker has broken her left foot twice, her right foot three times and her nose twice. She has a crack in her spine and a problem with her right knee. For the past 10 years, she's been dropped, bruised and battered in ballet.

But when the lights go down and the curtain rises, nothing shows but the sweet innocence of Cinderella and the magnetic power of Barker's dance.

"She moves with simplicity, a kind of music and poetry," said Francia Russell, co-artistic director at Pacific Northwest Ballet with her husband, Kent Stowell, who choreographed "Cinderella." "Another dancer could dance correctly, but Patricia's movements sing." The last performances are tonight through Saturday.

Barker is the darling of the ballet, the small-town-girl success story. After starting on scholarship to PNB at 16, Barker moved through the ranks to become a principal dancer at age 22. After 14 years with the company, she is one of their best.

Born in Kennewick, Barker spent most of her childhood in the Tri-Cities with her eight brothers and sisters. At 7, she took her first ballet class.

In the beginning, ballet was just something that got in the way of Saturday morning cartoons. Then it was something fun to do after school. It wasn't until she turned 13 and met ballet instructor Lynne Williams that she began to think of ballet as a profession.

"Patricia came to me with the attitude that she couldn't do the things I demanded of her. But I kept asking for more," Williams said.

"She used to pound her fists on the floor and get tears in her eyes when I would stretch her. And when she didn't like what someone told her to do, `NO!' was certainly in her vocabulary. But when she finally accomplished what she didn't think she could do, that little tear in her eye would turn into a little smile," she said.

Three years later, Williams decided it was time for Barker to move on to a professional setting. Patricia auditioned for the Pacific Northwest Ballet Company and moved to Seattle at the age of 16.

"I don't think anyone should have to go through what I did. When I first moved here, I had no guidance," Barker said. "I didn't know how to do my laundry, what to do when I got sick, how to go grocery shopping. . . . I was left struggling in a big city." Still just a high-school kid.

"Get this," she said. "I had to be at high school by 7 a.m., then to ballet by 10 a.m. A lot of times I had to do correspondence work between classes because I also had to go to rehearsals. I'd finish at 7 p.m., and I also had my own ballet classes.

"And do you know what the high school wanted to tell me? They wanted to tell me I had to take P.E. to graduate," she said.

Although her parents sent money to support her, Barker said she was on her own.

"I was a wild kid. I did things people shouldn't do," she laughed. "I did recreational chemicals, stayed out too late, went dancing every night, had a fake I.D., the whole bit. But the difference between me and other teenagers is that I had my own apartment and didn't have to sneak around. I didn't have any supervision to keep me in check."

In those years, Barker became anorexic - not because she felt she needed to be thinner for ballet, she said, but because food was the only thing she could control.

"Even though I was on my own, my parents still paid the bills. When they called at 10 p.m., they expected you to be there," she said. "And in dance, you're told all the time what's wrong with you. You stare in the mirror all day long telling yourself you have to get better. Trying to fix your faults, trying to be perfect.

"Anorexia was ruining my chances as a dancer," she said. "And there is nothing I would do to keep myself from dancing. It would crush me to let something like anorexia prevent me from performing my job, and that had a lot to do with beating it."

What makes Barker so good?

Amazing physical gifts, Russell says: her muscles and line, the shape of her body, her legs and feet.

Barker laughs.

"Francia thought I had bad feet. But her son, who was a dancer, told her she was crazy, that I had nice feet," Barker said. "So one day, she made me take off my pointe shoes and point my toes. It turned out I did have nice feet, I just had bad pointe shoes."

Now Barker has an evening ritual to make sure her pointe shoes fit. Each pair is custom-made in London. Before she wears them, she smashes each toe, removes a nail and breaks the shank; then she pours acrylic into each toe for added strength.

Each performance requires three pairs of shoes, and since August, Barker says she has gone through more than 200 pairs of pointe shoes.

"I've fallen three times in the same performance," she sighed. "Dancers always blame things on their shoes. If I fall during a performance, I throw my shoes away immediately. If I do a wonderful performance and my shoes are doing well, I kiss them."

Never close to her parents and siblings, Barker says she considers Stowell, Russell and the other dancers her family.

"Those people know everything you can do, everything you can't, and everything you're faking," she said. "They know when you've danced better than you ever have in your life, or worse."

Now in her eighth year as a principal dancer, Barker says another force in her life is her fiance, Michael Auer.

Auer and Barker met at PNB when she was 16. Auer was married at the time, and Barker remembers being one of many girls who had a crush on the Austrian dancer.

"We all thought he was so handsome with that accent and those crystal blue eyes," she said. "He called me Pear Woman when I first came to the company because he thought I had a big butt."

But when Auer and his wife split up two years later, he and Barker began dating. But she says their personal relationship never got in the way of her dancing. If anything, Auer, 9 1/2 years her senior, enhanced her professional career by providing stability for a young dancer, she said.

But no wedding bells are ringing in the distance.

"I don't really believe in the institution of marriage," Barker said, eyeing the diamond on her finger. "Society puts a mental damper on people by associating marriage with a ball and chain. I think that's a horrible image."

Now, more than 10 years after they began dating, and seven years after becoming engaged, Barker and Auer, who recently retired from dancing, are still together in a little house on Queen Anne that they began rebuilding five years ago during their time off.

"The thing she has gotten used to the most with me is my cooking," Auer laughed. "I'm not a great cook, but Patty was very picky. We actually have spice in our food now. A little salt, OK. Pepper? No thank you. And she has a mean appetite."

That's hard to believe. At 5 foot 7, she weighs 112 pounds. But Barker remembers going out to dinner with friends after a long day of dancing and having not only appetizers, dinner and dessert, but also ordering a pizza because she was still hungry.

Barker also "surfs" behind her power boat and enjoys pottery. She mows her own yard, drinks Welch's grape soda, keeps a cold bottle of vodka in the refrigerator, and loves beer and potato chips.

But mostly, she says, her life is Auer and the ballet.

"It's been hard sometimes, and disappointing. But I wouldn't give up my life for anything, and I don't think I've given up anything for ballet," she said. "I have something nobody else has because of all those hours I've spent. So maybe everyone else has given up something because they never did ballet and don't know what it's like."

And when it comes time to retire? Barker just shrugs and smiles.

"That's the big question for a dancer," she said. "I don't know when I'll retire. I can do other things, but I'm a very one-track-mind person. When dancing is over, that's when I'll decide what to do next."