THE STREET DANCERS

In a charming family story that grows out of the author's own stage experience, a girl deals with her mixed feelings about her family's profession. The members of Fitzi's family are all performers. When their agent doesn't come up with jobs, they do their mime act in front of New York's Metropolitan Museum. Fitzi has always taken delight in an audience's happy response, but now encroaching adolescence counterbalances the theatrical life's glamour with a new feeling of embarrassment; she feels envious of a friend who used to be a model but now goes to regular school. Meanwhile, just when Fitzi is confronting her desire for a life like her peers', she must also adjust to new emotional demands: her beloved grandfather has a stroke and comes to live with the family. Finally, Fitzi gets up the courage to ask for a chance at the ``normal'' life she craves. An entertaining insider's glimpse of the discomfort, instability, and excitement of life in the New York theater. (Fiction. 10-14)