In 1977, Whitley Hill arrived as a freshman at the University of Michigan and met the fellow dance major who would share her tiny room in University Towers: a talented, eccentric dynamo named Madonna. Hill’s memoir about those days, “Not About Madonna: My Little Pre-Icon Roommate and Other Memoirs” (Heliotrope Books, NYC), is available now in bookstores and online, and is filled with funny, poignant, sexy recollections of the days of her youth. Some of it isn’t quite suitable for print in an alumni magazine, but we’ve excerpted a lovely, and telling, scene here.

Ann Arbor seems a ghost town. A few plows clunking by, an intrepid student now and again. No children with sleds. I’m not certain there are any children in Ann Arbor. I certainly never see any. No dogs with frozen spittle and panting glee. Just frat houses gilded in white. The snow is very deep and everywhere. It’s hard walking—big wind—but we’re laughing and cussing and I’m feeling a tad self-righteous as we reach the Dance Department door and yank it open. There’s a big wall-unit heater in the vestibule and we lean against it gratefully, loving the fact that howling Arctic winter is just on the other side of the glass where we’re not. Warm, warm. We peer down the fluorescent-lit hallway looking for any sign of life but all is still, as if maybe even we aren’t really here. Wasn’t there an “Outer Limits” about that? I get that empty-building feeling in the pit of my stomach.I decide to say “C’mon” first and thus appear eager to get started with actually working out on a Saturday.We climb up to Studio A on the second floor. No need to hit the dressing rooms; we strip down and change into sweats right in front of the bank of windows that looks out onto a small parking lot and a boxy apartment building across the way. The walk has made our muscles cold and I wonder if I will ever be loose and stretched out again. I start on the floor, rolling around, cheap and easy full-body massage. Madonna’s facing the barre, seems to be looking out the window, then remembers why she’s here, grips the wood, takes a couple of steps away and bends over, as if trying to pull it right out of the wall. A very effective hamstring stretch. She ripples her back gently a few times then stands up in first position, heels together, tailbone dropped down, neck long. The first plié sends her knees straight out over her feet—wide, wider, then slowly up. As Christopher has reminded us a thousand times, the simple plié is a lot more than just a knee-bend. “Don’t think of dropping doooown. What you’re reeeally doing is separaaaaating your knees,” he likes to say, sometimes dropping to the ground and crawling through the negative-knee space of some hapless freshman from Grand Rapids. “You want to grow taaaaller with each plié, taaaaller, taaaaller …”So Madonna does her pliés, separates her kneeees, and grows taaaaller while I roll around on the cool, smooth wood floor. No one’s talking. Outside, the wind roars. I think of Siberia and wish for tea. And maybe some hot, savory corn muffin dripping with butter.I join Madonna at the barre. Second position, demi-plié, stretch, relevé, heels down, demi, stretch, relevé, heels. Then grand plié. Fourth position. Two demis and a grande, two and a grande. Then fifth, feet smashed together, the connection traveling right up the legs to the crotch. Demi, demi, grande, go slow now, slow and controlled. Don’t drop your weight at the base of the plié. Keep lifting out of it, lifting out (growing taller), ’til you replace the heels and rise through the demi to that delicious, solid stretch, knees tight together. Relevé once more to finish, hearing someone’s old Chopin, just a fragment, arms en haut and hold, hold, hoooold….We turn and do the other side, which means she’s got her eyes on my back now. “Whit, did I ever show you my aging ballet teacher impression? Wait, close your eyes.”I turn around and shut them.”OK. Open.” her voice is strangely tight.I bust out laughing. Madonna’s got her eyes open wide and her lips pursed and has somehow made every tendon in her neck stick out about an inch, like subcutaneous pencils. She’s the victim of a very, very bad facelift.”Get that leg higher! Higher!” she squawks, then drops down giggling, rubbing her neck.We finish an abbreviated barre and mosey onto the floor for a quick stretch. Snapshot: Madonna as yogi, in the plow position. Head, neck, shoulders on the floor, hips up high and legs slung back behind her. Her feet tread the floor like this, press, press, using her elbows to support her back. Her T-shirt flops to the floor, revealing that bruised spine, a row of slight plums. She’s chatting idly, not knowing I’m watching all this, getting it down for use in some book in the misty future. She peeks at me as she talks, turning her head to the side. Green cat’s eye, half hidden by scrunches of faded shirt.I’ve brought my cassette player and the Bach tape which everyone in the apartment adores. Madonna and I play a game I’ve imported from Brockport—”bop and leap”—taking turns making phrases of movement and stringing them together. After thirty minutes or so of this, we have a good phrase of movement to dance in unison, then in canon. Everything fits together nicely and we’re sweating and feeling at one with Bach and each other. Just a coupla undergrad white-girl innocents emoting to classical music. Could be anywhere, anytime, but damn, it does feel special, and with all the snow—mmmm.”I’m done,” I say, flopping down to the floor, breathing heavily. Madonna walks her walk about the room, cooling down racehorse-fashion. Heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe. It’s the walk of someone whose passion is making the exactly right footprint, every step she takes. Madonna crosses the studio (heel-toe) and drops beside me.

* * *

We walk to the corner of Washtenaw and South University and wait there with our thumbs sticking out. Little blasts of blowing snow now, no big deal. Madonna, bundled in jackets and sweaters and scarves, looks like a tailor from the Lodz Ghetto. All you can see are her eyes through a slit in the knitting. She catches me looking and squints.”What?””Nothing.””Why are you looking at me like that?””I’m not. I’m not looking at you any way at all.””Well, why aren’t you, you little s—? Why aren’t you looking?” She laughs and flicks snow on me.