Final bows

On Sunday, Cuban-born Pennsylvania Ballet principal dancer Riolama Lorenzo will perform with the company for the last time.

On Tuesday, after more than half a lifetime of ballet buns, "I'm getting my hair chopped. And I'm going for short-short." She displays an iPhone photo of French actress Audrey Tautou with hair cropped to an inch or two.

"Isn't it fabulous?," she raves. "And then the day after, I leave for Disney World. We're driving the minivan. How soccer-mom can you get?"

At only 34, Lorenzo is leaving several years ahead of the typical retirement age of 40. But she has been dancing for 18 years and has two small children, ballet-loving Sebastian, 4, and 6-month-old daughter Rio Maria. The next phase of her life is about them.

"I've been working since I was 16 - that's when I started with City Ballet. I needed a break."

 Ballet is in Lorenzo's blood. Her mother retired from Ballet Nacional de Cuba just three years into her career when her daughter was born in 1977. When Lorenzo was not quite 3, Fidel Castro permitted tens of thousands of Cubans to leave as part of the months-long Mariel boatlift; Lorenzo's grandfather in Miami had a friend with a fishing boat who brought the family to the United States.

In Miami, she started formal Russian-Cuban-style ballet classes at 7 with her mother, who still teaches there. At 14, she was accepted by the prestigious Harid Conservatory in Boca Raton; two years later she ascended to New York City Ballet's School of American Ballet, and then in 1995 to the company itself, where she spent five years.

For a while, she led a charmed life. Founding choreographer Jerome Robbins first chose her for a principal role while she was still in the school's summer workshop. And at City Ballet, as a teenage corps dancer, "I did Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I did 'Emeralds' in Jewels. I did a lot of great roles, danced with Jock Soto and Robert LaFosse.

"I got to do a lot of stuff, but for some reason [ballet master in chief] Peter Martins never took me out of the corps de ballet. And it was frustrating - I was being given these roles, and I never had a bad review."