Gold Comb! I love your posts regarding Madame Swoboda. Almost every detail rings with accuracy from the red nails and black shoes to the "babies", "old ladies" and "gypsies." You bring up so many delicious old memories - in addition to the ones posted on my behalf earlier in this thread.
She was completely larger tha life in every respect. Unlike the divas of today, she had the substance - the training, the musicality, the culture - to back up her oversized personality. She was always, ALWAYS right. Really, she was. Which was why no one ever challenged her. We knew she was right, and that was that.
One thing you touched upon made me laugh. She had a great deal of expertise in music as well as dance, and as a musician who also danced, I was with her all the way when she had "discussions" with her pianists. The pianists were critical to her classes. She loved them one moment, hated them the next - how dare they not have read her mind? The oddest part was, at the end of the class, you "felt" her musicality in her choreography. After hours of her punctuating our classes with the familiar "Stop-stop-stop" to the pianists - they did not run away in tears. They loved her, beacuse they also knew she was always right.