‘The Dancer’ Prompts Board Member to Quit

A board member of the Garden Grove Symphony who is strongly opposed to abortion resigned last week after composer and performer James Lee Stanley said that a song he would perform with the orchestra over the weekend had been written out of “pro-choice” feelings, according to Dick Hain, the board president.

The board member, Ray Romero, “resigned because of his deep convictions from a religious point of view,” Hain said. “We are sad and will miss him.”

Romero, a former vice president of the symphony, said he resigned because he felt “the stage of symphony should not be used for that purpose.” Stanley’s position, he said, “goes against my faith.”

There were no incidents during the performance, part of a free concert Saturday evening that drew about 9,500 to Village Green Park, Hain said.

The lyrics of the song, “The Dancer,” which has been played on KTWV-FM, make no explicit reference to abortion. Stanley said in an interview last week, however, that he wrote the song out of his conviction that for a pregnant woman, abortion is “nobody’s choice but yours.”

Yaakov Dvir-Djerassi, marketing director of the orchestra, said he received a number of phone calls before the concert, most of them in support of the group’s invitation to have Stanley perform with them.