Herko soon earned a four-year scholarship to the
American Ballet Theatre School (now known as the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School). — members of this group performed their manias and drug routines in a life/art blurring spectacle in crash pads and stages throughout the city. They are best remembered for their roles in many of Warhol's experimental films. Herko was a close friend of
Diane di Prima, who writes of him in her biography
Recollections of my Life as a Woman. She met him in 1954 as he sat on a bench in the rain in
Washington Square Park. He was "crying because autumn always made him sad." Later he told di Prima that "He needed speed to push his body so he could dance the way he wanted to. He felt otherwise he didn't have a chance; he had come to dancing too late in life to make it work for him." Di Prima describes Herko's elegiac performance
For Sergio: "He arrived in black tights and a leotard, with a fierce archaic face mask painted on his face, and whispered to us to kill all the lights: house lights, stage lights, everything. I noticed he was in toe shoes. Then I stood silent, in awe of what was about to happen — something sacred and diabolical all at once. Freddie had an antique wall sconce with a mirror, the kind that used to hold a candle, and he lit the taper he had placed in it. And in that dark and suddenly silent theatre with his back to the audience, he began laboriously and slowly to go down one side aisle of the theatre, across the front below the proscenium, and up the other side. En pointe. The only music was the sound of his deliberately exaggerated and labored breathing. And the slow scraping of his toe shoes on the rough floor. The light, the flickering light of the candle reflected his painted face in the mirror in his hand...He was gone again before any of us could move." ==Death==