BY JENNIFER GISH
Staff Writer

Caption: Philip Kamrass/Times Union PHOTOS BY PHILIP KAMRASS

    

     ERIKA KIRTOGLOU, a survivor of a 1993 car accident that left her with a traumatic brain injury, made the title of her self-published memoir "I'm Going to Dance" literal when she began taking ballroom dance lessons with instructor Michael Muller three years ago. She'll dance with Muller tonight at a benefit she organized for the Brain Injury Association of New York State.

     ERIKA KIRTOGLOU celebrates after correctly dancing a waltz with dance instructor Mike Muller during her weekly lesson

Erika Kirtoglou glances in the studio mirror as her dance instructor sweeps her around the floor during a slow waltz.      Michael Muller's flattened palm supports her back with delicate strength. He knows, since they've been dancing together for three years now, that he needs to pull her in for those few times when the room starts spinning and she wobbles a little in his arms. Kirtoglou says Muller's the only person she can dance with, because he knows how to compensate for the things she can't control, like when she steps back on her right leg and instead of gracefully staying on her toe, her leg locks like a wooden soldier's.      She never thought of dancing as anything other than a metaphor for her life and a theme in her book until Muller called her the day after a story about her incredible recovery from a traumatic brain injury appeared in the Times Union in 2003. He saw the book she was writing was called "I'm Going to Dance: A Memoir About Traumatic Brain Injury," and the professional dance instructor asked her if she was serious and offered free lessons.      Tonight, they'll dance that slow waltz at a benefit for the Brain Injury Association of New York State. It's the gala Kirtoglou organized herself, another one of the dreams that seemed impossible to everyone but the dreamer.      "I know my disability. I know my condition, and I know what my prognosis should be, yet I know it but I don't believe it and I don't feel it," she says. "I know my goals are unrealistic, and yet they're not. I can feel them beckoning me."      Last summer, Kirtoglou looked at Connie Slocum and told her a room that held 175 wasn't going to be big enough.      Kirtoglou already had admitted to The Desmond Hotel and Conference Center's director of catering that she didn't have any experience organizing charity galas.      But she had an idea for a Brain Injury Association of New York State fundraiser that would include dinner and dancing, and the belief that she could make it happen.      She expected a crowd. She wanted the biggest ballroom Slocum had.      "I was honest with her," Slocum says. "I've been doing this forever and a day, and with her excitement I didn't want to see that bubble get burst, and she said, `I know I'm going to need more.'      Tonight, Kirtoglou and Muller will waltz for a crowd of more than 300.      "Reach. Reach. Tang-o close," Muller says, guiding her around the room in a tango.      He tells her she needs to be like a cat, slinking around the floor.      "Soften your knee. Reach. Reach. Tang-o close. Soften your knee."      Each step gets softer. Kirtoglou's working against her body, but she smiles and looks up with warm brown eyes.      She tries to practice for 30 minutes a day at home. The short section of wall in her hallway becomes her dance partner. The kitchen counter catches her on her spins.      "It's very annoying because in your mind you know what to do, and you know you want to stay upright, but you just can't help it," Kirtoglou says. "That's really difficult to get past, knowing what to do and not being able to do it."      If she can't master a step during lessons, she'll practice it at home until she gets it right.      She's everything Muller read about her in the newspaper three years ago on the 10th anniversary of her car accident.      It was the story of a 17-year-old girl who was only a few miles from her house in Speigletown when she swerved over the center line to avoid some parked cars and crashed into an oncoming car. Her seat belt broke. She was thrown out the side window and head-first into a telephone pole.      Her family prayed over her as she lay in a coma at Albany Medical Center Hospital's intensive care unit. Even when she began responding to visitors with small hand and foot movements, doctors doubted she would ever excel beyond a vegetative state.      Yet she learned to walk again. She learned to talk again.      She battled through depression, and fought the urge to jump off a bridge one night.      The woman who doctors could only see limits for earned a bachelor's degree at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, then a master's degree in English from The College of Saint Rose, and then turned her thesis project into a self-published memoir of her recovery.      She got her first shipment of books from her publisher, Wicwas Press LLC in New Haven, Conn., just weeks ago.      "We've got to work on our song for Oprah," Kirtoglou tells Muller as she takes a break from practice.      She said the same thing to him on their third lesson, and she's not really any closer to getting on the "Oprah" show now than she was then, other than having sent the talk show host a copy of her book.      But she will dance for Oprah one day. She knows it.      It's the only way to get the message out, to talk to kids about wearing helmets when they ride their bicycles or skateboards. She recites the statistic that 5.3 million Americans have traumatic brain injuries.      She looks down at a copy of her book, lying on the coffee table in the dance studio's lounge.      "That's my life," she says pointing to the 266-page book. "And I have to pick it up every day."      She started her own motivational speaking company called Surviving Dancer, making advocacy her full-time job, and is looking for an agent to represent her on future books and engagements.      Kevin Craig West, an actor who's appeared on television's "Law and Order" and will perform in an upcoming production of "Metamorphoses" with the Capital Repertory Theatre, befriended Kirtoglou along the way, and wants to make a feature film about her life.      She's only 30. There's so much time left.      These things, Kirtoglou's sure, will happen.      And the people she's met have become believers.      "Whatever that girl says she's going to do next, if she decides to play the lottery, we should play the same numbers, because she's going to win," says The Desmond Hotel's Slocum. "There's someone who took a dream and ran with it. Not everybody knows how to dream like that. Each time I've met with her, you take a deep breath and you see the sun."      Muller presses the play button on the CD player and runs to the center of the dance floor where Kirtoglou stands gazing into the distance again.      It's the slow waltz, the one they'll do at the fundraiser tonight.      It's not the song she originally hoped for: country singer Lee Ann Womack's "I Hope You Dance." Muller thought it wasn't the right tempo for them. When he suggested another song, he teased her, saying she probably doesn't even know who sings it.      But she said she knew it was by the Eagles.      She's familiar with the song.      "Take It To the Limit."           Jennifer Gish can be reached at 454-5089 or by e-mail at jgish@timesunion.com.

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Factbox:  <%=hi%>Helping others It's too late to get tickets to the "Surviving Dancers' Fundraising Flurry: Making Dreams Come True" benefit for the Brain Injury Association of New York State. But you can call 459-7911 or go to http://www.bianys.org to donate to the association or to learn more about its work. For more on Erika Kirtoglou's book "I'm Going to Dance: A Memoir About Traumatic Brain Injury" visit her Web site at http://www.survivingdancer.org.