Sitting at the end of a rundown strip mall on Bayshore Drive, beyond the storefront for day laborers, the little grocery and the check-cashing joint, the Naples Crystal Ballroom and Dance Club doesn't look like much.

Inside, though, among the mirrors and the party streamers and the three air-conditioner cool, Debra Stevens looks for an uncommon brand of redemption.

"Foxtrot or tango?" asks a voice from behind the wood-paneled deejay desk.

"Foxtrot."

Larry Saunders walks to her, the lone figure in the middle of the dance floor. "Nice and easy," he says as he takes her into his arms — the delicate arms-length crescent that dancers call their "frame." "Here we go again."

The ragtime opening cranks up again and a Jack Daniel's growl chews through one of the tunes "Chicago" made familiar.

... in case you shake apart ... and want a brand new start .. All. That. Jaaazz.

Stevens doesn't hear the music as they dance. Not really. Not at this stage of shaping their routine. Like most competitive dancers at her level — better than the best country club dancer but still leagues from the top amateurs — she can move to a silence augmented by the steady count running through her head.

"Three ... four," Stevens mouths as she and Saunders slow to a reluctant pause, heads snapping to the side like a doll on a pullstring. Like so much of competitive ballroom dance, it's a study in contrasts — smooth and fast interrupted by slow and an unexpected quick. All perfectly synchronized, of course, to any piece with the right time signature.

Today is Wednesday, Jan. 13, and the pair have 48 days — 1,152 hours, if they were working 24-7, instead of feeling like they are working 24-7 — to finish sculpting more than a year of practice and for Stevens, ninja focus and worry.

"Mom talks about dance 58 minutes in every hour," says her daughter Kayley, 14.

On March 2, they will slip onto the dance floor at the Heritage Classic Dancesport Championships in Asheville, N.C., one of a handful of major U.S. ballroom competitions. There they'll dance against as many as 25 other pro-am couples, some of whom with enough wins to ascend to rock star status in this clubby little world.

Stevens and Saunders — her teacher and dance partner in six competitions over the past 18 months — are not stars. They've never won a sanctioned competition (although she placed first at a Sarasota contest in November) and last year, their first at Heritage, they lost. Badly.

"I learned that ballroom dancing is more than wearing a beautiful dress," she says repeatedly over the ensuing weeks. But what she really means is this: "To be honest, we were completely outclassed."

So she came home, put aside a marketing business she built from nothing, juggled the demands of a work-a-lot husband and two over-scheduled daughters, and started rehearsing with Saunders three days a week. They even brought in a European ballroom champion based in Sarasota for a two-hour coaching session each week.

Saunders walks to the CD player.

Stevens, 52, waits on the floor, hands on cocked hips like an NBA star taking a breath between free throws. She's dressed in her everyday uniform of a simple cotton shirt and straight-legged pants, both a little loose at size 4. Her blonde hair is pulled back at her forehead, and she has a freckled, just washed, outdoorsy beauty.

It's not the kind of beautiful we've come to associate with ballroom dancing, especially after the ABC reality series "Dancing with the Stars" and its leggy babes in stiletto heels and disco make-up invaded our national consciousness. The show, which just finished its second season pairing professional dancers with D-list celebrities like Tatum O'Neal and Jerry Rice, brought competitive dancing into a limelight it has never before enjoyed in this country.

Stevens watches it on the rare occasions when she's home and it's on.

After more than two hours of little lessons and numbing repetition, cajoling, snappish critiques and patient kisses, Stevens finally sits down. Yes, she says, her feet hurt. So do her knees. There isn't a day in the six years she's been serious about dancing that she doesn't question why the hell she's doing this to herself.

It's a good question. Because even if you ignore the accelerated erosion of this aging body, competing in ballroom dance is a costly avocation. Between the four-figure dresses, the flights and the hotel rooms, the entry fees and coaching costs, a competitor like Stevens can easily spend thousands, maybe tens of thousands, in an active year.

Add to that the toll that making dancing Priority One takes, and relationships can suffer. "In our low moments, David tells me that if I put as much into our relationship as I did dancing, then ..." She's talking about David Stevens, her husband of 18 years. "I think he's probably right, but ...

"I can't help it."

She doesn't know why. It's not the pretty dresses or the social whirl of jetting from competition to competition. Or television fame. Or even the lure of first-place trophies.

At least Stevens says it isn't.

"I want to do my best," she says. "I'm just honored to be there."

Making sure she does her best will make the next month and a half a tough slog.

It doesn't matter, she tells herself. Smile. Put a happy face on it. The glass is half full and every problem is an opportunity.

Forty-eight days (to proving it was all worth it). Forty-eight days (to facing it was all a waist of time and money).

Forty-eight days.

February 3: The first fitting

This has got to be the Barbie Fashion Show of all Barbie Fashion Shows.

Inside this worn Fort Myers bungalow an otherworldly kind of glamour rules. Sizzling Latin numbers with almost enough fabric, fringe and sequins to make a decent bikini mingle with the flowing confections of startling color, of chiffon and satin, feathers and crystals.

The dresses, Stevens says, will seduce me. Maybe, but at $500 for a gown someone else has worn to perhaps $1,800 for a new dress than wasn't made for me, it better turn me into Madonna.

The cost of a custom dress is a matter of how much you want to invest, says Lyn Wallander, a former dancer turned designer. "Styles With Attitude," her business card says. Starting at about $1,500 and going as far as your credit limit will allow, she will design you a perfect costume, nipped and tucked to your body and dance requirements.

And when you get tired of it, which you will, she says, in about a year, you can sell it on consignment, one of the legion of dresses ferried from bungalow rack to competition sidelines and back again throughout the season. Granted, you'll likely recover only a fraction of the original cost, but it'll go to a dress no judge has seen on you, and at the same time, you're supplying the new dancer with her ticket to the dance floor.

Thus the cycle of ballroom commerce rolls on.

Stevens waits among the orphan dresses. No interest. She's ready to see the two she stifled all her thrifty good sense to commission. "I'm a new dancer," she reasons. "I needed a new dress."

Together the two will cost about $6,500. And the trip to Heritage, if you're adding things up, will cost another $4,000, give or take.

"Go ahead and look," says Wallander as she settles Stevens in her office, which doubles as the only dressing room. Wallander gestures to two neon piles of fabric, one pink and one green, laying on a chair. "Those are your dresses."

Stevens bends close and lifts an edge with two fingers. In a few minutes she'll have it on, a halter dress with godettes, sheer panels in the skirt which allow dancers to have a wide sweep without all the weight. The godettes aren't in yet, though, and the skirt falls in long, thick strips like your mom's attempt at a Halloween costume.

"I'm not sure about this dress. I look like a popsicle." Stevens examines herself in a mirror that runs the length of the wall. Her hands are clasped white-knuckle tight across her ribs. The dress is the color of an embarrassed tangerine.

"See how gorgeous it is on you?"

"I'm not sure." She looks at herself with worried, serious stare of a taxidermied fox. "I would never have picked this color in a million years."

This last comment Wallander takes as a kind of surrender to the wisdom of the dress. "I love it when she lets me do things."

This was the first time Stevens has seen either dress. And she's been terrified.

Now I can see why: The design is a vague twitch of a sketch showing the bodice clearly enough, but picturing the skirt like an explosion of Js.

Stevens keeps staring.

"You can compete every weekend if you wanted to and have the money," says Patrick Johnson, who spends his year judging competitions and coaching competitors. He works with Stevens and Saunders every week.

Ultimately, though, this is a world of better-than-last-time, which is measured — not in wins that propel you to some World Series of dance — but in improvements sometimes so small that only the dancer can really access them. A compliment from a judge. A turn they don't flub. Beating a couple that has always ranked higher.

Three hours after arriving, Stevens pulls on a pair of faded jeans and a comfortable shirt. She doesn't strike me as someone who would feel at home in all the glitter and glam that is at the foundation of ballroom dancing — for the women anyway.

"In my real life, I walk around in the softest, largest clothes. Anything tight I throw it away, give it away."

"Debbie," says longtime friend Trout Scanlon, "is not a fashionista."

Looking back

Ensconced in his RV somewhere in Georgia, Ed Rolquin begins to describe his "beautiful oldest daughter."

"She's very serious. Debbie is a winner. The whole family is a winner. She's very competitive. Debbie is a perfectionist. We're very lucky. You know, her sister is Pam Watson." He waits for recognition. "The Realtor? She is the Realtor in Naples. Then, there's Jeff, who lives in Naples."

He wretches himself back to Stevens. Yes, he says, she always loved to dance. "Every time she got a chance, and there was music, you'd see her doing it, see her twirling and dancing."

She started ballet lessons at 3 or 4 years old while the rest of her family honed their tennis skills to a rapier point. She didn't like tennis. But she did have drive. "I have it. I know my wife has that drive. All the kids have it. They're very fair minded but you get them into a game ..."

Have you seen her dance in competition before? I ask.

"Whenever we can," he says. Then he turns away from the cellphone to address his wife, who is driving them home from their son's 50th birthday party in Wilmington, N.C. "Bonnie, which dance thing did we see Debbie in?" Back to the phone: "A couple of them. There was 'My Fair Lady.'"

"We do a lot of traveling."

Ballet lessons ended when her teacher died of cancer. Stevens was 7 and decided that without her teacher, there wasn't much point in continuing.

She turned to riding instead — with the whole equestrian package. A horse ("a very fine horse," Rolquin says), a trainer, lessons and a stream of competitions. But after roughly 15 years of riding, after competing in the Long Island Junior Olympics, after earning a degree in equestrian science at William Woods University in far-away Missouri, allergies rerouted a lifetime of plans.

She moves to New York when she realizes that jobs aren't for the taking in Long Island. She works as an administrative assistant, eventually ending up working for a man she likens to Donald Trump.

Marriage. A daughter, Jamie. Divorce. Better jobs. She leaves New York. She leaves Connecticut. Then she leaves New York again. She moves to Naples, where her parents had finally moved after 30 years of wintering here.

She called David Stevens, a real estate agent she'd seen quoted in the newspaper. She wanted to network. But she found out that Stevens, who was just out of school and valet parking cars at night, knew less about the local business world than she did.

They married in 1988. Over the years, he's seen her dabble in the arts, especially acting and singing. In between obligations to Jamie, now 23, Kayley, 14, and Cassidy, 12.

"We came back from our three-day honeymoon to do 'Damn Yankees," he says. He laughs, something that is not completely jolly.

A play called "Ballroom" hooked Debbie into dance again. Like riding, she attacked it with determination. And worry, because as a serial overachiever, she can not let good enough be good enough.

To connect the dots of their complicated lives, David Stevens takes up the slack, eating breakfast out with his daughters most mornings and ferrying them from school to dance lessons to diving competitions in the kind of complicated cha-cha most families endure these days.

Which is OK with him. "This is what I'm about now, these girls" says David, a jazz musician who abandoned a rising music career in college, because, in part, music wasn't enough to sustain him through the Spartan life it would surely provide. "I'm not going to get good at golf until they leave."

For the girls' part, they say they admire their mom. "She's always been involved in the arts," says Kayley, who danced competitively until entering high school this year. Right now, she wants to be an actress. "You can tell she loves it."

Do they miss her when rehearsals bring her home late or a competition cuts short vacations? "Well, we all make sacrifices," says Cassidy, who has competed in gymnastics and more recently, diving. And they're used to it: Debbie has balanced family with extracurricular interests for a while now.

"I could say that they don't even notice, but that would be crass," David says.

He doesn't dwell on the costs, which he says are considerable. He takes care not to call her dancing a hobby, which would hurt her feelings. He doesn't memorize the details of the sport so that he'll never know when doing better in a competition really means getting beaten by 39 other people, not 45.

"All I know is she's happy. That's good. If she wins, that's good. If not, the glass is still half-full."

Beneath the support and concern, though, there's something else, a slippery kind of pain that may be endemic to long-term commitments: You don't appreciate what I do.

"She's obsessed with the idea that we don't get it. We don't recognize her level of achievement." He runs through the list: hefty financial support; a free hand to do what she wants in the sport; and, of course, his time with the girls. He shakes his head. "I don't really know how I could support her more."

Debbie grimaces at the notion. She looks steely sad. "Not one person beside Jamie has come to see me compete," she says. "Not one."

"I can't do more," says David, who calls the issue a "small volcano, inactive, but there's the potential of it creating huge, ending events." "I wish we could attend more events, but hey, we have our lives, too."

February 8: A change in plans

Johnson asks Saunders and Stevens to compete in the Florida Superstars Dancesport in Tampa on Feb. 17-18. It would be their biggest competition since Heritage the year before.

Why risk injury days before the Valhalla of their competitive year? It gives them the opportunity to dance on a large floor with other dancers and to compete, which they haven't done for months.

The problem? It runs right into the ski vacation with her family. In the end, she leaves for Colorado from Tampa a day later and flying back to Naples a day earlier, which is something of a lose-lose: The kids see her make yet another change in her part of their vacation, or she misses a chance to perfect the routines less than a week before Heritage.

They go to Tampa. They do well, making the finals in one important event.

February 15: Crunch time

Stevens is at her post, the middle of the empty floor, as Saunders changes the music. It's a waltz.

Today she's wearing a simple white ballroom dress. Not one of the ballroom dresses. The popsicle dress isn't done yet and the electric green dress proved to be unworkable during the second fitting.

"It's a catastrophe," Stevens says. "They'll have to start from scratch."

Which could mean that it won't be done for Heritage and that she'll have to wear the dress she has on, one of four she's worn to death by now. Or the popsicle dress, if that's finished.

Patrick Johnson walks over to her, and talks about the viability of a certain gesture. Johnson, a European ballroom champion at age 6, has a studio in Sarasota, but drives to Naples every Wednesday to coach them. He's a compact dapper man with a Davy Jones lilt and unflappable good humor.

"Well, then," he concludes, "it takes away from being a princess. Turning your head during a bit with the music off is nice, but not with the music on."

No, the in-crowd language of ballroom dance doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if you haven't been initiated in the wonders of hair-pin turns, fleckerals or the nuances of American and International styles. Whether it's NASCAR or hip hop, it seems as much about naming the unnamable as signaling to strangers their outsider status.

The routines are firmer now, 15 days out from their first 2006 competition at Heritage. The action is clearer and bobbles fewer.

They chose long ago to focus on only four dances — the foxtrot, the tango, the waltz and the Viennese waltz — rather than the full range styles and subspecialties of ballroom dance: "We could spend hours and hours and hours on all of them or just four," Stevens explains. "We felt it had to be perfect."

Perfect is important, the baseline measure she seems to apply to every turn, every step, every competitive bid for just a little better.

They're ready this year, Johnson says, although he continues to mold their movement and his choreography; changing microscopic details in the architecture of the routine; making it cleaner, more musical, more dramatic. Whatever it takes.

Lack of preparation beat them at Heritage last year, Stevens explains. And because dance styles had moved on since Saunders, 50, had last competed. They were riffing on each dance without a set routine, a style called follow-and-lead, while their competitors were churning through a carefully calibrated chain of steps, hip shakes, dips and spins.

They get into position again, arms interlocked in waltz mode, the misty delight of love plastered to their features. But they're not in love. They aren't even friends in the sense of talking about anything other than dance. No, this is business, all business, for both of them.

Johnson tips Stevens' head back like she's a doll. Then a little more. Stevens doesn't react.

Ten seconds of music and they stop again. Johnson wants to change something else.

"You've got to be kidding me," Stevens says, almost under her breath.

"Why?" Johnson asks, actually curious.

"Because it's all in body memory now," she says.

Stevens didn't used to talk during rehearsals. And even three weeks earlier, she would quickly defer to either Saunders or Johnson.

"What do I know? I listened," she says. But recently, they've done better in the smaller competitions (even being tapped to dance around Manhattan to promote the second season of "Dancing With the Stars"), she's felt more confident about speaking her mind.

"It's not just me he's working on," she says. "It's both of us."

"One and two and three," Johnson says. They stop, as still and empty as mannequins.

When they break position, Stevens moves away from the two, bent in fatigue as she walks. Then, as if a Weakness Off switch has been flicked, she stands up straight. She smiles at Johnson as she comes back to position.

Stevens, he says, "picks it up fast, and she retains it. She never never makes excuses. 'I did it because of this or because of that.' She's up for anything."

"Debbie jumps right in," says Scanlon, her friend of 15 years. "I've never heard her say the word 'can't'"

They break again and Stevens sinks into a chair. She is dappled with perspiration and obviously tired. After a few minutes, she puts down the towel she's held but not used and moves to rejoin her coaches on the floor. She turns back to me.

"There can't be anyone out there as working as hard as I am. As we are," she says in something that sound as much like an entreaty than a statement. "There can't be."

February 24: Alone

The house is dark and cold. Her family are flying home from Colorado. The cat is in hiding.

Stevens leads me up the stairs to the only VCR she knows how to work. She's going to show me the Big Mistake during the Tampa competition.

I compliment the cream-and-blue guest room, which looks like a how-to page in Martha Stewart Living.

She looks at me for a long moment. "I think that isn't true all the time." She absently smoothes her loose blouse over jeans with her left hand as she thinks. She's Bain du Soliel dark thanks to a $35 spray-on tan she got for Heritage. "I think a lot doesn't get done around here."

This is a sore point for Stevens, who castigates herself — even if no one else joins in — about the time she takes for dance, the time she gives grudgingly to little household tyrannies like the laundry. She stuffs each load to the brim, she says, to try to convince her husband — and maybe herself — that she's really pulling her weight.

"I think I harbor a lot of guilt around here. We're not the Cleaver family."

Stevens slips the tape into the VCR. A little dance floor floats onto the screen with the half-glamorous decorations of a school prom. There are formal dresses that are trying to be something they're not — elegant or sexy or simply not like everyone else's. Men in tuxes are like sparrows in the company of peacocks.

"This is it." She returns the tape to real time. She points. I don't see it. She runs it again. I watch carefully, and I still don't see it. And again. Finally, I notice her hesitate during a section of the tango. She forgot a part of the routine, she explains.

Then she fast-forwards to the moment they're tapped for the finals of a competition called Scholarship, a contest that awards cash for lessons to the winners. She watches intently, her arms wrapped around her waist. Then, unexpectedly, she smiles.

"I don't think I could have danced any better."

"Number 261," a sonorous voice announces, "from the Crystal Ballroom in Naples."

Stevens giggles and claps as their doppelgangers move unto the floor with the other finalists. They dance. But that's not what she's interested in now. "Watch," she says, pointing to their figures as she and Saunders leave the floor.

"Go Debra and Larry," says a stranger in the audience. On the tape, she turns to look back at him. She's shocked.

This is another sore point: She may not say it out loud, but Stevens craves a cheering section who will also witness her evolving skill.

And when they don't volunteer to come — one friend says that he thought she typically competed in distant locations — it prods some iron resolve to push on, but also, a deep vulnerability.

She turns off the media show and climbs onto the bed, where she spends late nights deconstructing taped coaching sessions after everyone else in the house has gone to sleep.

So, what are you hoping for at Heritage?

Not winning, she says. Never winning. She won't even let herself think about that. Just doing better, that's enough. Maybe even just doing her best.

"I just want to dance as well as we can," she says. "That's all I can want."

She rubs her knee. It hurts today.

"I've analyzed this backwards and forward," she says of it all. "Why are you so in love with this sport? What are you doing? I'm limping." She shakes her head. "I've thought about it so many times.

"Yes, I pretty much think I'm crazy to do this at 52," she says. "When other people are bringing down things a notch, I'm kicking it into high gear."

She shrugs. It doesn't matter. Smile and push on. Heritage is waiting.