Debra Stevens is tired and frantic and facing the two most important days of her competitive life.

"I've never seen her this frazzled," says Larry Saunders, her teacher and dance partner for the past 18 months. "She's usually pretty good but she's been so frantic today, I don't know where she's at."

Stevens is in a special hell for overachievers right now, only a few hours before joining some of the best-known ballroom dancers in the country on the floor. It's March 2, and hundreds have gathered at the tony Grove Park Inn in Asheville, N.C., for the Heritage Classic Dancesport Championships, one of a handful of important ballroom contests in the country.

It was a long haul to get here. Her professional life put on semi-hold, family plans jimmied to include her less often, crisis after crisis with $6,500 of custom dresses, an out-of-the-blue competition in Tampa days before Heritage and money that gets spent and spent and spent. The last 24 hours haven't been much of an improvement.

• Stevens and Saunders arrived the evening before to discover that despite reservations made months earlier, they had no rooms for the night.

• The next day, one of two dresses she had specially engineered for the event malfunctioned in rehearsal. And while she fussed with the designer over the possible fix, she missed most of a massage, a possible cure a viselike headache.

• She's barely seen her daughter, Jamie, 23, who lives in Asheville, and is her island of support in a sea of strangers.

• She's waited for her hair and makeup for more than two hours, pushing back dark thoughts and staring at her competition.

• Finally, in about an hour, she will wrestle her pantyhose into position — the waistband removed so as not to peek over the low-slung back — and secured with safety pins. No bulges, though. Not even little ones.

"Yes," she says. "The judges notice things like that."

I'm sitting in the sprawling lobby-bar of the inn when Stevens suddenly appears, not looking much like herself. Her long blonde hair is pulled back artfully, if a little too tightly, in a pretty bun at the nap of her long, tan neck. Her makeup, usually dusted on in neutral tones, is just short of Carol Channing melodramatic. She looks cold: her arms are wrapped around her trim frame as if her blue shirt was a security blanket.

"The U.S. World Champion is in my heat," she says of her first competition, which dancers call comps. Like all pro-am competitions, dancers compete with others in the same age group. On the other hand, professional couples, Saunders says, dance with no age limitations.

"Ben Ermis?" she says. She nods slowly as if taking in the girth of his reputation. "He won the Ohio Star (Ball) with his wife."

She doesn't gulp. Instead, she does what she always does in the face of the inevitable. She shrugs. Maybe she smiles, a tight fragile thing, for good measure.

Stevens, 52 and a serious ballroom dancer for about six years now, doesn't have much tangible to lose at this point. Last year, her first at Heritage, she and Saunders, 50, suffered what she describes as a crushing defeat. They didn't belong there, she says.

No one else remembers it that harshly. Not Saunders ("We weren't bad. We just weren't up-to-date.") or Patrick Johnson, the European dance champion and coach who first noticed Stevens at Heritage last year ("Debbie's very hard on herself, very Type A personality.") Or even Jamie, who brought the loudest kid she knew to cheer her mother on ("I think you were great last year.")

Still, she came home to Naples, shelved her marketing business, leaned a little harder on her work-a-lot husband for help with their two daughters, and started practicing eight to 10 hours a week, some of that with Johnson. "It has to be perfect," she says like a mantra. "It has to be perfect."

"You're welcome to dance," prods the lounge singer as the band moves into a glacially slow "Give Me the Night." "Do you think we have some dancers out there?"

Two tables away, a couple asks where the competition is being held. The waitress gestures down the matrix of broad hallways behind them. She moves away and they discuss the merits of "Dancing with the Stars," the popular ABC reality series that pairs professional dancers with D-list celebrity partners.

"I really liked George Hamilton," says a man who looks like a banker between golf games. "He was dancing with some young stuff."

Stevens asks the time. It's 8:25 p.m. and Scholarship is scheduled to start in a little more than an hour. She walks to the elevator that will take her downstairs to change into her dress, dial-back her makeup and pray.

8:45 p.m.

For the third time today, the pair meet on the small parquet dance floor at the front of the banquet hall.

A gaunt blonde waltzes alone there. Another woman — likely one of those rare female teachers — foxtrots with a boy who is surely still in his teens. On another corner of the floor, a stout Jack Lord in his 50s tangos with his MP3 player, shiny black shoes and DUKE in big white letters on a black Lycra shirt. None are in costume yet, although they have taken the first step: They all sport the game face of a surgeon about to operate on his own son.

Everyone moves to an isolated silence that is interrupted, now and then, by a scussshh of a shoe dragged in a Latin slide or the hard snick-snick of a heel making a statement.

Saunders and Stevens take positions, backs arched, an arm high and another tensed at the waist. It's the beginning of the tango, an Argentian dance that emerged from the bars and brothels. Even today, it is a dance of lust, betrayal, control and, well, more lust.

Stevens frowns as they reel each other in and fling apart, more the provoked librarian than the temptress. Tango is not her strongest dance.

"It's supposed to be angry-sexy," she says. "I have trouble with that."

Still, their tango has come a long way from January, when the minute nine-second dance was about as sexy as watching a plumber work. The footwork is crisper now, the arm work precise and they've moved a few steps closer to what all ballroom dancers seem to yearn for: ascending to the land of the Hollywood musical, where dance is the inevitable extension of life, of love and perfect romantic harmony — or in the case of the tango, perfect disharmony.

Stevens is at the edge of the floor now, recovering from a dip gone awry. She's wearing an electric green dress that looks like it's trying too hard; the bodice is a breastplate of Swarovski crystals, the sleeves deadend into gloves, too-dark netting crisscrosses it all to suggest bare skin and one sheer sash stretches from shoulder to opposite hip.

"You look like a lizard queen," Jamie says when she sees it for the first time.

"A what?"

Jamie changes her tack. "Is that the dress Larry hasn't seen?"

Stevens nods.

"Is that the one they had to start from scratch?"

Nods again.

The original gown was rejected at the second fitting about two weeks earlier.

The material hung heavy off her shoulders, like a sodden wool blanket. So the Fort Myers designer started over, although with no guarantees that it would be ready for Heritage. She picked it just before leaving.

About two hours ago, though, the designer's staff had to trim the skirt to a titch above ankle length, which they hope will short-circuit its tendency to catch on Stevens' heel. There was no time to hem it. No one really knows if it will fix the problem.

Plates clatter on the other side of the hall, where a small crew of stewards in bow ties and white short-sleeve shirts remove the wreckage of the dinner buffet.

"It's hard to work when they're in here," says Niki, a 25-year-old redhead with a Slavic accent. She's worked through four competitions. She smiles. "It's hard because I just want to watch them."

9:15 p.m.

Saunders and Stevens head for the ballroom, parting a sea of vendors on two floors without giving them a second look.

Earrings and chokers and bracelets and hair do-dads sparkle in the spotlights. Table upon table offer CDs to energize a sagging routine and/or DVDs of name-making competitions to reveal the secrets of winning costumes and choreography. Shoes. Knee braces. Next to the entrance is a booth with more than a dozen notebooks of photographs of two days of performances. And dresses and dresses and dresses and dresses.

Dress designer Deidre Baker does about 20 of these events a year, transporting about $100,000 from her dress studio in Lake Worth, Fla., to the next big comp and back again. Sometimes her booth sits close to the ballroom floor, and other times, like now, she's tucked away in a distant corner on a whole other floor. "At places like this there are so many vendors, you just hope people find you."

Saunders hands the security guard at the ballroom double doors their tickets. He colors a dot in highlighter orange on Saunders' hand. The guard and Stevens look at each other and then look at her hands, which are sheathed in the green dress-glove.

He shrugs and waves her in.

They hurry past more vendors (video sales, shoes and what looks like back braces), and emerge at one corner of the C-shaped seating area. The audience is peppered with dancers in ballroom dresses and sweat jackets, their teachers and people in street clothes, probably friends and family of the student performers. High at the back of the center seating area, six videographers man cameras commissioned to focus on specific couples.

On the floor, the 8 a.m. to midnight ebb and flow of competition heats followed by awards, competition heats followed by awards, continues. Right now: Awards.

Saunders puts his small briefcase (two boxes of Altoids, reading glasses, cigarettes and a program) on the table in front of their seats. He sits their talisman, a stuffed duck, next to it.

"Oh, dear heart," the dance music croons, "you've been out of my life ..." A tall man in tails smiles and mouths the words as he moves down the aisle.

Stevens makes her way to the back of the room. Saunders follows and they tango next to yet another dress designer's booth. Doré Designs RESALE, the sign on the rack announces.

Turn, snap, angry look. Turn, whip, angry look and then, in the crucial move, Stevens leans against his back, hitching her left leg to almost his waist. Saunders improvises, grabbing the skirt as he wraps his hand around her calf. When he thrusts it away, he hangs onto the offending material for a split second.

Perfect. The dress doesn't stick.

Stevens steps back and shrugs happily: Maybe they'll make it through the routine without humiliating themselves after all.

But on the third try, it doesn't work. Stevens cradles her face in her hands.

9:40 p.m.

"We are now going to proceed with the quarterfinal round of the pro-am open American ballroom four-dance Scholarship," intones the emcee.

Because the group is so large — 21 couples — it's divided into two heats. The first includes most of the heavy hitters, dance champions like Ermis and others as well as another Naples couple, Jane Parker and teacher Jim Clemens, who runs Modern Steps School of Dance.

"Oh, Larry's back," crows a dancer crusty with faux diamonds.

He stops.

"These events are what he lives for," Stevens whispers. "Networking."

"Go 340!" yells someone from the risers. "Go Jackie!" That's Ermis's partner, a tall drink of water in a flamingo pink gown.

"Go Victor," which is pronounced Veeek-tore.

Saunders and Stevens move to the entrance of the dance floor where they wait, not talking, with about a dozen other couples. In this communal moment, everyone is strangely alone: One woman scrubs her front teeth with a finger; another reaches into her sparkly dress and adjusts her left breast.

Stevens is still and beautiful, staring at nothing in particular. Waiting. Saunders, who has the face and rangy build of a Marlboro man, bounces on the balls of his feet.

The tango music ends. It's the first of four dances that each group will perform for the five or six judges. The foxtrot, the waltz, and the Viennese waltz follow.

"Heat two please," the emcee calls.

As the first group leaves the floor, the second surges forward like an invading army. They find positions on the floor dictated, in part, by the flow of their routines.

"This is heat two. Tango, if you please."

They begin to move through the familiar, but with an added variable: They're dancing with many other couples, all with the intention of getting from Point A to Point B, even if you're dancing in the way. The traffic jams that result separate the men from the boys: The more skill the less reaction, save the disdainful pause one couple makes to allow the others to pass by.

As they make it through the first test of their dress-heel strategy, I sit down next to Patrick Johnson. He isn't judging the heat. He looks smart in his tux, which is required when evening comps.

"This is a tough one for them to start off with," he says.

He watches as they cut through the dervish of dresses, untanned women's backs and men dressed in sleeveless black suits that make some look like undertaker-nurses.

"They're doing good. This is heavy duty competition."

He points into the pack. "The guy in the black?" I search the crowd of men in black. "He's a standard dance champion." He points again. "She's danced six or seven years with the same guy. Which is something you run into here."

"Timothy Mason over there?" He gestures a cufflinked wrist to No. 389. "He's a former USA champion in standard. Victor Russo" — another wave — "used to be a Russian champion."

"Three four oh," yells a man in the crowd. "Woooo!"

Johnson taps the table with his ring, bending to one side when an audience member stands up in front of him. "She doing great, look at her," he says of Stevens. "She just shines."

Then, after all the pain and anticipation, it ends, and the heat floats off the floor. Stevens is smiling.

Johnson turns to me. "You know that's probably the best they've danced. Ever."

10:05 p.m.

Stevens stands in her practice corner as another age group moves through the same four dances. She's with Jamie, who arrived with her boyfriend. Stevens is not quite levitating.

"I feel good, I feel good," Stevens tells her daughter. "I feel confident that we made the semifinals."

Jamie hugs her.

"We need a cheering section this next time out," she says, bending close to Jamie. Then she catches herself. "If we make it."

While Jamie wanders off with Chris to get a drink, Stevens watches the dance floor. Her hands are clasped on her chest like a pair of sleeping doves.

"What am I thinking about? I'm thinking of ways to kick it up a notch."

She pauses.

"I can tell you, though, we're competing against someone who kicked our butts last year."

Which is likely much of the floor, but Stevens means Parker and Clemens, the two from Naples.

The couple becomes the target of Steven's serial goal setting. Outrank them, and Stevens will know all that work and sacrifice was worth it.

Both Naples couples move to the next round.

"This is the semifinal round," the emcee says. "Twelve couples have been recalled. Places once again, please, for the dance. The tannn-go."

Stevens has on her tango face as they dance. The dress seems to work just fine.

It goes much faster now, shifting quickly to the next dance when the former is over.

Saunders goes to his seat when it's done. He doesn't sit down. He wipes his forehead with a napkin.

"Excuse my language but it was a (expletive) fight out there. Everyone was all over the place."

"I lost him big time," Stevens says, shaking her head and blinking hard. "I think we were 15 feet apart."

She sits down, back straight and regal. When she starts talking again, it's quietly, as if she's talking herself into a leaner state-of-mind, one where you don't want more because you have so much. "My goal was to get to the semifinals and I did it. If I go further, then pure bliss. I don't know if I will have the opportunity to go further or not."

10:42

Saunders stands by Stevens, who is sitting next to Jamie now. As the emcee prepares to call out the numbers of the couples that have reached the finals, he reaches for her hand.

She shakes her head without meeting his gaze. Her hands remain in a tight ball in her lap.

They listen for their number, 423, as the emcee runs through the finalists, as always, in chronological order.

"Three-fourteen, 322, 340, 382, 422 ... " And like that second before your car runs into a telephone pole, life slows for a long moment and Stevens closes her eyes. " ... 447."

They wilt a little. Then Stevens shrugs. "We made it to the semifinals."

"Yes, we did," Saunders says.

"OK," Stevens says, "it's time to go to the bar."

Stevens lingers at the edge of the finals for their event, talking to Johnson. She doesn't look as the competitors fly by, caught as they are in the dreamy glee of being ballroom finalists.

Stevens leaves before the emcee gets a chance to call the winners.

9:15 a.m. Friday

Stevens opens the door of her hotel room. Every hair is in place from the night before.

"I was so tired last night, I don't think I moved all night."

She wanders into the bathroom and continues with her makeup. She canceled the 5 a.m. appointment late last night after she allowed that, yes, she needed more sleep.

She doesn't have all the necessary materials to do an Auntie Mame, but she's making do. She squeezes the tube of viscous something onto a false eyelash. It's the same stuff she used to glue on her clip-on earrings. "This is getting scarier by the moment."

She trundles down to practice with Saunders after eating breakfast with Jamie in the room. Saunders and Stevens rehearse, still swimming in the after-glow of the night before.

"That's perfect," Saunders says after a turn. "That's perfect. Thank you."

There are fewer hired guns dancing today's comps, and Stevens and Saunders relax a little into the possibilities.

"I feel so much better today than I did yesterday," she says.

By 11 a.m., Stevens is back in the room, stepping into a different gown, a tangerine halter dress with lace, chiffon, crystals and the need for cantilevered pantyhose pinning.

She calls her husband, David Stevens.

"We did really well," she tells him again: He was asleep when she called last night. "I was really thrilled."

She describes the path of the day — an intermediate silver four-dance, a three-dance closed silver scholarship championship and the open American ballroom Super Bowl Championships. All fancy names for pretty much the same thing.

"By 6, I'll change back into your wife," she says. She laughs.

She listens. "Are you playing golf?" she asks as she tugs up her pantyhose. "Uh-oh. OK."

Listens. She frowns. "Is that it (for me)? What do you mean?"

He says something.

"Well, we're dancing in 30 minutes."

Her frown fades as they talk about Jamie and the other girls — Kayley, 14, and Cassidy, 12.

"OK, well, if you see the girls, tell them I love them and we'll be done at 6. So I'll check in with you at 6."

11:25 a.m.

The day is gravy, until you get to the actual competition.

Stevens, an elegant tangerine popsicle, sits in the ballroom, waiting for Saunders to return from some errand. The routines are running through her head. She tries not to worry as she watches (and doesn't watch) couples get ready.

On the floor, Ben Ermis bounces on the balls of his feet and looks at his partner like he can't quite remember her name.

Besides a pro turn with his wife, he'll squire a number of students at Heritage. Most teachers do. Maria O'Daniel, 42, is one.

"In this business, there are a lot of hot properties," O'Daniel says later, "but Ben is such a dream to work with."

Once a week O'Daniel commutes four hours to his studio in Nashville, takes four hours of lessons and drives the four hours home to Richmond, Ky.

"You try to get what you want out of what you can do," says O'Daniel, a pert blonde who works for a dress designer, both as a salesperson and as a dancing billboard. She laughs. "People know me now. I've been in the ladies' room and had to slip out of dresses so someone can try it on."

Saunders wanders back to their place at one of the tables. He's wearing a pinstripe suit with black shirt. Like the sport itself, it is a curious hybrid of illusion and utility. With the silhouette of a double-breasted suit, it is conservative and invisible, except for the fact that it has no sleeves. Men in most of this world are elegant backdrops for the eye candy they wheel around the floor.

His mom sits a few seats down. She drove from Charleston, S.C., to see him for the first time.

He was "kicked out" of the family, which was strict Southern Baptist, he explains, when he started dancing 30 years ago. But as church strictures loosened about dancing, so did their relationship.

They take the floor for the first cluster of comps. It's a much smaller group than the day before, only 13 couples. It moves quickly.

They make the finals in all but the tango.

"That's because we didn't deserve to," Stevens says as she settles into her seat. She pulls a chair out from under the table and she puts her aching foot up. "But we got in the finals of four dances which we couldn't have last year."

After waiting through another age group's heat, they join the loose cluster on the floor. The emcee calls out names and places in a blur of efficiency. It's about as ceremonious as waiting for a table at Denny's.

"Second place, Debra Stevens."

As usual, Saunders isn't mentioned because as her teacher, he's considered an accessory. "I'm there to make her look good," he says.

When it's done, Stevens pockets that second place for the waltz and two finalists, which is tantamount to honorable mention.

"Hey, Larry did we beat them?" There's no need saying who. He knows. The Naples couple.

"In every heat."

"It will be a first if we beat Jim and Jane."

They wait some more.

2:51 p.m.

The three-dance championship. Done.

"We just got into the finals. I can't believe that we made it. It's unbelievable. Larry just went to check the board. I think he was crying."

A woman in bunny slippers and a Lilliputian Latin dress shuffles down the aisle. A bumble bee of a woman follows, her arm hooked on the arm her teacher, a steroidal Valentino.

Ballroom dance is a "window on life the way we'd like it to be," says Tony Prado, a dance teacher from Charlotte, N.C. He's competing with four "girls," including the bumble bee.

"My philosophy is when we're on the dance floor, there is no other lady in the world for that time," he says. It's a movie romance, but one where almost every woman he dances with defies stereotypes of beauty and attractiveness. "For me, it's something about that music. So, for that moment, she becomes the girl. I create that reality."

4:30 p.m.

Stevens is limping now.

5:15 p.m.

"I'm third. I do not mind being third," she says as she leaves the awards' floor. She holds quarter-sized coins representing her placement. "There's three thirds and one finalist. That's pretty damn good."

Then Saunders and Stevens disappear backstage, where the detailed scores are kept. They want to see where they fell in the ranking. Exactly where.

When they return, they pack up their things to find dinner. Heritage goes on through Saturday evening, but it's over for them.

They leave on a mid-morning flight the next day. Stevens is tired. He's euphoric, quietly dancing down the Charlotte concourse.

Stevens has packed the recording of their performances and is planning to watch it, maybe even that night. Then two days after returning to being a wife and mother, she's back at the Naples Crystal Ballroom and Dance Club.

Johnson, their coach, tells them that if they want to compete at the Unites States Dance Sport Championships in September, they have to compete at least once a month.

Most will be in Florida, because of cost. But they flew to Houston this weekend for the Texas Challenge.

Stevens groans, a soft, tinny sound on this cellphone connection.

And it begins again.