Two o’clock on a sultry August afternoon, and Mary Collins is dancing.

 Backward lunge, turn of the calf, thrust of the hip. Rosemary Clooney purrs “Why Don’t You Do Right?” over the stereo. Swing is difficult –even though Vladimir Kosarev, Collins’ Russian dance instructor, tells her that new moves always feel strange at first.

Gliding on the 3-inch heels of her bronze satin dancing sandals, Collins’ size-2 frame looks lithe and muscled in a black slip dress. Diamond-studded hoop earrings and a gem-crusted fleur-de-lis pendant gleam as she bends and twists with the beat.

On the surface, Collins is the picture of a woman who tries to look good, and succeeds.

Today, though, her attention is not on her appearance. It is on the dance.

“Mary is a natural,” said Kosarev, when the music spins to a stop inside the Fred Astaire studios on Sheridan Drive. “Her main problem is, she doubts herself.”

That, however, may be changing.

After three years on the public stage, as the wife of Erie County Executive Chris Collins, Mary Collins is now stepping into a spotlight all her own.

She has gotten used to the attention –positive and negative –that comes with being the spouse of a top elected official in Western New York. She’s speaking more at public events, appearing more in front of cameras. Her charity work, long a priority, is blossoming.

Collins has even found time to develop a passion for ballroom dancing –which she calls a “workout” almost as rigorous as the ones she does each morning in the gym in the basement of her 6,000-square-foot Clarence home.

All in all, you might say, 2010 marks the year the former Mary Sue Kuhn became comfortable enough with the unexpected places her life has taken her to be fully herself.

“Living with Chris has taught me you have to live with challenges,” said Collins, who recently turned 50. “Growing up, for me, it was always about being safe. But that’s not the way you learn things.”

There’s no doubt that Collins’ life has been just that sort of learning experience. Which makes the journey, to her mind, all the more fascinating.

Mary Sue Kuhn was 21 when she met her future husband in Cole’s, the Elmwood Avenue bar. She was there that night in the early 1980s with a friend. Chris, who is 10 years older, was on a blind date with another woman.

The fresh-faced Mary Sue –as everyone called her then –quickly caught Collins’ eye.

“We started chatting,” recalled Mary. “We chatted a long time.”

There were obvious differences between the two. Besides the age gap, Collins was a college-educated businessman –he worked at Westinghouse –who was divorced and a father. He was not a Western New York native.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Mary had deep roots in Buffalo. She had finished high school at Bishop Neumann in 1978 and dabbled in classes at Buffalo State, Erie Community College and Continental beauty school. Her childhood growing up in Williamsville and Newstead was unglamorous but secure: her father, John Kuhn III, owned Kuhn’s Well Drilling.

“Growing up, we always had what we needed,” said Mary. “We didn’t have the best of everything, but we didn’t care.”

But Mary was a bit fragile when she met the 31-year-old Collins.

At 20, she had watched her father die after a painful struggle with colon cancer. During his illness, Mary drove her dad to Roswell Park Cancer Institute and grappled in her own mind with questions about mortality that turned her from a carefree girl into a reserved woman. “Nobody ever told me my dad was going to die,” she said. “It’s something I had to figure out.”

Mary said “no” that first night, when Collins asked for her phone number. The friend Mary was with, however, took pity on the well-dressed young man with the Boy Scout good looks.

“He was very genuine, honest and very direct,” said Mary Matthews, a Southtowns resident. “I said, ‘I think this one’s different, Mary Sue.’ I told her, this one’s already an 8; if he has any kind of a job, he’s a 10.”

Mary and Chris dated for five years. Then came perhaps the most unromantic proposal ever –though they laugh about it now. Chris had planned a two-week trip to Australia for the couple for January 1988. In December –“being the thrifty person that he is,”Mary jokes now –Chris decided the trip was a perfect honeymoon destination. He asked Mary to marry him and gave her a 3.5-carat diamond ring. (More recently, she traded that in for a 10-carat diamond bought for her by Chris; the couple had the old solitaire reset in a bracelet for her to wear.)

They planned the wedding in weeks. The bridal gown was borrowed from Chris’ sister.

Trickier was the ceremony itself. As a divorcee, Chris, a Catholic, was in a sticky spot for remarriage. But it was important for Mary to be wed in a Catholic church.

Chris’ connections proved the charm. He asked a priest he knew from the board of directors at a local hospital to help them. Within a week, the couple had the papers they needed to be married in the church. (The priest he knew turned out to be Father Robert Cunningham, who was a member of the leadership of the Buffalo Catholic diocese, and is now bishop in Syracuse.)

In Syracuse, diocesan officials explained that what the Collinses received was not an actual annulment –which can take months – but a declaration as to the “Lack of Canonical Form” of Chris’ first marriage. That means it was not a Catholic marriage to begin with.

“What is issued [in this case] is simply a decree that the original marriage was null and void,” said Father Timothy Elmer, judicial vicar of the tribunal in Syracuse. “That’s about the usual turnaround time.”

They were married on Jan. 9, 1988, in the chapel at St. John the Baptist Church in the Town of Tonawanda. Cunningham performed the ceremony.

Sitting on a sofa in the living room of the couple’s sprawling $1.05 million home in Clarence’s Spaulding Lake subdivision –a three-story red brick colonial crammed with decor flourishes, from a towering vase of flowers on the circular foyer table to family pictures and campaign memorabilia lining a side hall –Mary reflected on the path her life has taken.

“I’ve become a positive person,” she said. “It’s been an interesting transition. Chris was always positive about things. He was always saying, ‘If there’s something you want to do, do it.’ ”

In 22 years, the couple carved out discrete –and in many ways, traditional –paths.

Chris has been the business powerhouse. He ran Nuttall Gear for 15 years, then became involved in numerous other companies. The Republican also succeeded in politics. After an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1998, he ran for Erie County executive in 2007. His platform of conservative business approaches as means of stewardship in the public arena resonated with voters, and he won.

Meantime, Mary, who had been a stay-at-home mom since the birth of the couple’s first child, Caitlin, in 1991, was in a perfect position to help her husband by standing by his side at campaign events, then at Erie County events and appearances.

It took some getting used to, Mary said. But she gradually grew comfortable at podiums in front of the room, or when everyone’s heads turned when she and Chris entered. She recently gave a full speech at a public event on her own, and enjoyed it tremendously.

“I have learned so much,” she said.

Collins, who is convinced that people make mistaken assumptions about Mary because of her attractiveness, said that his wife is a real asset to him.

“She’s learned just by doing. And people are realizing she’s a very smart person,” the county executive said. “She’s changed very little over the years –but she’s a much more confident person.”

Others see a strong parallel between Mary Collins and another first lady.

“She’s a Laura Bush –but with a lot more style,” said a close friend of the couple, Jane L. Corwin, who was their neighbor for many years and is now a state assemblywoman.

When Collins was debating about whether to run for county executive, recalled Nan Ackerman, a friend of the Collinses and a Town Board member in Orchard Park, Mary’s opinion mattered more to him than anyone’s.

“We were at a party in the wintertime, about a year and a half before the election, and everyone was brainstorming about who should be a candidate, who should run. I took Chris aside and said, ‘You have been a candidate before, you have taken businesses and turned them around ... you are an example of a logical person who should run for office,’” said Ackerman. “We talked for an hour and a half. Finally Chris said, ‘You’re right, maybe I should do that. But I can’t do that unless Mary says I can.’ ”

Now, in her public role, Ackerman also said that Mary most closely resembles Laura Bush, whom she has also met.

“She takes it very seriously,” Ackerman said. “She supports Chris in everything he does. She’s at his right-hand, never tries to upstage him in any way, she does her homework.”

As Mary has grown from the 21-year-old at Cole’s to the political wife with two kids on the verge of leaving the nest, she’s also become freer to be herself, friends said.

Caitlin, now 19, is a sophomore at Boston College. Cameron, the couple’s 17-year-old son, is entering his final year of high school at Nichols. (Collins’ daughter from his first marriage and her family live in Virginia.)

Mary recently fulfilled one of her longtime dreams by signing up for ballroom dancing lessons last fall. She goes at least once a week, and loves every minute.

And, to mark this new phase in her life, Mary and some of her close friends celebrated her 50th birthday this year with a girls’ trip to New York City.

The trip was about shopping, restaurants, laughter –and celebrating the roller-coaster ride that is behind them, and the one that is surely to come.

“Mary didn’t have a lot of these opportunities growing up, so she’s grabbing all these new things,” said Theresa Jehle, a friend of Mary’s for 19 years, and one of the women who went on the trip. “She knows Chris is doing what he loves. And she is doing what she loves.

“She’s really enjoying the ride.”