Tap Dancer/Financier

A seventy-nine-year-old man recently asked me to give him tap lessons. He’s known me since I was a child. Of course I said yes. He’s a successful finance manager and grandfather of thirteen. He’s also a fabulous dancer who always gave me a spin around the dance floor at the wedding receptions we attended of mutual friends, his daughter’s among them. He knows I love to dance.

We’ve decided this summer to meet once a week in the morning for 30 minutes in his workshop, between the worktable and the saw table. He sweeps the floor of woodchips and sawdust before I arrive so that the sounds we make with our formal shoes on the floor—we’re not wearing proper tap shoes—will be clearly heard. We have a narrow corridor—about 3’ by 6’—in which to move; the floor is unvarnished wood. The workbench before us has been cleared off so that we have a neat open space to jot our choreography onto the back of the lyric sheets I printed out. Screwdrivers and chisels hang on prongs in the wall. We make up our own shorthand for our tap steps like a stenographer’s vocabulary—fl for flap, sh for shuffle, H for hop and so forth. His wife reads the paper in the next room. The breakfast dishes have long since been cleaned up. The door is kept ajar.

My student wears his brown dress loafers with dark socks pulled to mid-calf and shorts. I wear silver cocktail heels and a cover up over my bathing suit. This is so that we can both easily see our feet. I run through the basics of the tab dancer’s vocabulary, the building blocks of every routine you’ve ever seen in the movies or on TV. My student’s hearing must still be very good because he is able to discern the components of each combination as we review the basics. He repeats after me and gets each step right away; clear hearing is germane to tap. It’s an intricate and nuanced language comprised of only a few letters or moves. Step, stomp, toe, heel, dig. There are others and we scribble them down. I think I’ve remembered them all from my childhood and am too confident to check, preferring instead to feel cocksure.

On our first day we have a short conversation about Bob Hope and Gene Kelly, and how effortlessly they made it look. He tells me a story about his father trying to teach him to dance as a child in the 1940s. I’ve chosen “Tea for Two” as our song to work on, hoping that this is something that he will know well and feel comfortable with. He nods and agrees that that’s a good one. I start simple and try to use the same language each time. I also try to marry the steps with the words to the song as soon as we set the choreography. “Picture you upon my knee…”, I sing. I make up little nick names for the steps we do: the saunter, the clock. I always needed mnemonic devices to help me remember things, always needed to see it done, get up and do it, or push the buttons myself so that whatever I needed to remember would code not only in my brain but in my body. I wonder what kind of learner my student is. I wonder what kind of brain one needs to be excellent at finance and banking, numbers and risk. I wonder how long this extremely successful man has harbored dreams of being an effortless tap dancer. He’s certainly been talking to me about lessons for at least ten years. “Someday” he’s said at least once a summer for as far back as I can remember. But this summer he held me to it. This summer must be different somehow. Tomorrow he turns eighty.

My student sings alongside me as we run the steps again and again. I feel very comfortable singing and dancing alongside him and the forty or so years between us melt away, irrelevant. For a brief moment I picture myself Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire. We circle the saw table in the middle of the room—flap-right ball-change, flap-left ball-change—smiling as we say the words aloud until we land back at the start, slightly winded, but laughing. I picture Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in suits, swaying side to side then hop-shuffling with their arms out before them, bent at the elbow as if gently resting on a counter. I remember the steps they did, the easy weight change, the steady shoulders. I recall them turning together, the vents of their suit jackets opening slightly, then finding themselves facing the audience at the same moment, just in time to thwack at their own thighs a few time and end with a clap.

I decide to add the slap/clapping bit to our routine and see his eyes light up as he looks at what’s to come. “Oh, that’ll be good,” he says, but his wife looks in and I know that’s our signal to wrap it up. “We’ll add that next week,” I assure him and he says okay. Something about the way he says it makes me think he’d go on dancing all day if he could. Maybe possibly would have started years ago if he could have. I wonder how many bankers have wished they could tap dance as well as Gene Kelly, and how many dancers have wished they had the financial savvy of bankers. Then I scoop up my lyrics, kiss my student lightly on the cheek and say goodbye until next week.