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.

Show Time

This past winter I had the pleasure of seeing three performances: the Shanghai Circus, a delightful display of feats of strength, balance and derring-do; Savion Glover, a delightful exploration of percussive tap dancing to live flamenco music; and the Queen of Spades, a delightful slog through a four-hour Pushkin opera at the Met.

In all three cases, I had to surrender. The shows had no heady dialogue to follow in order to occupy my mind. I had to take off my coat and stay a while, acknowledging to myself that in order to get the full effect of the entertainment experience, I had to completely immerse myself and let it wash over me. It meant turning off the cell phone, turning off my brain and giving over the controls to someone else until further notice. It meant begging off the scheduling nymphs and list fairies and allowing awe and wonder to scramble up from where they’d been bound and gagged, waiting patiently to see the light of day again. In all three cases it worked, and as I relaxed and let go, I was dazzled.

Pushkin was up to his same old melodramatic tricks at the Met but with a compelling avant-garde flair. The depth and scope of the vast stage’s starkly compelling sets elicited gasps from the opera-goers around me each time the curtain was raised, and the costumes’ design and palette thrilled the fashionistas in the audience with their modern take on an age-old winter wardrobe. I read the summary in the program and then decided to leave the LED narration off and float through. The story line was simple enough to explain to a stranger in one subway stop and because this was Pushkin I just assumed that everyone would either die of consumption or a broken heart, but that they were sure to suffer madness on their way there. I was right, and since the opera clocked in at about the same length as a flight to Phoenix, I cozied-in and, once again, surrendered.

The Shanghai Circus was mind blowing. It’s performers showed such nimble control, such deft coordination, that my son and I found our selves unable to decide which act impressed us most. Was it the strongest man I’m likely ever to see; able to support and balance his own body weight in impossible, one-armed ways? Was it the mad, multi-ball hand juggler or the whimsical foot jugglers; passing balls to each other in Dr. Seuss fashion? Naturally I was attracted to the plate spinners, whose ability to multi-task-- spinning twelve plates on twelve sticks with each hand while moving and grooving-- spoke to the mother in me, and the eerie, science-fictiony, high-pitched hum they gave off was mesmerizing.

Savion Glover was mesmerizing, too. Having discovered the percussive seduction of flamenco, he teamed up with the equally mesmerizing Carmen Estevez of Spain. The daughter of a jazz drummer father and a flamenco singing mother, she drummed and sang with the cool, detached rasp of an aloof femme fatale while Savion-- two feet away on a tap platform—listened and let her music soak into his every pore until his head was so wrapped up deep inside the music that and only his tapping feet remained free. My mom and I watched—along with the flamenco guitarist nearby-- like voyeurs to a flirtation. Carmen played and sang as Savion hoofed and tapped and together they wound and weaved not so much a story but an experiential journey, like when you felt your way through the woods with your eyes closed, on a dare, when you were young.

During intermission, my mom told me about a Tap Happening she went to with Dad back in the 1960s at the Dixie Hotel on W.43rd (now the Hotel Carter, named
the dirtiest hotel in the US for 4 years in a row). Metal folding chairs were set up down in the basement and a record player sat in the corner. As my parents sat in awe, Howard "Sandman" Sims, Charles "Honi" Cole, Jimmy Slyde and Chuck Green tried to best each other; walking to the record player one at a time to put the needle down on the song that would take them to that place where body and imagination paired up and left the head in the dust. Mom said that tap had gone out of style at the time, but these guys just wanted to get together to keep it alive, to see old friends and to work their craft with nothing but camaraderie and fun as their goal. Having grown up seeing these greats on the big screen, Mom and Dad were blown away.

During the second half of the show, I thought about the plate spinners and opera singers and wondered if they’ll ever get together someday in a basement, just to catch up with old friends and show each other what they’ve still got. I thought about how much fun they would have without the pressure of a theater crowd and itchy costumes and marveled at the sight of them smiling and laughing it off as plates and notes were dropped. A lifetime of hard work and show times behind them, I pictured the plate spinners teaching the opera singers that it’s all in the wrist, and the opera singers giving voice to the muted acrobats.

Then the lights came on and the show was over. It was time to put my coat on and head back.