You can take the boy off the dance floor, but he'll only find another one

I’ve always had a fascination with tap dancing going back to my earliest days watching dancers glide across our family’s 12-inch television screen. But I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to become a tap dancer. I probably should make clear what I refer to as tap dancing was really nothing more than an impromptu shuffle making a noise not much different than a shelf of Thom McCann shoes falling off the rack at a K-Mart. Nevertheless, I do remember taking whatever opportunity, whenever and wherever that opportunity arose, to put my talents or lack of on display.

I think it had something to do with the casual, devil-may-care, go-where-you-wanna-go, do-what-you-wanna-do approach that seemed to guide every tap dancer I ever watched perform. I now know I was only watching a charade, a showman’s deceit being perpetrated on a very sheltered and not so streetwise kid.

Real tap dancers, good tap dancers, real good tap dancers aren’t ad-libbing it. They know exactly what they are doing—just as real good banjo players know exactly what they are doing. Every step is planned, every move measured, every tap deliberate. It may look like they’re making it up on the fly but they’re not.

They couldn’t make it up as they go and still make it look spontaneous. But try telling that to a ten-year old kid watching Sammy Davis Jr. or Gene Kelly dance across the stage of the Ed Sullivan Show or up some stairs or atop some bar on a movie set.

Not that I shouldn’t have known better. I was probably in second or third grade when mom signed my sister and me up for dancing lessons. I quickly learned that there was in fact rhyme and reason in what appeared to be rough and reckless.

With our instructor’s encouragement I attempted the intricate heel, step, heel, step   and drop, toe, drop, toe, drop, toe, drop routines until at some point I decided I didn’t like tap dancing after all.

That’s not true. What I decided was I didn’t like the structure of legitimate tap dance steps being forced upon unsuspecting and impressionable seven and eight year olds. I was still absolutely and unequivocally enthralled with the idea of haphazardly clicking, clinking, clapping, and clanking my shoes across any floor that would give me in return the magical sound of rhythm in the works.

I continued to break out into dance between the clothing racks in department stores when mom took us shopping or on street corners waiting for the bus. Adults—mostly women—loved the cute little dancing boy as he threw his heart and soul into his routine. But all good things—including bad dance routines come to an end, eventually.

As quickly as I would break into dance that is how fast I stopped breaking into dance. Maybe I grew up, maybe I simply grew wiser or maybe I just lost the moves and with them, the confidence; but for whatever reasons I stopped dancing. 

I didn’t do a tap dance throughout the remainder of elementary school, junior high, high school, or college. But while I was keeping my tap dancing talents well under control by the time I got to college there was another dancing phase sweeping the country—go-go dancing.

Go-go bars were popping up all over as young women, usually dressed in bikinis and confined to cages, danced their way into the hearts of young college students, young army GI’s and older traveling salesmen.

They didn’t really know any dance steps—probably less than me on my best day and they didn’t even pretend to. For the most part no one seemed to care. That they were wearing bikinis and moving to a beat, any beat, was all anyone asked of them.

But there was a dark side to go-go dancing and that dark side was burlesque. Woman had been stripping down to the equivalent of a bikini and sometimes a little less for as long as anyone could remember but with the advent of go-go bars, go-go cages and go-go girls no one really cared about burlesque anymore.

And it almost didn’t matter. By the 60’s, burlesque was mostly dead anyway. But as Billy Crystal pointed out in Princess Bride, there is a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.

A friend once brought me to a burlesque show in Chicopee, Massachusetts and I honestly thought I was watching the last burlesque show on earth. It had a bad emcee telling bad jokes, a bad magician doing bad card tricks, and a bad stripper doing a really bad strip tease. It even had a bad banjo player playing bad banjo but he could have been playing good banjo. It really is hard to know the difference. That was in 1969 and I pretty much put the whole experience out of mind when it was over.

But is anything ever really over?

After Vietnam, I was stationed in San Pedro, California along with my barrack mate, Cecil. There were a lot of bars in Pee-dro but we frequented only a few. One of them was the “Tiki Girls,” where we practically lived when not working until there was a shooting one day and the bar moved up the Harbor Freeway to Inglewood. Another was a bar whose name escapes me but where on one eventful night Cecil and I drank with, toyed with, and ridiculed a man claiming to be an alien spy from Alpha Centauri. I wrote my first published article for the Los Angeles Times about that encounter. To paraphrase Lyle Lovett, I always remembered that alien but I never remembered that bar.

Then there was one occasion when Cecil and I went into a bar that was advertising live entertainment. This was still the era when live entertainment would most likely be an array of go-go dancers but this bar on that night wasn’t going that route.

A stack of handbills in a rack by the door alerted Cecil and I that the entertainment was going to be burlesque or at least a tribute to burlesque. It seems that at the time there was a famous stripper by the name of Jennie Lee, who had recently bought a club in San Pedro dedicated to the preservation of burlesque. There was a movement among some of the other bars on Pacific Avenue to help Jennie Lee succeed by promoting “Save Burlesque” events.

So we went in to see what we could see. We knew from the get-go that we weren’t in Jennie Lee’s Club and the stripper wouldn’t be Jennie Lee but we didn’t know much else.

We ordered our beers and waited for the live show to begin. Apparently we were the only ones because when the dancer finally appeared it drew hardly a nod from the men in the room.

It was easy to understand why. She was hardly young—in fact she was older than any go-go dancer I had ever seen and possessed less showmanship skills than the Chicopee dancer, who I had watched several years earlier. There was no particular act, no routine, no hook and definitely no sense of timing. In many ways it resembled the tap dancing routines I had ad-libbed years ago between the dress racks in Sibley’s Department store.

Burlesque had for many years entertained men, young and old and now I was watching a woman unable to even hold the attention of a roomful of drunken fisherman. They were talking about their jobs, their cars, and their problems. It was like they didn’t even know she was there. But I knew. I knew because we shared a bond—a bond no one else in the room shared. We were both dancers and always would be.

She needed help badly, in the worst way and I had something to offer—something bad that I could provide in the worst way.

I put my drink down and meandered over to the little stage set up at the end of the bar. I took one last look at the roomful of inebriated misfits who called themselves men but didn’t have the decency to pay attention to a woman stripping right before their eyes. And then I looked at her and for an instant, just a blink-of-an-eye moment, I think our eyes met and I think she knew what was about to happen—and was all right with it.

I jumped to the stage and revived my act that had been dormant for so long. I tapped my toes and heels—in no particular order—and shuffled my feet here, there, and everywhere. My arms were flapping in the air like a crazed chicken sharing a henhouse with a bunch of drunken fisherman foxes.

When I dropped to my elbow and started tracing a circle with my feet, she stepped back and I’m pretty sure she gave me the “go for it” sign.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say it felt good—good to be dancing again, good to have an audience, good to be helping a fellow dancer. I knew it wouldn’t last for ever. Still it was over quicker than I might have expected. The bartender came over and told me I had to leave the stage and frankly, I had used up all of my moves in the thirty seconds I was up there. As they say I left it all on the floor. I didn’t hold anything back.

But I had succeeded in accomplishing my goal, which was to bring this dancer the attention she deserved. When I left that stage every eye in the room was on us and they stayed on her as she finished her act. I think she even mouthed a silent thank you as we left the bar. That’s right. Not only did I have to leave the stage but the bartender said we had to leave the bar.

Sure I got the hook but I gave the audience a once in a lifetime show and left them wanting more and that’s all any hoofer ever asks for—that and to hear the tippity-tip, tippity tip, tippity-tippity-tippity-tip of leather striking wood.