Commuters' Choreography

With all this energy and all these people, the question is why there are not more collisions. I'm not talking about people and automobiles, but about people and people. By what strange grace do pedestrians keep from running into each other?

I went to Grand Central Station to try and learn the answer. I observed commuters rushing to their trains, entering from 42nd Street or from the Met Life building, heading in scores of directions at once, never colliding. 

There's an almost balletic precision to the movements, many narrow misses, but somehow people get where they're going without rehearsing any of the bobs and weaves required to do it.

It's worthy of Balanchine: the commuters' choreography.

Seven Degrees

If there are seven degrees of separation, then are there not seven degrees of isolation? I'm thinking about the world as we know it: working remotely, separated from friends, too cold for outside get-togethers ... and now further set apart by rain, snow, sleet and an anticipated ice storm.

I suppose it's easier in one sense. We now have multiple reasons for staying at home. But that doesn't warm the heart when the heart is accustomed to the stimulation and richness of a life fully lived.

What is called for, I suppose, is seven degrees of patience: hoping, praying, reading, writing, baking, cleaning — and of course, dancing. You can't forget about that last one. It's the most important of all. 

Imagining 2021

The new year arrived wearing top hat and tails. It landed with a swoop and a glide and an elegant dip. It was Fred Astaire tap-dancing on the ceiling, Gene Kelley singing in the rain and Judy Garland dreaming of somewhere over the rainbow. 

Plans were canceled, isolation strictly enforced, but the American musical was not shut down, or at least not the American musical as imagined by Metro Goldwyn Mayer in the 1974 classic "That's Entertainment." Hosted by a slew of stars (Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minelli and Jimmy Stewart), there were clips of everyone from Esther Williams to the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. 

It was a surprisingly apt way to see out an old year and bring in a new one. No, it wasn't realistic. The world depicted was mostly on a sound stage or a backlot. But it was vivid proof of human imagination.  And imagination is looking pretty good these days.

On Top of Tap

For months I've felt lost at tap class. The steps have been complicated and I've been slow to learn them. "The thing is," I've admitted to my teacher, Candy, "I tend to think of a foot as a foot — not a toe, ball and heel."

"Oh, that's not good for tap," Candy said.

For some reason though, I was on last night. I did back-ups and push-backs and even mastered a bit of the not-so-aptly named Happy Warmup.

I can explain my sudden improvement. This was the last class for several weeks. Our annual break is coming up. My feet obviously knew this. They were putting on a show, the final volley of fireworks, throwing it all up in the air before taking a well-earned rest.

Dancing Bones

Advanced beginners' tap is, at least for me, more about the advanced than the beginners. There's a lot of fancy footwork, quickly executed. Balance is required. The kind of balance you have in your 20s or 30s but not — ahem — later in life.

Relax your toes, teacher Candy said last night. You need to relax your toes inside your shoes and then you'll be able to move more smoothly. She broke one complicated step down into its components, told us the movement was like a ribbon unfurling.

There were other suggestions —jump down not up, take smaller steps. But the one said most often was "keep smiling." That wasn't hard. The woman next to me was wearing dance tights with skeleton bones. Suddenly I saw a parade of dancing, prancing skeletons, out for a night on the town.

Happy Dance Day

"Up the steep and very narrow stairway. To the voice like a metronome. Up the steep and very narrow stairway. It wasn't paradise, it wasn't paradise, it wasn't paradise, but it was home."

                                         "At the Ballet" from "A Chorus Line"

I missed International Dance Day (April 29) and National Tap Dance Day (May 25), so ... happy National Dance Day!

Ballet Nova is offering free classes and there's a big event at the Kennedy Center. But I'll stay home, practice my buffaloes and think about the dance classes I've taken through the years: the very first when I was five, then adult beginning ballet at 18, folk dance and modern dance in college, and a series of classes as a young adult.

At Joy of Motion in Chicago the teacher actually advanced us to pointe work. For a few precious, foot-cramped weeks I felt like a real ballerina. Later, in New York City, I took ballet uptown and midtown — once even in a studio above Carnegie Hall. I was earnest, tight, worried about my turn out.

Now ... it's all for fun. Tap is loose and joyful. It's difficult to take myself seriously doing it. It's a happy dance for happy National Dance Day.

Shifting My Weight

"Tap is easy," Candy says. "But shifting your weight, that's hard." This is not the first bit of life wisdom I've learned from my tap teacher. But it's the most recent.

"It's like gymnastics," she continues. "Gymnastics is easy. Landing is hard."

Well, I don't know about that. But I do know that hopping on my left foot, flapping with my right (or as my tap buddy Denise would say, "falapping," since we give it two beats), landing on the ball of that foot before transferring weight to my left ball, heel and right ball, heel — yes, that is difficult.

In fact, balance is the most challenging part of tap class, apart from the traffic I must drive through to get there. And what makes balance tricky is letting go. To transfer weight from one foot to the other, one must, for a single terrifying moment, not have weight anywhere. One must leap into the void.

It's not unlike a trapeze artist or a mid-life career changer. Yes, there is practice, preparation, mastery. But there is also the hand off, the letting go.

I'm thinking there's a point where shifting my weight will cease to frustrate and begin to exhilarate. I'm still waiting for that to happen.

(A tap class in Iowa, 1942, courtesy Wikipedia)

End of the Beginning

We practiced brush back down, shuffle ball change, time steps and breaks (single, double and triple). I continue to marvel at the many ways a foot can touch the floor.

But last night's dance class was different. It was my last basic beginning tap. After a two-week break I'll move up to ... drum roll, please ... advanced beginning tap!

Which makes me think of Winston Churchill: "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." 

I looked it up. This from the Churchill Society: "After a series of defeats from Dunkirk to Singapore, Churchill could finally tell the House of Commons that 'we have a new experience. We have victory — a remarkable and definite victory." It was the Battle of Egypt.

Less than two weeks since the D Day anniversary and I'm comparing my tap dance class to the Allied victory in Europe. What can I say? It's early; that's all.

The Company

We are all shapes and sizes. All ages, too. Some of us are in high school. A couple of us don't even have kids in high school anymore.

But for one hour every Wednesday, we are one. Slapping, flapping, bouncing, turning. We are the beginning tappers at Ballet Nova.

It dawned on me tonight, driving home from class, that we are a company. OK, we're not Alvin Ailey or the New York City Ballet. Fame and fortune have so far eluded us. But we are a group, a troupe. We "work together to perform dances as a spectacle or entertainment."

The spectacle is what we're making of ourselves and the entertainment is how much we laugh when we can't execute a perfect buffalo. We look nothing like this picture, but we have fun just the same.

Yeah, I'd say we're a company. Earnest, ragtag, trying hard. But a company just the same.



(Photo from "A Chorus Line" Timeout.com)

Tap Happy

Years ago, when I lived in Manhattan, I drug some friends to 34th Street, where a record number of tappers were dancing along the pot-holed streets in front of Macy's. I remember wanting to join in.

It's taken several decades, but yesterday my feet were two among 80 others with metal-plated shoes flapping, slapping, digging, brushing, scuffing, shuffling — tapping away. The sound alone altered reality.

Add to that the hopping and twirling, the sheer exhilaration of moving the body through choreographed steps in unison — and fortissimo — and, well, it's impossible not to be happy when tapping.

It's been almost six months since I started taking dance lessons. Life hasn't been especially easy since then. But tapping has been.

(Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and the late Shirley Temple in the famous stairway tap-dancing scene from "The Little Colonel." Photo: Cinewiki.)

Let's Dance!

Sometimes the empty nest is so quiet it drives you out of the house and into ... the dance studio. Tap dance, in this case. Maybe (in retrospect) because it is so loud. But mostly, I think, because it is so much fun.

"Smile," the instructor says. "Don't forget to smile."

And so I do, even though I feel ridiculous wearing a little straw hat, attempting shuffle ball change and a complicated routine that others seem to be picking up much more quickly. Oh, and without tap shoes. (I'm waiting on those until I'm sure I want to stay with this.)

But it's hard to feel ridiculous for long in a tap-dance studio. After all, everyone else is wearing a little straw hat.

So I loosened my shoulders and let the music flow through me.

That's when the awkwardness went away and the dancing began.

(Photo: Tapdance.org.)

Fort Lee Ballroom

The dance is over but the dance floor remains. Carpet rolled up in the garage, floor clean and swept, new stereo receiver waiting for a willing iPod and the playlists I fiddled with for weeks.

Now when it rains and the trampoline is water-logged, this is where I'm hanging out. I have to be alone, of course, or at least with others involved enough in other projects that they won't critique my style, which is eclectic to say the least. And at some point we may have to put at least one of the cars in the garage and move the table out.

But for now ... we have a ballroom!

Saturday Night Fever

On Saturday night we rolled up the carpet, cranked up the stereo and lured some aging boomers (and even younger folk) out on the dance floor.

Blaring from the new sound system were the Supremes, the Beatles and disco classics like "I Will Survive." At one point there were probably 20 people jumping and jiving.

The ersatz dance floor is so nice I'm letting it stay a while, meaning that the couch and wing chairs are  crammed into half of the living room with extra stuff piled in the garage. The open floor is  begging for an encore of "YMCA."

Saturday Night Fever? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe this should happen every night of the week.

It occurred to me Saturday (as it has often recently), that people would be much happier if only they could spend part of every day dancing.


 (Photo: Theatrical Release Poster from Wikipedia.)

Boogie Wonderland

Never underestimate the power of soundtrack. The tunes in the ear set the pace, set the mood and sometimes make the day.

Take today, for instance, a gray Tuesday. Ho-hum. But over the weekend I watched a French movie, "The Intouchables," which featured some of my favorite old Earth Wind and Fire songs. I already had most of them, but after Saturday night I also have "Boogie Wonderland" on my iPod. So that's what I listened to on the short walk from Judiciary Square to New Jersey Avenue.

Impossible to walk to this song. You bop. You bounce. And you try, very hard, not to dance.

But don't take my word for it. Listen (and watch) for yourself.

(See what I mean. Even the trees are dancing.)

Yankee Doodle Dandy

It's July 9. The firecrackers aren't snapping and the flags aren't flapping. What remains for me is the memory of James Cagney as George M. Cohan in "Yankee Doodle Dandy." I can't stop humming "It's a Grand Old Flag," "Over There" or "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." And I can't forget the sight of that powerful little man going into one of his tap-dancing riffs. He is the essence of jaunty, of sticking out one's chin and plunging into life. Was our country ever that innocent and optimistic? I replay the final scene of that movie, Cagney dancing down the steps of the White House after telling his life story to President Roosevelt, and I think yes, maybe it was.