Authors: Kristi Lynn Davis
The tiny tap class, irresistible in their yellow-and-black striped bee attire, performed “Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee.” They flapped their wings, buzzed, did a few heel steps and maybe even a shuffle or two. A couple of bees, in complete control, led the number like little troopers and shouted the lyrics loudly enough to make up for all the petrified insects. Their parents loved them no matter what they did or didn’t do. The kids could have stood on stage in their darling costumes and simply farted, which was about the only thing some kids actually did, and the parents would have been elated.
Josie and her children did a family number in the show à la the Osmonds or the Jackson Five, but it took some coaxing to get all four kids on stage. The music started, and they were still waiting for the two-year-old to join the bunch. Josie rolled her eyes and shouted, “Elliot, get over here!” Someone finally pushed him on stage. The number was a real crowd pleaser.
The recital ended with Josie playing the accordion and half singing, half speaking her traditional closing song: “This is the end of our show. That’s all the dancing tonight. This is the end of our show. It’s been a delight.” The production was quite amateur, but I didn’t know any better and was having a ball being on stage with my friends. After the performance, I was swarmed by people complimenting me on my trick in the Tarantella. My adoring parents brought bouquets of flowers, and I felt like an absolute star.
*******
Dancing with Josie got me off to a great start, but two musicals during that first year really rocked my world and sent me flying into theatrical heaven. The first was a high school production of
Godspell
. The inspiring songs and dances captivated me. I’d never seen or felt anything like them. The second was the movie
Jesus Christ Superstar.
I was haunted by the music and overwhelmed by the emotions stirring within me. The songs seemed to touch the depths of my soul. Perhaps entertainment was worth more than just a laugh with my friends.
Superstar
so moved me that, at the ripe old age of nine, I mounted a full-scale production of the musical. I easily recruited the neighborhood girls to be cast members, but the boys were more of a challenge. I tried to coerce a few of my friends’ little brothers by bribing them with cookies, which always worked when we needed a groom to play “Wedding,” but even the party I promised after the performance wasn’t incentive enough to get any boys to dance with us. The result was an all-girl cast for a show comprised of mostly men (Jesus and his Twelve Disciples, King Herod, Pontius Pilate, Judas). I really wanted to play Jesus but felt guilty giving myself the lead role, so I cast Frieda Snodgrass, who most looked the part and was willing to memorize all the songs and fake die on the cross at the end. Only Lynnette Bulman, who played Mary Magdalene, got to play a woman. The parents brought their own chairs and sat on our lawn to watch the production held on my front porch. I’m sure the adults were chuckling at us, but I took the show seriously. The cast party we threw at the end was almost as much fun as the show itself.
Entertaining the neighbors was a great start, but I longed for bigger opportunities so I formed the “Katherine Street Supremes” and took our show on the road. We made it as far as a talent show at a popular campground about an hour away. Sporting our old recital costumes, loads of bright pink blush, and powder-blue eye shadow, we boogied to Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancin’.” Afterwards, we met some other contestants in the ladies’ room, and they fawned over us and told us how great we were. My fire was fueled. I was getting a rush from all the attention and adulation. I had been bitten by the showbiz bug and hungered for more.
*******
By the time I was ten, Josie had taught me all she knew, and I yearned to learn more difficult moves. So I moved out of the basement and up a few steps to a real dance studio situated above ground and about five miles from my house. It was here where I met Hattie Dallas of Hattie Dallas’s School of Dance.
You know those little local dance schools like “Miss Lulu’s Dance Academy” or “Twinkle Toes Conservatory of Dance and Tumbling” in the middle of a strip mall between a pizza place and a dry cleaners? Those are what we in the “Biz” refer to as “Dolly Dinkle” studios. My image of the fictitious Dolly has always been modeled after Hattie Dallas: She is a dance mistress who has looked fifty for the last thirty years and has a fabulous body, perpetual tan, penciled eyebrows, and thick, Egyptian-like black eyeliner. She bats her false eyelashes and smiles too widely. Like Josie, she plays the accordion.
Hattie had a mystique about her that fed my childhood imagination. I was certain she hadn’t revealed all the secrets of her past. Was she once a famous gypsy dancer traveling the world and performing in exotic places? Did some romantic liaison ultimately lead her to the Midwestern suburbs and the demise of her dance career? I sensed that she’d lived a life of adventure, and I wanted to live it, too. I could only fantasize about what breathtaking performances she’d given as I was too much in awe to ask for her resume. She was glamour personified. On the inside cover of the recital program book, Hattie was always pictured engulfed in a luxurious fur coat or swathed in a feather boa. To me, she was as alluring as any movie star.
The happenings at Hattie’s were equally captivating. It would be perfectly normal, for instance, to find a girl in a red, white, and blue sequined leotard performing back walkovers in pointe shoes while twirling a baton affixed with lit sparklers. In addition to the traditional forms of dance—tap, jazz, ballet, and pointe (or “toe,” as Hattie would say)—such classes as tumbling, cheerleading, Hawaiian, Tahitian, baton twirling, and clogging were also offered. Hattie’s was a one-stop shop for entertainment, and I was enthralled by it all.
Referring to a show (or performer) as being “Dolly Dinkle” generally means the show (or performer) is amateur in nature and borderline corny. “She’s so Dolly Dinkle!” for example, would probably be stated with an air of snotty superiority and eye rolling by a more refined professional. Technically, the Dallas productions (and performers) were amateur, but they were packed with pizzazz and had great audience appeal. Hattie loved to use all kinds of tricks in her recitals. If you could do running back walkovers, aerials (no-handed cartwheels), handsprings, or standing back tucks (somersaults in the air), if you could walk on your hands, wrap your legs around your neck like a pretzel, do the Russian splits suspended in the air by two burly guys, or perform any other form of bodily contortion, she would use it in the show every year without fail. The Dallas gals were known to utilize strobe lights, glow-in-the-dark costumes, and Tahitian dancers juggling flaming coconut shells. Anything went if it brought the house down.
Hattie Dallas’s School of Dance had aspirations well beyond your quintessential Dolly Dinkle school, and the whole Dallas family was involved in this pursuit. Hattie had a beautiful, twenty-year-old daughter, Skye, who shared the teaching responsibilities with her mother and was my main teacher. She had lovely long brown hair and wore big diamond studs in her ears. Her voice was deep and permanently hoarse from shouting over the music all those years, but it sounded Marilyn Monroe-sexy on her. She and Hattie vacationed in Florida every Christmas, which helped maintain their gorgeous golden skin color (a highly coveted look back then). Skye was careful to get a perfectly even tan (including the hard-to-reach-spots like under her arms, which she tanned by lying on her back with her arms over her head), and her sun-kissed appearance made her all the more enchanting. Hattie also had a lanky teenage son who taught gymnastics classes but favored magic and was pictured in the recital program book in his goofy magician’s outfit. Even Hattie’s mother, who was no spring chicken, played her part by running the busy office and answering scores of inquiries.
In addition to the Dallas family, Hattie employed a small group of girls fresh out of high school to teach the classes she and Skye eschewed. These second tier teachers were young and green, but they all had tiaras and sashes and titles like “Teen Miss Southeast Main Street Deli.” To me they were extremely beautiful and talented. One had a strong southern accent and was always popping her gum, a skill I desperately but unsuccessfully tried to master in order to be like her.
The school itself was nothing fancy but, oh, the tales it had to tell and the dreams it harbored within its walls! You entered the front door into a lobby, which led to one large studio and two small studios separated by a pull-out accordion partition. The lobby was festooned with trophies and newspaper clippings of Dallas students winning awards, evidence of the competitive atmosphere. “Teen Miss Tap Dancing Terror” was succeeded by “Tiny Miss Over-the-Top” who was shoved aside by “Little Miss Syrupy Sweet” all of whom lugged back trophies (some larger than they were) and gleefully displayed them at the studio for all to see. My first time entering this place, I could only imagine how glorious it must feel to have your picture on the wall of fame.
Being cute, tall, and naturally thin with long legs, I looked the part of a dancer, and the Dallas duo saw potential. (It didn’t hurt that I was disciplined, polite, and well-behaved to boot.) They shoved me into ballet quicker than you can say “plie,” and I started to get serious about dancing. I dove head first into rigid Cecchetti ballet training, taking two levels simultaneously. I had some catching up to do if I wanted to join the other good dancers my age who had started classes when they were barely out of diapers.
In order to move from one level to the next, I had to pass an exam in which I executed specific ballet exercises for a panel of somber ballet experts. The exams were achingly tense and deafeningly quiet. It was a stressful and solemn setting, not for the weak at heart. I had to be perfectly dressed in the required leotard, pink tights, and pink ballet slippers, my hair in a neat bun. I had to study my French terminology and know the moves on my syllabus down to the last minute detail including head and finger placement. The process was rigorous, torturous, and perfect practice for my professional life to come. I couldn’t have strayed any farther from the happy-go-lucky atmosphere at Josie’s Bargain Basement.
The training was undeniably tough, but something incredible happened when things finally came together, and I was properly aligned with every body part in the right place at the right time. I could balance, turn, leap, glide, jump, and soar through the air. The transformation was magical: “And unto this day, in the city of Deerfield, a dancer was born…”
By the time I was eleven, my identity as a dancer was solid, and although I continued taking jazz and tap classes, which were always a lot more lighthearted and fun than the ballet, I really considered myself a ballerina. I was ecstatic when Skye allowed me to start taking pointe, but the day I was fitted for toe shoes marked the beginning of the end of ever hoping to have presentable feet. The satiny pink slippers had ribbons that laced around my ankles and a wooden box into which I stuffed my lamb’s wool-wrapped toes. The box allowed me to stand on the very tips of my tootsies. Bubble wrap would have been a lot more helpful than that meager lamb’s wool. I held back the tears in class as my feet would bleed and my toenails would fall off from being bruised so badly. Soon all my toes were as callused and bent out of shape as a crusty old lady’s. Oh, the agony of the feet! It’s a wonder that Child Safety Services doesn’t deem dancing on pointe child abuse and arrest all the ballet teachers of the world. In spite of the excessive pain, I was dancing on pointe just like the beautiful, diminutive ballerina who twirled on tiptoe when I opened the lid of my musical jewelry box.
Soon I was dancing with the favorites, the “cool” girls, and they fascinated me. They were excellent dancers and gymnasts, and some even did solos in the show. They took every class offered including Hawaiian and Tahitian dance, which made them even cooler. They always sported the latest, trendiest, prettiest leotards and a matching ribbon or flower in their hair. They were generally good students, cheerleaders, piano players, athletes. They did it all. They would rush into the studio, McDonald’s bags in hand, and stuff french fries into their Big Macs before cramming the whole concoctions into their mouths and heading off to class. The cool girls knew survival tricks I didn’t know, like how to pee without taking off your dance clothes: pull leotard crotch over to the side, yank down the top of your tights, and carefully go. They were so popular, self-confident, and downright amazing, I was too shy to even try to infiltrate their clique of coolness.
*******
My life revolved around the almost daily classes, but the recital fed my soul and sent my spirit skyrocketing. I could hardly wait for spring to roll around, for the end of winter signaled the beginning of performance preparations, the most thrilling of which was the distribution of costumes. I had high hopes for my jazz outfit, as my class was dancing to a hit song, “Pinball Wizard,” performed by one of the greatest rock bands of all time: The Who. I held my breath as Skye tore open the precious parcel holding the much-anticipated wardrobe. My balloon deflated as she handed me a plastic bag containing a sleeveless turquoise-blue leotard, a shiny silver waistband, and matching arm and leg bands embellished in metallic fringe. That was it? A glorified leotard with tinfoil? I had created better costumes using Mom’s sewing scraps and a stapler.
But it got worse. There at the bottom of the bag was the headpiece. It was a turquoise-blue, ski-mask-style hat with a silver foil fountain spewing out of the top like a whale spouting water. When I slipped it on, my entire head was covered, like a nun with a bad habit. I think we were supposed to resemble pinballs bouncing about, but I felt more like a pinhead.