Shirley Temple, Bojangles & Me

This story begins in my childhood. Now, as most of you know from reading my words, I’d always wanted to be a radio-broadcaster, followed by a baseball player, a fireman, with a lingering interest in the arts.

As it turned out, I did end up becoming a print journalist & a for a number of years & a radio announcer briefly, but then I burned out with those career choices and decided to try other fields, whether they have proved successful or not, I’m not totally sure, even with the current job i hold.

While growing up in suburban Chicago, Saturday afternoons was always a great time to sit back, relax & enjoy what was on WGN television. I was an avid fan of old films, particularly though, the old Shirley Temple movies, that featured both her & Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. There was always a basic plot to the film, most times kind of silly, but then came the scenes in which young Shirley & Bojangles would be a-hoofling & a-dancing atop staircases & across wooden floors. I knew right away that I wanted to learn how to do that.

Tap-dance. It was the single most thing I really wanted to learn, but when you’re a kid, you have so many aspirations, so many dreams, so many goals that well, they get put off until you realize one day while you’re combing over all of your old ideas, that, well, bingo! You find that long-lost rusted needle in the haystack from 35 years ago, still shining for you to take to take a hold of & utilize to the best of your ability.

It was easy to become a tap-dancer, so I thought. I did start out as the minimalist finger-popping, hand-stomping counter table top dancer, tapping out rhythms with my index, middle and ring fingers on both hands, with the thumb & pinky fingers eventually joining in for the bigger dance routines. Some folks were amused at first, but then it was dubbed as noise & I had to find other places to bang out my rhythms, mostly on floors or desks or wooden benches at school, college & my apartments.

Sometimes I added hand-clapping and singing to my minimalist dancing routines, to give it a little flavor, an extra spit of spice in the numbers. Then, about 10 years ago or longer, I was talking to my mom about taking tap & she wanted to take it with me. Like me, she had always wanted to learn to dance that way, but for some reason or another decided not to.

Then about a year ago, as I was changing music styles, I went from learning vocals to throat-singing, the idea to tap-dance started to come around again. I was traveling to a sound poetry festival in Portland, Oregon, as a participant. The year before I had been a cell-phone participant, but this time, I was going full steam ahead, as I did a lot of text-based sound-enunciated related poetry & pieces.

On the following day, Sunday afternoon, I toured the Columbian river & Gorge with the festival’s host & organizer mARK oWENS, his wife Maria & David Braden, a computer-based performer. When driving back to the Portland airport to drop David off, I mentioned to both mARK & David that I had desired to become the world’s first tap-dancing throat-singer, they both laughed out loud & one of them remarked that I was “crazy.”

Well, here it is, eight months later & my craziness is about to be fulfilled. And I couldn’t be any happier, excited & thrilled about the prospect.