Once upon a time, I was a dancer. I started dancing when I was 4, (thanks to my mom and Mrs. Moak's tap class). I moved onto ballet until I was about 13, then took a long break, (although I did have marching band and flag corps, which was a form of choreography and movement), until my mid 20's. Even though I wasn't taking class, I was still dancing. My friend Lorenzo used to take me to Denim and Diamonds to get his country music fix and he would teach me things like the Texas Reel, and the two-step. I learned to partner dance and follow. My friends and I would have crazy dance parties in our large and small NY apartments. I never let go of my love for it, I just didn't cultivate it very much for a while.
One grey day, my room-mate Maria pulled me off of the couch after I had recently broken up with someone and said "we're going to take a free swing class tonight - I'm sick of you moping around and being depressed". Well, that class led to another and another and pretty soon I had rediscovered that passion that once led me to dance around the living room, the front yard, the empty stage.
Some people listen to music and see colors. Some see notes. I have always seen dance. Play me any song and my brain will switch into dance mode. I can't sing, but I have always understood timing and nuance in movement. This is so extreme that I often listen to talk radio when I am working because, if I listen to music, I get way too distracted by what happens in my mind.
That first swing class was at the Sandra Cameron Dance Center. As I took more and more classes, my teachers encouraging me along the way, (Thanks Bill for the day that you pulled me aside at the 92nd Street Y and told me that I was becoming a lovely dancer - little did you know that that was all I needed to keep going forward) I became lost once again in the world that I had known as a child. Basic swing led me to something called lindy hop, really the first style of swing and the one that was born uptown in NY City in the ballrooms of Harlem in the late 20's and 1930's. Classes were followed by performance groups followed by teacher training followed by competitions.
My friend Barry used to call me #8, really the only nickname I have ever liked, because one year I placed 8th at the American Lindy Hop Championships, being judged as an individual rather than as part of a partnership. 8th out of dozens of advanced female dancers who had made the long journey to compete at the ALHC - in reality, I finished 7th, but my 8th place ranking was what put me into the finals that year and I never bothered to contradict Barry since he took such pleasure in greeting me with a loud cry of "number 8!!!!" every time he saw me.
This dance journey also brought me into contact with a man named Frankie Manning. I don't have the time to run through his bio, but suffice to say that he was the lindy hop and the lindy hop was him. He had made this dance up with his friends when he was young and dancing at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, (he was about 82 when I first met him). He took his talent all over the world, including Hollywood, and, in an era when a black man could not sit down in the same public room with a white man, he was performing for the queen of england and touring with Billy Holiday. Just google him, and you can see hundreds of videos and sites devoted to him. I had no idea who he was, really, when I was able to take class with him my very first year of swing dancing, but I learned very quickly. Taking his Monday night class was a tradition which continued until I realized that Monday nights were the only nights I had off from teaching at Sandra Cameron. By that time, I had become a member of his performance group, The Big Apple Lindy Hoppers. I only danced with this group for about 3 years, (and the circumstances of me leaving are one of those stories that I will tell my daughter when she decides to go for boys who talk a great game but can't step up to the plate and do right by the person they are involved with) but I spent Friday nights after work rehearsing and learning Frankie's technique and choreography and the memories and stories I have from those rehearsals are priceless.
Frankie didn't come to every rehearsal, but he was there often enough. He was a positive teacher, but he never kidded you about your skills. If you did something well, he told you, if you didn't, he would try not to say bad things, but you would know. And because I respected him so much, it would just make me try harder. I was a good performer, but never very good at the air steps. I was just never very bouncy. I would always ask things like "Frankie, how was my 'around the back' that time" and he would pause, and say" well...... it was just ok". I knew it was just ok, but I wanted it to be better if only to make him happy.
When I left that group, I still had contact with him through the dance studio, dance camps and other events which went on in the swing dance scene. Our paths crossed quite often and I still looked to his approval after he would watch me perform an especially difficult routine. I still never got more than an "it was ok" regarding my air steps, but once he smiled when he said it, so that meant it was a bit better than the last time and it made my night (even though my wallet was stolen from the Roseland dressing room that same night, but that's another story altogether!).
One year, I was able to get Frankie to work with me on a dance program I was doing with LaGuardia Performing Arts High School (this was the "Fame" high school in NYC that focused solely on the performing arts). I brought him in to teach the ballet students how to lindy hop. I wish I could tell this story and do it justice, but suffice to say, it was an amazing winter's day. He had a whole studio of uptight ballet dancers swinging out and he was laughing and having a great time of it. Celeste Holm, one of the board members of the group that I worked with, even came to visit so that she could meet Frankie, (if you don't know her, she was the girl who couldn't say no in the movie version of Oklahoma). At the end of the day, Frankie thanked me, and then bundled up in his down coat, put on the glasses he needed to help him see when he was driving, and walked out to his huge old bomb of a car that was parked along 10th avenue. Because, for all of his dance fame and recognition, he was still just a humble guy who lived in Queens, just another extraordinary New Yorker going about his daily business.
He always reciprocated when you sent him a Christmas card and he was always happy to see a friend. In a dance community where he met thousands of people a year, and where dancers were often defined by who they partnered or dated or what clique they hung with, Frankie always knew who I was and what was going on in my life. Even my friend Daniel, whom most people can't forget because of his distinctive personality and dress, said to me: Frankie only knows me because he knows I'm friends with you - he doesn't remember who I am until I tell him that I know you!
I have so many stories and I really should write them down now. You see, Frankie lived a great life, but, like all of us, he was not an immortal. He passed away 2 days ago at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. Complications from his meds led to pneumonia and then finally into a coma from which he never woke up. He was surrounded by his family and old friends from the dance community. Daniel, who is a doctor at Mt Sinai, told me that the ICU resident had never seen so many people visit someone there, had never seen the kind of grief that he saw when Frankie passed. Frankie was like that. He was such a good soul. I sat at my computer 10,000 miles away and cried every time I got an update because even though my life has taken me so far away from the dancing, I still couldn't imagine the world without Frankie in it. Then he passed, and I spent a quiet day watching old videos of him, listening to his laughter one more time.
He would have celebrated his 95th birthday this month, (he was born May 26, 1914), and some of my swing friends were trying to get me back to NYC for the week long celebration that will be held in his honor at the end of May, (now as a memorial to the amazing life he led).
I had to turn them down. I'll be too busy holding and nursing my first child, a girl, who I'm expecting a few days before the party for him starts. In my last card to him, I told him that I was expecting a baby, and that I was sure it'll be a dancer because it was already "jumpin' like mad" on the ultrasound!
I think that would be the best tribute to him, to teach my daughter how to swing out the way he taught me, to bring another dancer into the world and to make sure that she knows who Frankie was and the joy he brought to anyone who knew him.
That same night at Roseland when I did that better than ok round the back, the same night my wallet was stolen, I missed out on Frankie's actual birthday dance. The tradition was that he would dance with one woman/ follower for every year of his life to Count Basie's "Shiny Stockings". I went up to him right afterwards and said to him "I missed dancing with you!" and he grabbed me just as the band was starting up "Jumpin' at the Woodside", which is a good deal faster than Shiny Stockings. He swung me out for 4 eights and then grabbed another follow, and then another - he wasn't even tired! He had just celebrated something close to his 90th birthday, danced with 90 women and there he was dancing to a song that most younger people would sit out because it was too fast.
He was an amazing man, and there is truly an empty spot on the dance floor now that he is gone.
