Tap: The Long Lost Love For The Dance I Never Studied

"Do you tap?"  "No."  I can feel the regret sink to the bottom of my throat every time I'm asked.  Oh sure, I've faked it--pretty well, I might add--and on a professional stage!  It's not that I didn't like tap dance as a kid or even that I wasn't exposed to it.  Quite the opposite--my mother made sure I owned, or had at least seen every single Shirley Temple movie in existence by the time I was six years old, and I complied quite happily.  To this day, some of those song and dance numbers come back to haunt me with a classic nostalgia and I find myself looking them up on YouTube for a trip down memory lane--and sometimes just to marvel at the musical genius of songs that, for whatever reason, seem to have faded into obscurity.

It's not that I wasn't exposed to any contemporary tap dancers either--the late Gregory Hines would often rehearse at my home studio when he visited L.A., and while we couldn't always see the rehearsals, my friends and I would always marvel at the machine-gun percussion that would emanate from behind closed doors as we put on our pointe shoes.

I guess the simple answer is, as a child, I was never really one to do something halfway.  I knew that I wouldn't enjoy something unless I devoted proper time to practicing and perfecting it.  I had already bestowed this priority on my ballet studies and knew that if I wanted to excel at my chosen dance style, I didn't have the time to properly learn tap.

Lately, I've been feeling the urge to try to make room for finally learning the dance I ignored earlier in my life.    I feel it would only make sense as a Musical Theater artist and Swing dancer to finally give this dance the respect it deserves.  Who knows?--maybe Tap and I will "go together" as well as George Murphy and Shirley Temple in this clip from Little Miss Broadway...

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