It has been borne in on me lately that my life, most of it, anyway, is history. How that happened I don’t know, since I lived it in the usual way. But there it is.
To plunge right in, I am one year younger than Queen Elizabeth, and one year older than Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple is the one who has brought me most grief. Not personally. She was very cute and danced admirably. I didn’t want to be her. I didn’t want corkscrew curls. I did at one point nag my way to a dress at Stotsky’s Kiddie Togs which was a replica of the one she wore in The Little Colonel. (It had a tag that said so.) But it was the dress, which had some kind of panier arrangement, as in olden days, I aspired to, not Shirley. This was what I told myself.
Unfortunately, however, like most kids my age, every once in a while, I would find myself tap dancing. What made it extremely unfortunate on that particular summer’s day was that I was tap dancing on the sidewalk outside of our decrepit apartment building in Hell’s Kitchen and that just then a young man came along and watched me. Whether there were other children outside also tap dancing, or maybe merely playing potsy, I don’t remember. But he was watching me. "You have talent, little girl," he said after a while. I believed him. He also said he wanted to speak to my parents about enrolling me in his dance studio. Which made perfect sense except later to my big brother Yossie when I told him about it. Yossie said it was a scam, that the guy was a crook, that he was just trying to put one over on us, pick up a little business wherever he could. Since it was the middle of the Depression I might have believed him. But the Depression was just a big word that older people sighed over. And this was my brother Yossie trying to lord it over me, minimize my talents, as usual. He even said, trying to be reasonable, which he never was, that our father knew real bigwigs in show business, and that in time, if I were serious, Papa with his connections could...
My father didn’t listen to Yossie, either, for many reasons connected with Yossie’s own history, and because I was crying. The rest is a blur. Some days later I found myself in a big room with lots of other little girls, facing a huge wall mirror and saying doggedly, over and over again, "One two three four five, one two three four five..." Saying it, but evidently not doing it, at least not the way the other little girls were, all tapping away blithely. And certainly not the way the instructor up front was demonstrating it. This was decidedly not the same man who had stopped me on the street to tell me I had talent. That one had vanished. A point made only too clear when this one marched up to me, grim faced, for the fifth or sixth time.
It’s possible that I went for one more lesson just for the honor of the thing. "One two three four five, one two three four five..."
In the end, maybe for the first time in the history of the dance studio, they gave my father his deposit back. Ten dollars. In the middle of the Depression.
