Tom Strait AKA The Dancing Machine

Still going through old boxes of stuff.

I found one centered on my amateur acting career while going through the boxes in Fibber McGee's closet*.

And how could I not treasure this award for achievement in dance the most?

Until the memories came back that it was a good-natured joke.

I played Lazar Wolf, the older butcher who wants to marry one of Teyve's daughters. He leads a dance to the song L'Chaim (To Life!), a lot of fancy Russian dancing (well, fancy to me). I struggled. It was not pretty. We had to rehearse a lot just to get to something passable. And I was the chief culprit who was not getting it.

Dance has always been an interesting challenge to me. There is some kind of wiring delay in my head that causes all my movements to come out about two seconds later than they should. That is if I get the movement right at all.

The first school dances that I went to, in Junior High, proved to be a major attraction, and not in a good way. Other students would stop and watch my gyrations. I found myself surrounded by a rapt audience as if I were John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. But not in a good way. More like a jaw-dropping stare at the geek way. I had a few girls want to dance with me, girls who otherwise would not want to go near me, just to see how lunatic I would dance.

Throughout my acting experience, I always had difficulty with the dance element. I've been sidelined in several dances, which probably limited my usefulness in musicals. I could sing pretty good, but most of the good singing parts also required dancing. Most of the parts open to me were comic relief, and the singing I had to do was more bass/baritone, when I am a first tenor.

I plan to do community theater again, but I am picking my spots carefully. With my periodic arthritis (centered in my knees and feet), it makes it difficult to do if there is a flareup. So, this dancing machine may be retired from that element of theatre.

I've said this before, but I'll repeat here my theatre motto - 

I can act with the best of them. I can sing with the rest of them. I can dance if everyone closes their eyes and pretends.

I can still dance at home alone. Well, with the pets. But they're ok. They don't judge me.

*Fibber McGee's closet was from a well-known radio program, Fibber McGee and Molly.  Every time the closet was opened you would hear sounds of a deluge of things falling out of it.