Did any of you take dance class as a kid? Maybe your children are hip-hopping, pirouetting, or shuffling off to Buffalo at their local dance studios. For years my daughter said, “I hate dance.” She didn’t want to be anything like her discoing Ma. “You’re a terrible dancer, Mom.” she’d state with an eye-roll, as I attempted to Roger Rabbit to T-Pain’s “Apple Bottom Jeans.” “People used to pay me to dance!” I’d retort. “For twelve years, I made a living dancing! I was a professional!” More eye-rolling. “Whatever, Mom.” About eight years ago, she decided to take baton class and came home thoroughly disgusted. “You didn’t tell me there were going to be dance moves in baton!” A couple years later (around age 11)…”Hey, Mom. I really want to take dance class. I’m thinking lyrical. Maybe ballet and jazz, too. Can you sign me up?” She pranced, twirled, kicked and wiggled more than she stood still. And now? She’s that gorgeous girl leaping in the picture above. “So you hate dance, huh? Whatever, girl. Whatever.”
Enjoy this excerpt from
by Kristi Lynn Davis
By the time I was ten, Josie had taught me all she knew, and I yearned to learn more difficult moves. So I moved out of the basement and up a few steps to a real dance studio above ground and situated about five miles from my house. It was here where I met Hattie Dallas of Hattie Dallas’s School of Dance.
You know those little local dance schools like “Miss Lulu’s Dance Academy” or “Twinkle Toes Conservatory of Dance and Tumbling” in the middle of a strip mall between a pizza place and a dry cleaners? Those are what we in the “Biz” refer to as “Dolly Dinkle” studios. My image of the fictitious Dolly has always been modeled after Hattie Dallas: She is a dance mistress who has looked fifty for the last thirty years and has a fabulous body, perpetual tan, penciled eyebrows, and thick, Egyptian-like black eyeliner. She bats her false eyelashes and smiles too widely. Like Josie, she plays the accordion.
Hattie had a mystique about her that fed my childhood imagination. I was certain she hadn’t revealed all the secrets of her past. Was she once a famous gypsy dancer traveling the world and performing in exotic places? Did some romantic liaison ultimately lead her to the Midwestern suburbs and the demise of her dance career? I sensed that she’d lived a life of adventure, and I wanted to live it, too. I could only fantasize about what breathtaking performances she’d given as I was too much in awe to ask for her resume. She was glamour personified. On the inside cover of the recital program book, Hattie was always pictured engulfed in a luxurious fur coat or swathed in a feather boa. To me, she was as alluring as any movie star.
The happenings at Hattie’s were equally captivating. It would be perfectly normal, for instance, to find a girl in a red, white, and blue sequined leotard performing back walkovers in pointe shoes while twirling a baton affixed with lit sparklers. In addition to the traditional forms of dance—tap, jazz, ballet, and pointe (or “toe,” as Hattie would say)—such classes as tumbling, cheerleading, Hawaiian, Tahitian, baton twirling, and clogging were also offered. Hattie’s was a one-stop shop for entertainment, and I was enthralled by it all.
Referring to a show (or performer) as being “Dolly Dinkle” generally means the show (or performer) is amateur in nature and borderline corny. “She’s so Dolly Dinkle!” for example, would probably be stated with an air of snotty superiority and eye rolling by a more refined professional. Technically, the Dallas productions (and performers) were amateur, but they were packed with pizzazz and had great audience appeal. Hattie loved to use all kinds of tricks in her recitals. If you could do running back walkovers, aerials (no-handed cartwheels), handsprings, or standing back tucks (somersaults in the air), if you could walk on your hands, wrap your legs around your neck like a pretzel, do the Russian splits suspended in the air by two burly guys, or perform any other form of bodily contortion, she would use it in the show every year without fail. The Dallas gals were known to utilize strobe lights, glow-in-the-dark costumes, and Tahitian dancers juggling flaming coconut shells. Anything went if it brought the house down.
Hattie Dallas’s School of Dance had aspirations well beyond your quintessential Dolly Dinkle school, and the whole Dallas family was involved in this pursuit. Hattie had a beautiful, twenty-year-old daughter, Skye, who shared the teaching responsibilities with her mother and was my main teacher. She had lovely long brown hair and wore big diamond studs in her ears. Her voice was deep and permanently hoarse from shouting over the music all those years, but it sounded Marilyn Monroe-sexy on her. She and Hattie vacationed in Florida every Christmas, which helped maintain their gorgeous golden skin color (a highly coveted look back then). Skye was careful to get a perfectly even tan (including the hard-to-reach-spots like under her arms, which she tanned by lying on her back with her arms over her head), and her sun-kissed appearance made her all the more enchanting. Hattie also had a lanky teenage son who taught gymnastics classes but favored magic and was pictured in the recital program book in his goofy magician’s outfit. Even Hattie’s mother, who was no spring chicken, played her part by running the busy office and answering scores of inquiries.
In addition to the Dallas family, there were certain teachers fresh out of high school who taught the classes Skye and Hattie eschewed. These second-rate teachers were young and green, but they all had tiaras and sashes and titles like “Teen Miss Southeast Main Street Deli.” I thought the teachers were extremely beautiful and talented. One had a strong southern accent and was always popping her gum, a skill I desperately but unsuccessfully tried to master in order to be like her.
Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more Dolly Dinkle drama and hijinks.
Cabbage-patch on,
Kristi
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