Facebook post about tapdancing in stores

 Facebook thread with Donna Champion:

Mo Hurley Remember when we tap danced in the Sebastopol Safeway and everyone looking around for all that clattering? A flamenco dancer came into the store the other day and danced in front of my cheese booth. It was a scream. Customers joined in, clapping, saying Olé. Do you remember the flamenco guitarist Enrique Sanchez? She is his blind musician friend Augustine's wife. I met them when I was producing the art/poetry events at the InterCultural Center at SSU. Didn't we book them for Garbo's too? RRWG?

Donna Champion Ah, yes, tap dancing in Safeway. I'd almost forgotten that. I think my most obscure tap experience was in a convalescent home. I think they enjoyed the show. One old man yelled out, "Look at the girlies!" I don't remember any flamenco dancers/musicians performing for the Guild, but anything was possible in those days--not too many restrictions on what we called "poetry & prose." 

Mo Hurley Great floor acoustics. Was it the bowling alley? No that was farther down Hwy 116.

Donna Champion Well, it was a DANCE floor! I thought it used to be a bowling alley and they converted it into Garbo's.Yeah, it wasn't a full-sized bowling alley, but it made a pretty good nightclub.

Mo Hurley Ninepins! Donna, did you give me those old school flamenco button-up boots with the hobnail heel taps? I was telling Augustine's wife I needed to be a contortionist to get them buttoned up. Didn't wear them often! I remember those too, Sistha! And the Guamanian slips that I wore as dresses and how your mother was so scandalized.

Donna Champion I think I gave you a pair of sexy black heels with ankle straps and buttons on the sides.I just donated all of my old dance costumes to the local thrift store. I gave my tap shoes to my great-nieces years ago. **sigh** Life goes on....

Mo Hurley But you've ballet dances in the family now. Didn't Galena dance in the SF Nutcracker?

Donna Champion How did this conversation go from ants to tap shoes? They do come in handy for killing ants, I suppose.

Mo Hurley Curiouser and curiouser. You'd think this thread would be under the Rita Moreno post.

Donna Champion Yes, several ballerinas. Galina has hung up her toe shoes and teaches at City Ballet, the studio that she and Kenny own in SF. They're all in Moscow now with several of their students who are doing an internship with the Bolshoi. Connie's with them.

Mo Hurley I remember standing outside the Bolshoi, mid-winter, snow falling in feathers. Valera Stupachenko (remember him) sang there when he was famous. Ah, memory. The man I didn't marry.

When we got off topic with dance and romance, was the best bit of the thread.

Maybe Even Dance Again

      Elegance is the only beauty that never fades. —Audrey Hepburn

Rita Moreno walked over to say hello to me at my sample booth today. She always makes a point of coming over to say hello and to visit. It's not just about sampling the cheese of the day. It's about the connection. Community. Except today I had finished early and was serving raspberry almond tarts. I said I was the queen of tarts.

Rita laughed. Nibbled on her sweet. Nice to see you, nice to SEE you, she always says in her little Carmen Miranda lilt. And she means it. Putting her hand over her heart. We always gaze deep into each other's eyes for a moment as if to fathom something profound but the words never come. Her kohl-rimmed eyes are cinnamon brown with green flecks like mine. The makeup suits her.

Hard to believe that Rita's 82. She always wears interesting hats. A wisp of chestnut hair streaked with gold framed her face—she'd just come from the hair salon. Marvelous describes her. In a word: she is elegant. She has a beauty that never fades.

The first time I met Rita, she looked like she was at death's door. Her husband had recently passed away. She was frail, barely mobile. Shopping was an effort. But today she walked unaided. Sans walker. Today the red shopping cart was her surrogate walker. But it was banished to the far side of the aisle. She carefully walked over to me unaided.

She said: See, I am off my walker, but I keep it it in the car just in case. She's living dangerously. Wow! The hip replacement surgery was a success.

Rita, the Hollywood goddess of dance, did a halting little two-step and said Look, I can walk again—maybe even dance again! She said, smiling, her arm leading with a slow spin. Now those are immortal words to live by.

She said, But the balance is not so good. With a dismissive wave of the hand, she tottered off pushing the red cart like red Ferrari, but she was a frail hummingbird. My heart in my throat.

My cheese booth at Trader Joe’s is like a village well. The Regulars come to visit me, to share their stories. I tell them I am a stationary object. I am a lighthouse. I stand at this one spot five days a week greeting people, picking up dropped threads of conversation.

New friends tell me old stories. I give them recipes, wine and cheese. It is a civilized bastion, an outpost in the midst of commerce where the qualities of terroir are invoked daily. I have many Regulars who come to visit without fail.

Blind Augustine's wife, the flamenco dancer, took off the neckscarf I was admiring and then danced with it in front of my cheese booth. Customers clapped, said Olé as we twirled our hands like pigeon wings in unison. In that moment, we realized that we knew each other from long ago via Enrique Sánchez, the flamenco guitarist. A gig I produced at Sonoma State University in the 1980s. Small world.

And  any (in)famous old friends always stop by to say hello and chat: Earl Kingston and Maxine Hong Kingston, Camille Dungy, and her daughter,  Al Young, Alastair Johnson—even Jerry Brown and his retinue. I once gave him a standing ovation for all my CAC arts grants. He said Where's the salmon? But Rita Moreno, by far, is my favorite Regular.

In my CAC poetry workshop at Mark West School, an exuberant kindergartner once threw his arms open wide and told me: If I were king of the universe, I'd dance for a living. Pure poetry on the hoof.

Today we celebrate a small victory. I give Rita another piece of raspberry tart. We measure the progress of recovery in small, ordinary increments. Today the dancer can walk again. Maybe even dance because dancing is still in her heart.

That sterling moment more than made up for yesterday's sour customer from hell: a 20-something blonde who shrieked at me, Youfuckingbitch! and stomped off, because I said: Please do me a favor, use the serving tray next time instead of my cutting board as it's a health code violation. I never even got to finish my sentence. I was too shocked to respond as I dumped the tray-full of cheese in the trash.

Such displaced rage—a tantrum over what? A piece of cheese? Wow. Not the first time this has happened. Chalk it up to bad parenting. The young woman was too impatient to wait for an older woman to get her sample first. At that moment, the customer becomes my friend, she became a Regular. She vouches for me, tells the manager what happened, then calls the 20-something A real bitch.

I tell my Regular the story about Rita Moreno. She is thrilled. Says Bless her heart. Bless her heart.

May that tart young woman who cursed me, grow old and wrinkled too soon in her fallow heart and may she never find the joylines to dance at the cheese booth in a supermarket when she's old enough to know better. But does it anyway.

Mad, Mad World

A frail wisp of a little old lady, dressed in flowing vague floral patterns of beige and white, wearing a lacy wide-brimmed hat, toddled up to the cheese booth where I was serving samples.

She looked vaguely familiar, and her eyes reminded me of an older version of my mom—if my mom was still alive. She was my mother's age. I searched her face for some clue. At first I thought she was a cancer survivor, because of her sunken eyes but she still had her hair, and she looked sane enough.

I puzzled over her face. I tend to remember the faces of people I photographed, sometimes decades later. But I couldn't quite place her.

But she wanted me to take her trash after I'd offered her a sample and I refused, not wanting to cross-contaminate the food... I was taken aback that that she had even handed me her trash with such an imperious gesture. An awkward moment ensued as I withdrew my hand  and pointed to the trash can. Inexplicably I was thinking of musicals—the scene between the Jets and the Sharks. Snap! Dancing in the aisles.

The little old lady, also taken aback, said she liked the cheese, and wanted two pieces. She said that she was having some people over tonight.  Did I have a larger piece? Thankful for the distraction, I gathered my wits as I rummaged in the box behind the counter for a large chunk, and offered it to her.

Meanwhile, another woman came up and was thanking her for something, I didn't know what, so I asked what that was about? She said: I really like her work. What work? Her movies. Movies? Don't you know who that is? That's Rita Moreno! She lives in the Oakland Hills. 

Oh. I was gobsmacked. No. I guess I didn't know that.

But indeed I was thinking of my mother's halcyon stage days when I thought the old woman reminded me of my mom.

I remember watching my mom at the Sausalito Gate Playhouse, performing Of Thee I Sing, and Pipedream. At Music Circus costuming Guys and Dolls. I remember searching for my mom in the big crowd scene in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World. But I never found her. No matter how hard I tried. By that time she was already well on her way to the world of madness.

When I got my break, I went looking for Ms. Moreno in the store aisles. I wanted to apologize—well not so much to apologize so much as to smooth some feathers and to close the loop.

I wanted also to tell Rita that I knew of her world, and that my mother's escape came too late. But Rita was already gone. Deep into the Oakland Hills. An escaped West Side Story.

Snap!

ENVOI
Dec 3: I was chit-chatting tonight with Rita Moreno as I was putting away my cheese booth. We nibbled on dill havarti with salmon. I gave her suggestions for appetizers, etc., for a party.

I've become the Go To girl for spontaneous recipes and menus. This time she didn't try to hand me her trash. She must've remembered how I got cranky last summer.

Anyway, she does have the most marvellous eyes. So frail, yet so alive. Most people I work with don't even know who she is. Sad, Really.

At least they've heard of West Side Story.


Dec. 23 Wished Rita a Merry Christmas—we chatted in Spanglish. Sweet.

Dec. 30 Rita came right up to me to say hello. I met her friend
—we slid through several languages as he doesn't speak English. Fun. I told Rita about learning Russian while traveling there as an artist and poet. She looks so much better—I think she was sick.  She said she was feeling much better. Anyway, it's fun conversing with her. I think she enjoys the one-on-one, with no mention of her stardom.

Jan. 21 Rita came over to say hello—she's looking positively marvelous. I told her so.

I asked her if she would be restaging her one-woman show. All my friends are still talking about it and I never never got a chance to see it. She said, "I don't know, it depends upon how I feel."

She said that she's recovering from double hip surgery and it's been a long haul. She said, "I'll be sure to let you know if I do decide to stage it again." Looking forward to it.

A newer blog entry on Rita, Maybe Even Dance Again.