About 25 years ago when I was just 65 I took a tap dance class from that same teacher who had taught my daughter, Nancy, many years before. Our classes were at the Senior Center there in Battle Creek, Michigan. There were about 20 women in the class and as I recall I was the only man. I remember it as my weekly hour of total humiliation. I just couldn’t keep up with the ladies. I dropped out of the class, bought a 4’x4′ plywood board and began dancing a simple shuffle step I came up with. Greg Brayton and I recorded a song we called The Dancin’ Rag. It started out slow and got faster and faster. And then I went back and danced on my board at Greg’s recording studio and we taped it. The Dancin’ Rag is attached.
At speeches I would close my talk with a story about the fact that no one is too old to learn new skills and I would illustrate my point by closing my presentation with my dance.You might find me dancing for the United States Air Force on Youtube.com Art Fettig.
Well, the other day I was looking at some DVD’s we had recently converted from a big box of VHS’s I’d brought with me twenty years ago in my move here to Hillsborough from Battle Creek.
In that box I found a video tape of a presentation I made for Alabama Power Company years ago and I closed that presentation doing my first ever Dancin’ Rag in public.
Well that stirred me up. Maybe it is the months of isolation most of us have endured lately. Somehow I went straight to Amazon.com and typed in Men’s tap shoes, size 13. To my amazement up popped a wide selection of offers. Reasonable offers and they all claimed to have size 13. I’d been searching for years for such shoes. My wife reluctantly helped me order the shoes online and they arrived today, sure enough, black lightweight tap shoes and they fit me perfectly. I found the song on our Mixed Bag CD. I played it and some good old memories came back to me. I put my new shoes on. I sat in my chair at my computer shuffling my tired old feet. A few toes felt a little bit numb. There is a little arthritis in the ankle joints. Both knees were replaced over twenty years ago and they had 12 year guarantees. Then there is my lower and upper back and my neck. You know, the usual 90 year old stuff. The worn out parts. Still, there is that spark still burning in my imagination, still burning bright. I dug out that 4’x4′ practice board, and there is my big mirror on the wall and if you happen to drive by our home in the woods and hear a rag song blasting out from my music room upstairs I might just be standing in front of the mirror on that practice board dancing the whole one minute and fifty-six seconds of our song The Dancin’ Rag. You can hear it right now by clicking on The Dancing Rag MP3 below. Good luck.