Tag: 1960’s

A Love Letter to That 60’s Boy Dancer

December 10, 2013.Reading time 10 minutes.

This is a love letter to Bobby.  No, not Bobby Kennedy, Bobby Brown or even Robby Williams…Bobby Banas.  You probably don’t know his name.  But you probably know his work, particularly if you are a fan of old musicals.  I had a beautiful reminder yesterday morning about a huge part of my past that I rarely take the time to really hold on to and appreciate.  Dance.

My friend Mimi Quillin posted a clip from the 1963 Judy Garland Show of a dance called the “Nitty Gritty.”  In it you see your typical 1960’s dancers for the most part (women with beehive hairdo’s lacquered into place, flirty chiffon skirts and heels…gentlemen in skinny tuxedos.)  They are performing a dance that has shades of the Frug and the Mashed Potato and they are dancing with great reserve…except for one.  This one male dancer is letting his head fly about, his back slip and his hips literally wiggle (gasp!)  The camera moves in for a closeup and the expression on his face says,”I could care less that I’m on national TV, I’m just dancing for me, baby”…wheeeee!

That is Bobby Banas.

Why am I writing a love letter to a 1960’s dancer?  Because, quite simply, when I was a little boy, I wanted to be him.  Other little boys wanted to be astronauts and policemen (it was the 60’s and 70’s) but I wanted to point my toes and stretch my legs and make beautiful shapes with my body.  What’s wrong with that?  According to the world at that time: everything.  Officially, I was a little boy in the 70’s and despite the whole free love, peace, hippies, Black Power and any host of other liberation movements that gave rise to the age of disco…boys still didn’t have hips, and definitely wouldn’t or shouldn’t wiggle them if they did.  The message was very clear that ideally, I should probably stop wiggling my hips by the time I was 10, despite the best efforts of John Travolta to change a generation.  Alas, by the time I was 11, I was still wiggling.

My parents tried to embrace my wiggling by pointing me toward great black male dancers (Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey, Geoffrey Holder) but I knew that they were hoping I would outgrow this fantasy and settle into wanting to change the world as a lawyer…or at least something with a good stable income.  I accepted their desire and outwardly focused my dance ambitions on the most regal and noble art of the ballet.  But what they didn’t know is that my ballet fixation was a clever rouse; in my heart, I really wanted to be one of those dancer boys on TV or in the movies…like Bobby Banas.  I had seen the movie Sweet Charity with Shirley MacLaine and the Rich Man’s Frug became my life ambition.  But how does one tell one’s parents that not only do you want to be a dancer, but you really want to be that third dancer from the left who has just a little bit more spice and body English than the others.

Bobby Banas’ career is amazing.  He danced with Marilyn Monroe (she kisses him at the end of the opening number of Let’s Make Love), Ann Margret and Debbie Reynolds, in movies like The Unsinkable Molly Brown and the Holy Grail of Hollywood Musicals, West Side Story.  He was a Jet.  He was sexy.  He was strong.  He was impish and Puck-like; an unpredictable beatnick in a world of dance that was careening toward the great cliff of the 1970’s when the great movie musical would go out of vogue.  He wasn’t in front like Russ Tamblyn, Elliot Feld or George Chakiris, but he had just that right kind of quirky freedom that made you look, more than once.  He is part of a generation of dancers who did the hard work of the movie musicals.  They made the impossible choreography of Jerome Robbins, Gower Champion, Gene Kelly, Onna White look not only easy, but fun.  I can only imagine choreographers seeing him come on to the set, looking at his elfin face and feeling his raw energy and saying, yes, yes, please make my dance look much better than I could ever have imagined.

I was very, very lucky.  I had enough talent to be able to pursue the whole ballet thing and get a good foundation.  It was good enough foundation for me to eventually drop ballet altogether and focus on musical theater, but not before taking class with people like Bobby Blankshine and Michael Vernon where I danced (poorly) alongside the likes of people like a retired but still magical Allegra Kent.  Although I happily left 180 degree turnout and stretching my feet for a better pointe, I will always be grateful for the discipline that ballet gave me.

But why a love letter to Bobby Banas?  I guess its a bit like those boys who watched Joe Namath or Doug Flutie or Willy Mays.  Not only did I want to be part of that club, I learned an important lesson about my masculinity by watching dancers like him.  I learned that it was good to be able to express myself physically with joy and not violence;  I learned that my wiggle had nothing to do with my sexuality.  I learned that I had value and uniqueness that no one could take away from me.  In my pursuit of dance, I gained an appreciation for my body as an instrument that required constant and loving care, from the food I put into it to the way I trained it, to the things I asked it to do.  I also gained appreciation for those who came before me and achieved much, much more than I did working with the greats.  My chance encounters taking class with or meeting people like George Chakiris, Suzanne Charney, Donna McKechnie and others were moments of touching greatness that I will never forget.  There is a wonderful You Tube channel out there, Dancers Over 40 (http://www.youtube.com/user/dancersover40)  where you can see some of the great dancers from “back in the day” remembering their early careers and the spectacular times in which they lived and created great work.  The were and still are incredible

But I write a love letter, primarily because my dancing didn’t just stay my dancing.  It became life experiences on Broadway and abroad; it became a career in the fitness industry including my appearance in P90X; most importantly, as I’ve grown out of the body that could do 10 Russian splits, it became perspective on the changes that we go through in life, both physically and emotionally and has given me a foundation for my path as a minister that lets me respect the beauty that once was and the beauty that one becomes.

I can think of no greater gift than to give a little boy the freedom and encouragement to dance.  Even today, boys aren’t encouraged to move their bodies in ways that aren’t goal driven.  Why must a little boy run toward something, or faster than someone?  Why do we ask young men to be able to push someone over, hit harder than and be strongest?  Let boys move just for the sheer joy of moving.  Somewhere in that boy who can bench 250 and can knock down a line of defensive linemen on the football field, there might just be a man who would rather be doing something else altogether…he might actually want to wiggle instead.  And because of that wiggle, he might just turn out to be as remarkable, inspired and inspiring as someone like Bobby Banas was to me.

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Million White Man March

October 16, 2013.Reading time 11 minutes.

Obama_WhiteHouseConfederateFlagAs I watch the current state of the US Government, it is difficult to regard it without also taking in the national climate surrounding what is going on.  Mass shootings, chronic homelessness, rabid religiosity and total religious apathy, education in decline, greater wealth gap, gender and gender identity wars, the complete meltdown of information systems and above all the total and absolute disintegration of cultural trust.  Houston we have a problem.

To me, this whole thing reminds me, sadly, of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.  I’ve referenced this movie before.  In it, the director portrays a world that is thrown into chaos when black people are liberated, particularly when a black man is in leadership (at least that’s how this black man sees the movie.)  That was 1915.  What is happening right now in 2013 is exactly the same thing; we have a black man in leadership and the cornerstone of everything American is falling to pieces.  Simple, right?

No, not so simple. This is what I believe, our dear conservative tea party Bible beating white male friends would like to have us believe: that because a black man is in the white house, mayhem ensues.  He (Obama) doesn’t have the capacity to lead; he is polarizing; he is inept; he has no authority.  This story line is exactly what D.W. Griffith was preaching.  But my dears, that was a movie, made by one white man 98 years ago. This is real life.  Or is it?  Could it be that our Tea Party friends aren’t quite as simple and bumpkinish as some of us high flying, over educated Liberals want to believe?  Remember, the Tea Party created Sarah Palin.  She is a complete and ignorant nobody, yet she is in our NATIONAL media and consciousness.  She is the ultimate creation of the “gotcha media” that she so scorns.  Like the bride of Frankenstein, SHE LIVES…and it would seem that she is carrying the torch for a completely fabricated movement to make President Obama the scapegoat and to reaffirm the bedrock of what American culture was originally built upon: oppressive white male colonial power.

Now why would someone do this?  Why would anyone wish to play out the storyline of a movie like Birth of a Nation?  Well, if you are attached to the security you felt when your world wasn’t challenged by someone else’s culture, or gender expression or wealth priorities or look or smell, you might just want things to go back to 1861.  But in this modern era, we live in an increasingly unstable and erratic world.  Most specifically, from November, 22 1963, as a nation, the United States was suddenly living in a world where “if it could happen…it would.”  The President of the United States was shot and killed and unlike the Lincoln murder that took not only days but sometimes weeks for people to become aware of, the entire nation experienced the loss of John F. Kennedy in real time.  The unthinkable of losing someone who’s image we had seen repeatedly and who’s voice we had known, happened and was transferred globally within minutes.

And that was just the beginning.  Footage of race riot brutality, Viet Nam, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy.  We spent the 1960’s being emotionally raped by a serial sickness of “if it can happen…it will.”  We emerged assuming that if a public figure was out in the open, they would be shot; if world finance was on the rise, sooner or later it would come crashing down; if there was a conflict between nations somewhere in the world, it would escalate into a convoluted political quagmire with unthinkable loss of human life.  And then, just as we were starting to show a few signs of emotional healing…September 11, 2001.  The attack on the World Trade Center in New York, more than the 50, 100, 200 years of tragedy leading up to it, sent us nationally over the edge.  Regardless of the political motivations of the attackers, or their connections to international networks or global terrorism, 9/11 meant that we were locked in the cycle of abuse once again.  If it could happen it would.

Suddenly we have Homeland Security, border control, language like “Islamist Extremism,” “freedom fries,” and cries of U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A! We entered an age of chronic national post traumatic stress disorder.  Our first thought is fear.  Our world is shaped by laws that, despite the language of law (innocent until proven guilty) assumes the worst.  We put people in prison for assumption; we have insurance we don’t need nor could ever use; metaphorically, we are shuttered away in our minds and our attitudes so that even if it is good for us to be in the sun, we don’t want any part of it because we might develop cancer.  Our reaction to learning of the abuses in the Catholic church is a classic example.  We assume now that everyone who interacts with children is predatory and thus we’ve created boundaries and walls and assumed guilt and an environment of suspicion. There now little Johnny, you’ll be safe!  Of course you won’t know what to do with yourself when you need comfort and you won’t think you could ever trust an adult, and you will develop attitudes that present no sense of community or interdependence on your peers or cultural identity and you will develop into someone who is more likely to perpetrate a mass shooting because of your disconnectedness and mistrust of others…but you’ll be safe! 

The current state of affairs is not just about the assumption of privilege by white men.  It is about the assumption of privilege being played out in a culture of trauma.  The million white man march of the tea party is reactionary; it is a symptom, it is not the problem.  Certainly, we need to fix the symptoms: racism, homophobia, classism, sexism, ageism, etc., but we need to go to the root of a national consciousness that is in deep and excruciating pain.

I am frequently asked about God and religion.  This is a constant for anyone who is in seminary.  I always reply with “I” statements, because I deeply believe that faith is entirely personal and that although we can unite as people who experience faith, the expression of that faith is as variable as the people involved, even within faith traditions.  For me, I believe that that breaking the cycle of trauma is dependent upon faith, for the sake of a better word.  My “faith” is rooted in my interpretation of Christian teachings and Unitarian Universalist principles. For others, it may be in Islam, or Judaism, or Humanism or Hinduism.  It may be a “faith” that is not god centered at all.  But trauma, any trauma, can only be healed by the distinct belief that one is unconditionally safe and loved, where the cycle of anticipating harm or loss is broken and put to rest.

The Tea Party and the Million White Man March are not the enemy. Instead, it is very clear that in a changing world on shifting ground they do not believe that they will be safe and cared for as they had been in the mythical pre-Birth of a Nation past.  As a result, they are trying to create this safety just as they created Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz by elaborately and deliberately fabricating a world where Obama will ultimately be a scapegoat and everything will magically return to the “way things were.”

And he said to them, ‘Why are you afraid, you of little faith?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm. (Matthew 8:26 – NRSV)

I see you Tea Party; I see who you are and I will not let your fear bring us all down.  I will acknowledge your pain, for we all share in the trauma; but I will call you out on your crap.  Just remember that ultimately I will love you all the same, as I ask you to love me, because ultimately that is the only way this cycle will end.