Welcome to the Hotel Tapifornia

What a nice surprise

If you are a childless creative in Los Angeles you are legally required to do some sort of adult hobby. This firm policy has resulted in various friends knitting, sewing, woodworking, painting, meditating, making pottery, cycling, surfing, running half marathons, running full marathons, and doing adult gymnastics. They’re a talented bunch.

A few years back, a combination of an emotional breakdown and a New Year’s resolution led me to my primary LA hobby: adult tap. I assumed finding an affordable class nearby would be a logistical nightmare, but I needed something to do in the long stretch between work and sleep’s sweet embrace. To my surprise and delight, I found Tap Dance with Howard: less than a mile away and well within budget. Wednesday night I darkened his studio door (directly above his garage) and entered a sacred space where all are welcome to find themselves, each other, and the rhythm.

Dancing has always been a challenge for me, but there’s little else I’d like to excel at, even my chosen profession. I can trace this pretty clearly back to a childhood bout with the flu, during which I consumed a multi-day Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers marathon on TCM. When the flush of health returned, I knew that one day I’d be the one dancing cheek to cheek, happily time-stepping through an elegant dinner club, leaving ostrich feathers in my wake. The moment had come. With the opportunity to pursue my craft at my own leisure, I would finally become a dancer.

The first obstacles—my body and my mind. Medically, I have diagnosed myself with abnormal brain pathways. What does this mean? It means that any message traveling from my brain to my body will ricochet back to my brain before executing its mission. For example: I hear “shuffle ball change.” My brain tells my feet to do a shuffle ball change. No sooner do I lift one foot than my brain has shifted its focus to a particularly salient plot point from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The shuffle won’t make it past the ball, let alone the change.

But after four solid years of occasional work on my craft, I’m proud to say that I have learned three and a half dances and can perform them with remedial proficiency. I deployed one and a half of those dances in my first public performance with Howard’s mostly adult tap dancing ensemble, titled “Tap Water.” “Tap Water,” it may surprise you to learn, was a story about tap dancing and water. The next two dances will be deployed this weekend at my sophomore adult dance recital, “Hotel Tapifornia,” which, without giving away too much, is a story about tap dancing and a hotel called Hotel Tapifornia.

Who can say what the weekend will hold? It’s insane to think that I’ve spent literally years of my life learning dances to six minutes of music total. And even now I’m not confident I can do them flawlessly. I’m already ruminating about which cramp roll or weight shift will be my undoing in the upcoming matinees. And then I think, “Wow, I just used the terms cramp roll and weight shift like it was no big deal.”

And you know what that means? It means I did it. I’m a dancer.

Portraying, through dance, a member of the “evil security forces” (Photo Credit Carrie McCrossen)

I’ll be in Hotel Tapifornia this Saturday at 2 PM and this Sunday at 2 PM if you’re interested in attending a performance.

If you live in LA and would like to be a dancer yourself, you can sign up for classes with Howard here.