EXCERPT: TAP DANCING ON A HOT SKILLET

Chapter 1: The Silvery Moon, 1958

 It was another unbearably hot Friday afternoon in Florida when my burly, balding father ran through the back door calling our names through the halls of the house. He peeled his clothes off, sweaty shirt hitting the floor, and the pencils in his front pocket flew everywhere.

“Come on, Redheads, let’s celebrate! It’s the end of the week and we can finally get back to working on our act!”

We knew the drill, so we ran tumbling after him, undressing as we went.

Dad always saw his children as a vaudeville performance group in the making. From the time I was a baby, he’d spend his early mornings in the woods practicing his clarinet, or what he called the “licorice stick.” He adored big band music—Benny Goodman was his idol. Dad’s dream was that he and his children would eventually form a touring family band. So, I started playing the accordion at age six.

To Dad, rounding up his little chickens, jumping past the mermaid-etched shower stall door to teach us song-and-dance routines was his reward for working all week at a thankless commercial art job. Dad, whose professional art training was in New York at the prestigious Pratt Institute and The Art Students League, hated the Florida crackers he worked for. I heard him say more than once: “They wouldn’t know the difference between a Rembrandt and a macaroni wreath.”

In our musical household, little Benny, the youngest, just past two, started singing, “Skidamarink a dink a dink” before he could walk. Chunky Benny and my four-year-old sister Paulina took after the Polish side of the family. Paulina, with her round face and Buster Brown haircut, looked like a real-life version of a Raggedy Ann doll.

Mom said Harvey and I favored the Hungarian side of the family because, like her, we’re fine-boned. Mom was small and birdlike, with tiny, deep-set, watery blue eyes that always seemed bigger when magnified by her horn-rimmed glasses. Like Mom, Harvey had one crossed eye and wore glasses, too. I figured that was why he was her favorite—because they made him look like a little professor, and the parents concluded he’d one day be a great success story as the lawyer or doctor in our family. Harvey, eighteen months younger than me, was wiry and athletic with thick, orangey-red hair cut in a flat top, that all the old ladies loved to run their fingers through.

Mom was always in a hurry. It seemed to me that she was in such a rush to get to the next thing that she rarely enjoyed what she was doing at the moment. At pretty much every meal, she’d eat too fast, which caused her to choke. This sent Dad into a tizzy fit and he would jump up from the table, red-faced and worried, to perform the Heimlich maneuver. It’s my contention that Mom learned to eat fast when she was growing up with five foster kids during the Great Depression, competing for every morsel.

And me? I was a gangly ten-year-old with a strawberry-blonde pageboy hairstyle who fantasized about becoming a movie star one day because the kids at camp nicknamed me “Rhonda” after the actress, Rhonda Fleming (also a redhead).

In our small performance space of the family shower stall, the choreography was simple: All five of us marching around in a circle, stopping only when it was our turn to sing under the microphone (showerhead). Whenever it was my turn, I did a couple of my fancy tap steps—the Shuffle Ball Change.

Our favorite show tune was, “By the light of the Silvery Moon.” Dad began by singing “By the light,” and each of the three oldest kids would echo, “By the light, by the light, by the light.” Then we’d sing, “… of the silvery moon,” in unison.

Benny would chime in a few bars later with, “yeah moon,” holding his arms out in true Al Jolson fashion. Because there were only three “by the lights” and four kids, the echo, “yeah moon,” was his part.

Then Dad sang solo, “I want to spoon to my honey. I’ll croon love’s tune.”

Then we’d sing in unison, “Honeymoon, honeymoon, honeymoon, keep a-shinin’ in June,” and so on.

Dad’s nickname for Benny was “Fishhook, end-of-the-line!” So it was only fitting that at the end of the song he got to sing the last few words, “… of the silvery moon,” which were sung twice, slowly.

Once the water began to run cold, Dad blasted through the door in his towel, leaving a trail of water into the kitchen while Mom screeched, “Max, get some damn clothes on!” in her signature Brooklyn accent as he danced around the room.

Mom’s job, as she saw it, was to hand each of us a bath towel while commanding us to get into our pajamas. We begrudgingly obeyed, going to our bedrooms then emerging in the kitchen in our PJs, ready for dinner.

Mom once told me that her mother Gussie, who died when she was three, used to bathe her and her brother in cold water to “toughen us up for the world.”  It seemed to me that Grandma Gussie’s plan worked because Mom did turn out to be a tough cookie but, sadly, her chance to be a child went down the drain with the water.

Dad was the fun parent.

We never saw Mom naked—and she certainly would never have danced in the shower with us, or even thought up such a thing. After Grandma Gussie died Mom was sent to live with a no-nonsense Austrian foster mother named Mrs. Kravitz, who didn’t think play had any value. Later, when Mom was eight, Mrs. Kravitz threw away her only toy, a doll, telling her that she was “too old to play with toys.”

My job was to set the table and make a salad while Mom stood at the stove making our Friday night special, “peppa steak”—her version of Chinese food. Also, a way to stretch a bunch of meals out of half a pound of top round. She sautéed small pieces of beef with onion, green pepper, and soy sauce, then served it over a generous portion of Uncle Ben’s rice.

As she stirred the pan, she glanced over her shoulder at Dad, clearing her throat and exhaling with a forceful “harrumph” in an attempt to get Dad to realize he needed to put on some clothes.

 Her hints were wasted on Dad, who’d be so absorbed in some creative pursuit—on this night, carving a bust of Venus de Milo out of a bar of ivory soap—that he wouldn’t notice her. Truth was, it looked to me like Dad didn’t really give a rat’s ass if dinner was late. Her final plea was always, “C’mon Max, you’re setting a bad example for the kinder” (Yiddish for kids). Mom and Dad used Yiddish to talk about things they didn’t want us kids to understand—in this case it was an obvious translation.

Finally, Dad, not one to give up easily, jumped up from the kitchen table and sidled over to Mom crooning, “Five foot two, eyes of blue,” and dropped to the floor for dramatic effect, kneeled on one leg, and continued, “But oh what those five feet can do.” 

Then, he rolled his eyes in the style of Yiddish theater, hopped back up on both feet and offered Mom his hand.

“C’mon Ruthie, let’s dance.”

“Max, get some damn clothes on for Christ’s sake.” She replied, giving Dad a scowl while she ushered him out of the kitchen with a wave of her hand. “And, hurry up, supper’s getting cold.”

 “Yes, ma’am,” Dad said dutifully, then headed to their bedroom to change out of his towel, winking at us kids on the way out of the kitchen.