I can’t find half of my belongings after our move and a summer up north, but I had the wherewithal to set aside a pair of the girls’ old tap shoes and today I walked over to the Fine Arts Building where there is a dance studio overlooking Michigan Avenue.  I took a class called Grown and Sexy Tap. We made rhythms with our feet, toes and heels. We watched, learned and tried new things.We honored those dancers who came before us, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, The Nicholas Brothers,  and Idella Reed-Davis.

My mom wanted my sister and I to have our tap shoes handy for all occasions. She envisioned us more in the Ruby Keeler genre, Fred and Ginger or maybe Shirley Temple. It wasn’t until later in life she told us she had an opportunity to dance professionally and my grandma and my dad discouraged her or didn’t allow her to go. This small story, told once when she was about 83, was such a window into my mom’s encouragement over my sister’s and my dance lessons. She was never a stage mom; she just thought that any family occasion should warrant a “show”.

As petulant teens we resisted her pleas and moved away from tap dancing, but we both came back to it later in life. It is this ebb and flow between parents and children that is so amazing. We never know when something will emerge that was hidden under all that “need to be defiant, do my own thing, you don’t know what your talking about” person. I have confessed to my sister that I now realize that many times my mom was right about something, but we held on to that streak of independence so fiercely. So maybe green eye shadow in 8^th grade was a bad idea, or cutting bangs, or wearing big clogs to a job interview or my sister playing outside in her go-go boots. But you figure this stuff out and you look back and realize it almost had to happen that way.