Fosse Read Free Page A

was terrific with the kids, and Weaver, who didn’t know from ballet, knew he would have no shop without her. Trixie, he called her. At one point, they married. Together, Weaver and Comerford were a perfect instruction manual for a young hoofer, he the text and she the living illustration. “She filled me withall of these wonderful thoughts,” Fosse said, “and the magic of dancing. She cared a great deal about us. So it was a woman, really, that brought me to dancing. It was a woman that brought me everywhere.”
    Miss Comerford, the most elegant woman Bobby had ever known, was certainly the most elegant professional to grace the academy. The rest were entertainers, circus performers, and stage acts brought in by Weaver to teach the basics of showbiz comportment. To Fosse, they were the big time. Jack Halloran, a local emcee with a speakeasy kind of mien, showed him how to address a microphone. Chris, a Barnum and Bailey clown with a big gold tooth and a scalp as bare as an eight ball, taught the kids how to fall without getting hurt and how with pantomime they could make an audience think that a bucket of confetti was actually a bucket of water. Radio personality Gilbert Ferguson brought in scripts from his soap-opera serials and helped them practice enunciation.
    None of the specialty skills gave Fosse any trouble; he could tap, clog, and tumble like a pro, but whereas his classmates seemed to double in stature when they were onstage, Fosse seemed to disappear.As much as he loved an audience, he danced away from them, rolling himself up like a crustacean, as if he were ashamed to be seen. Which he was. No one at Ravenswood Elementary knew what he did after three o’clock. He wouldn’t let them. They would have called Bobby girls’ names and laughed him out of recess. “They would acceptthe tap dancing, and the tumbling,” Fosse said, “but the tights and the ballet shoes were hidden in the bottom of the drawer, and I’d sneak those in in a paper bag, you know?” Ballet stifled him. Fosse had no turnout, no extension, and he felt sissy pointing his hands and toes like a prima ballerina. “He was always toldto keep his fingers together and his hands down,” Grass recalled, “but up they’d go again, his palms out, his fingers spread. That was his style even then. He was doing Jolson and Eddie Cantor.” Almost Jungian in resonance, these gestures of showbiz’s past would one day form the syntax of Fosse’s dance talk. But not yet. In Miss Comerford’s class, Bobby was reprimandedfor sloppy technique. That there was vaudeville: his first naughty act.
     
    Once a year, the academy presented a recital for the parents. In Fosse’s first,held at Chicago’s Medinah Country Club on June 15, 1936, he played a policeman in the
Toy-Town Revue
and performed a tap solo (“Stepping It Out”). Fosse also appeared with the full company in the ballet ensemble, though he was afraid of what his father would think of his son’s sissy-flitting through the colored lights. Cy, though he danced the social dances of the day, drew a hard line at first position. And paying for it seemed a lavish indulgence. These being Depression years, cutting some corners could make a difference to such a large family, which, in 1937, had grown one girl larger. Marianne, Bobby’s newest and fifth sibling, was added to the dinner table next to Buddy, who had left home but then returned, bringing with him his new bride and not much income. Thus Sadie and Cy,already stretched to the limit, stretched further: he traveling longer hours in search of more money, she finding ways to prepare bigger meals for more mouths. Fosse’s theatrical training was not essential.
    And he had been improving too. On June 15, 1937, Fosse played the role of Master of Ceremonies, one of his favorite parts, in “Le Petite Café,” act one of
La Folies de l’Academie,
Weaver and Comerford’s annual recital. A ten-year-old Maurice Chevalier, he tipped his hat to