Show Me the Way to Go Home

If you don’t know it is WPBL opening weekend is this weekend! ⚾️✨ Watch on ESPN Select, Scripps Sports Network, and YouTube!

Way back in the early days, it was where black performers in Vaudeville were legendary for it in Jazz and Jive routines. At about 1:37, this is where the Nicholas brothers go off.

Tap is a distinctive American art form that comes from a blending of African dance traditions with Irish dance traditions. It was developed by Black and white dancers and came up alongside and deeply entwined with jazz.

Certainly the tap that ends up in musical theater often seems old-fashioned and white but that’s a musical theater issue, not a tap issue. That is only one small part of tap, which continues to have a strong African-American tradition.

The Nicholas Brothers, above, are in a clip from the film Stormy Weather, which has an almost entirely African-American cast. Some of the other scenes in the film include Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of the greatest tap artists of all time. He was very well-known generally and was in quite a few Shirley Temple movies in his day. (Shirley Temple, herself, was a tap dancer – which I’ll be real is probably contributing to people thinking it’s old-fashioned and white, because it’s easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)

Here’s Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather – he’s performing a variation of his famous “stair dance” in parts of this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM

Here’s probably the most widely famous version of the “stair dance”, from The Little Colonel:

There’ve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years – see, for example, everyone’s favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:

… but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and it’s weird to me that people don’t know that.

Have a scene from Tap (1989).

and this from 2014-ish:

And if you are saying, well, I never heard of this guy, I guess today you are going to learn about this guy. But I bet you know THIS guy:

Mumble’s dance is choreographed by, and mo-capped from, Savion Glover.

This guy. This guy is SKILLED, ok? He’s in his 50s now; he’s been a professional tapper for over FORTY YEARS – he made his Broadway debut at age 11. He’s in that movie, Tap, that I linked a clip from above. Sometimes his tap seems a little old-fashioned – other times it is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. This is intentional – he’s paying tribute to his teachers and tappers of the past by learning and performing their signature moves, but also he’s got his own style.

It is absolutely worth going through whatever you can find on YouTube. Look for “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk” – he was Tony nominated for the choreo & his performances in this musical. (The MDA telethon performance above is an excerpt – he did these for several years on the telethon.)

I like this one, because you can watch modern African-American tap alongside modern-traditional Irish dance and you can see that these are related, but distinct, art forms. They share a common ancestor, but they’re also so different. Right around 4 minutes, Colin Dunne (the man in the cover image below) and Savion Glover start dancing together, trading off, and it’s AMAZING.

Sidenote, if anyone ever hears of a revival of “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk,” please tell me, I want to see it liiiiiiive.

Let’s finish off with Glover’s special guest performance at the Stockholm International Tap Dance Festival last year:

I also happen to specialise in gambling addiction (although I'm not practicing in that area right now), and all I could fucking think about was how these fucking apps were conditioning me in the same fucking way gambling apps do. To be constantly plugged in, consuming. To not even think about just picking it up and having a look. To feel bored when I wasn't watching them, to think about watching them when I wasn't watching them....

That shit is fucking evil.

I deleted it. I'm not exposing myself to that.

That shit will fry your dopamine/reward system so fucking bad you will never read a book or watching a movie again without it.

Love yourself and your potential enough to put that fucking shit away. Watch longer form things that require focus and engagement. Listen to podcasts and audiobooks. Read books. DO ANYTHING BUT CONSUME SHORT FORM CONTENT IN AN UNSTRUCTURED WAY.

If you MUST consume it (I'm sure people will be like 'but my classmates' or 'but my own channel'.... etc), do it in a siloed and structured way. 30 minutes between x time and x time on x day. Focus on it. Don't eat and do it. Watch each short form video to completion. Engage critically with the content. ANd never watch them first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

And the thing is, up through the 19th Century, people knew it. If you want a specific silhouette, okay, fine, you use corsets and strategic padding and bum rolls and hoop skirts or whatever you need to achieve that silhouette.

Now we think that you should achieve that look by "diet and exercise" and plastic surgery.

Thank you for this timely question! I am at an airport with time on my hands. This will be a slightly unorthodox proposal, and it is true that I happen to have it on the brain right now, but:

The Count of Monte Cristo.

I was thinking about this and being dubious about it because it seems like it would really work much better for the first half of the novel than the second. But I've come up with a fix, I think.

OK, so basic summary: the young sailor Edmond Dantes, on the day he is supposed to marry his true love Mercedes, is framed and thrown into prison through the collusion of four men who all have different reasons for wanting him out of the way. While in prison he meets a wise old Italian priest who tells him the location of a fabulous buried treasure. After the Italian priest dies, Edmond escapes, finds the treasure, and reinvents himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. After ten years' preparation, he returns to Paris--where all his enemies are, along with Mercedes--and executes his diabolical revenge.

So. For the pre-escape part of the story: I mean obviously, Kermit as the young and idealistic Edmond Dantes, Miss Piggy as the devoted but fiery Mercedes, and Fozzie as Faria. I think the villains should be played by humans, except for Caderousse, who is played by Gonzo. (Were we able to suspend the laws of space and time, I'd want Joe Keery as Fernand, Steve Martin as Danglars, and Vincent Price as Villefort.)

BUT. After Edmond escapes and becomes the Count...he is played by a human actor. Some young and hot comedian who can also do Scary and Brooding. Or maybe a young Denzel Washington. Either way. When interacting with all the villains, the Count is played by this devastatingly suave human actor. BUT. Mercedes is the only person from his past who knows who he is right away. SO. Whenever the Count is seen from Mercedes's point of view...he's played by Kermit.

#you’d need to change the ending though right?#muppet movie has to have Piggy and Kermit (or his human stand in) end up together#I think you could cut Haydee from the muppets version#adaptation license and all#and the count could actually forgive Mercedes#you would also have to do something clever with the whole murdering a child thing#but i would trust the muppet team to handle it#or cut it#it’s been several years since my last read#but this is a very fun exercise

I have...so many Serious Thoughts about the ending, about Haydee as a character, and about the way Dumas creates these fascinating female characters and then criminally misuses them...but this is not the place for them. We are talking about a Muppet movie. So here's what we're gonna do with the ending:

So we get to the big confrontation, the night before the duel with Albert is supposed to happen, when Mercedes confronts the Count and tells him she's always known exactly who she was. Now, in this adaptation, at some point, Mercedes/Miss Piggy is going to lose it and just come at him. She HI-YAAAAAAAAs into the him so hard that she literally chops in him half. Now there are two of him: the Count, played by the human actor, and Edmond Dantes, played by Kermit. At the same time.

Nobody fights Albert. The Count sails off into the sunset with Haydee. Now obviously they're not sailing off as A Couple because he raised her from the age of 11 and we're just, we're not doing that. Haydee is going to be his first mate and they're gonna have High Seas Adventures, probably involving Tim Curry.

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?

Also important:

Just to clarify my vision on a couple of these:

* by chickens I mean Muppet-chickens à la Camilla (Gonzo naturally would have some reaction to this)

"Oh hey these people have their own style of [language A's word for thing. Say, what do you call it?"

"Oh it's [language B's word for thing]."

[item] the way [culture] makes it. 

If you don’t want sliced bread, you want bread the way Eastern Indians make it you ask for Roti, not bread. Because Roti is bread THE WAY [EASTERN] INDIANS MAKE IT. Like fuck, it’s not that complicated a concept.