What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [60]
When, a year later, Thomas saw his brother perform at the elementary school with Dancers of the Third Age, and he committed himself to becoming a dancer, too, Thomas was already in reasonably good physical condition. A few years earlier, while stationed in Kathmandu, he had lost twenty-five of his then 185 pounds after he picked up an intestinal bug. Then, while posted in Vienna from 1983 until his retirement in 1986, Thomas quit smoking cigarettes and began a modest conditioning program, walking three hilly kilometers to work at the U.S. Embassy each morning and then home at night. That included climbing the 110 steps he counted every day on his way up to Peter Jordan Strasse, the street where he lived. His weight dropped to 142. Then, in 1987, he began taking dance classes at Lerman’s studio, then housed in the Hall of Mirrors at an old amusement park in Glen Echo, Maryland.
Several months later, Thomas asked Lerman if he could dance in performances with the nonprofessional Dancers of the Third Age. She turned him down because he was still six years too young. But she encouraged him to continue taking classes and workshops at the studio. Thomas threw himself into learning dance with even more determined zeal and dedication. Occasionally, when the Dancers of the Third Age needed an extra dancer, the director of the troupe asked Thomas to fill in for a performance at a school or nursing home.
He had fun dancing with the elders, but he enjoyed even more being around the younger professional dancers. He was tickled by their creative and collaborative playfulness. “It looked like fun. I used to see how Beth Davis, one of the dancers, would cut up with the others. I was enthralled by her antics,” Thomas said. “I remember one night, I went to a performance of the Dance Exchange at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. When it was over, I saw Beth leaving the stage.
“ ‘Don’t worry, Thomas, you’re going to be up here one day,’ she called.
“I looked at her and I couldn’t believe it,” Thomas recalled. “At the time,” dancing with the professional company “was the furthest thing from my mind.”
A few months later, in June 1988, Thomas got his break. An older dancer in the Dance Exchange suffered an injury, and Lerman needed a replacement for performances in a dance festival in Zagreb and Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She also needed someone with a valid passport. Thomas jumped at the opportunity to dance—and to return to Belgrade, where he had served a decade earlier in the U.S. Embassy. His role, he says, didn’t amount to much. “I played a Russian bureaucrat. He was supposed to be a silly person, as Liz asked me to portray him. I took off my stovepipe hat and bowed to a stool. And then I moved it around to various locations on the stage. It wasn’t a big part, but I wanted to do a good job. That was uppermost in my mind,” he said. He was simply pleased to be performing with the professionals.
Lerman was pleased to have him. So pleased that three months later, she asked Thomas to join the Dance Exchange. She had found what she was looking for. “With Thomas there was no veneer. Nothing. He is what he is. You see it all. I wanted to push that on my audiences. I also wanted it to rub off on my young dancers, who could do anything, but they came with a lot of physical baggage as a result of all their training. I’m interested in people dancing, not dancers dancing.
“From almost the second Thomas took the space, I knew we were in for something. After the first couple of performances, I had theater directors calling me and saying, ‘I can’t take my eyes off this guy. Can I borrow him?’ ” she said.
The response to Thomas’s appearance as a dancer confirmed Lerman’s notion that dance technique should be a tool and not the master of the dance. “In dance, we have over-recognized technique,