About Me
Didn’t you dance on TV in the ‘50s?
Yes. In the Fall of 1957, I was one of the teenage dancers on a local Baltimore TV show called The Buddy Deane Show that was loosely modeled after—OK, it was a copy—of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. (If you click on the link, you can see an actual clip from the show. I don’t think I’m in there but it’s hard to tell.) Buddy Deane’s show also served as the inspirations for the Corny Collins show in John Water’s wonderful 1988 film Hairspray and the not-so-wonderful musical 2007 remake. Although I did like the music.
Part of my lack of enthusiasm for the Hairspray remake was that I was there back in the day dancing my ass off, much like Water’s heroine,Tracy Turnblad did in the 1988 film, and found the original to be more true-to-life, inasmuch as any John Waters film could be called “realistic.” Heck, I even lived in the same neighborhood as Tracy Turnblad and trod many of the same sidewalks on Eastern Avenue that are seen in the original movie, just thirty years earlier. So how did a kid from East Baltimore get to dance on TV every day for six weeks? It’s almost as funny a story as Tracy Turnblad’s but with a lot less family drama although to be honest my mom and dad could easily be cast in those parental roles in the original Hairspray.
Several weeks after the Buddy Deane Show premiered they put in a casting call for teenagers to dance on the show every day and I really, really, really wanted to be on TV and showed up for the audition. Unlike Tracy Turnblad who was a great dancer, I was mediocre. Still am. The person in charge of casting who I don’t think looked anything like Michelle Pfeiffer but I could be wrong, asked us to pair up to dance to a few tunes to see if we were good enough to be on the show. But I was odd man out in the boy-girl pairings and here is when the goddess Terpsichore smiled upon me.
As amazing as it may seem today, in those days WJZ has a mascot a beautiful young women often shown in the persona of a (good looking) witch who did on screen promos for the station. Like every other young man in Baltimore at the time, I had a huge TV crush or her. You’re ahead of me here, aren’t you? Yup, they asked “Miss JZ” to dance with me during the audition. Not only was I dancing with Miss JZ but she was a helluva dancer and made me look like I knew what I was doing. Gradually dancers were asked to drop out and when it was all over the second “committee” for the Buddy Deane Show had been selected and I was on it.
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