Unfamiliar with the name, I wikipedia'd Bill Robinson – as namechecked in the often brilliant Fred Astaire muscial The Band Wagon – and my belated dance education continued (it beat working on my abs):
"According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, 'Robinson's contribution to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging,' adding a 'hitherto-unknown lightness and presence.'... He is also credited with having popularized the word copacetic through his repeated use of it in vaudeville and radio appearances."
So when I wrote that the trick to dancing seemed to be to get my top half to hold up my bottom half, apparently he invented that. And more. Watching the battered, echoing remnant of his work above I realised – later than I would like – that I'd grown up loving Bill Robinson's dancing without ever seeing the man himself do it:
"His signature routine was the stair dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he unsuccessfully attempted to patent."
And who can blame him?
Heigh ho.
That's entertainment.
