LAST CALL : The Eccentric Dancer
Klein, Phillip
lAsT cAll The Eccentric Dancer by philip klein M ike always wore his white hat, but his hat wasn’t always white. It started out khaki col-ored, but as it deteriorated over time,...
...Mike adopted the slogan “Don’t Worry, Be Happy...
...His life began a few months after the sinking of the Titanic and lasted until the emergence of Barack Obama and John McCain this Super Tuesday...
...Nobody would recognize me...
...If one of his aging siblings passed away, he would cross the name off the list with a single line...
...It started out khaki col-ored, but as it deteriorated over time, rather than purchasing a new one, he refurbished it by periodically painting the surface white...
...I’ve got a rich girl for you,” he would say...
...His dancing career was cut short, however, when he invited his pragmatic father to one of his perfor-mances at a Chinese restaurant in midtown Man82 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 hattan...
...If you wanted two sleeves,” Mike explained, “he’d charge you extra...
...He got to know Ray Bolger, who is best remembered for playing the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, and was one of the more famous masters of this art...
...He also loved repeating stories and telling jokes, though there was usually not much of a distinction...
...That was that...
...He was a man who never spent time in a hospital until the last year of his life, and never quite knew how to deal with death...
...Five dollars,” Mike replied...
...How much did you get paid for that...
...Mike also served as an understudy to a comic team known as “The Ritz Brothers...
...Partofitwasvanity.Whenwewentouttogether, usually to a local coffee shop, he used to introduce me as his son...
...In the days before ubiquitous Xerox machines, offices relied on offset businesses for their copying needs, and Mike made his living first as a salesman and then as an owner of one of these operations...
...With no teeth...
...To him, dinner could be a can of Campbell’s soup and a handful of potato chips, which he ate while sitting by his window and watching the traffic move up Third Avenue...
...The horse moved its bowels, and it cost me $500...
...At some point when I visited, he would get up, push aside his area rug, and perform a ten-minute dance routine, usually to the music of Glenn Miller...
...By the time he passed away this February, he had administered so many coatings of paint that it had taken on the composition of a hard hat...
...She’s 98 years old...
...If I don’t wear this hat, I’m a dead duck,” he once told me...
...Mike was my grandfather, but he never wanted to be referred to by the terms of endearment typically reserved for elder relatives, such as “Grandpa,” or “Pop Pop...
...May God Bless him...
...In one standard tale, he claimed to have lost money when he received a hot tip on a horse that went bad as the animal entered the final stretch...
...He also played matchmaker...
...But for all the memories he left me with, I thought he deserved a bit more...
...It was when he was servicing one of his accounts that he met Doris, who would become his wife...
...At one point he had a sign up in his kitchen, with the names and birthdays of everybody in the family...
...lAsT cAll The Eccentric Dancer by philip klein M ike always wore his white hat, but his hat wasn’t always white...
...She gave me the business,” Mike once recounted...
...If I told them you were my grandson, they’d never believe me,” he whispered, apparently oblivious to our nearly 70-year age difference...
...his father asked...
...Mike lived off black coffee and vitamins, and he maintained a thin frame throughout his life...
...A tailor by trade, he used to manufacture suits with one sleeve, according to legend...
...And then she gave me the business for 50 years...
...His father, Charles Weinberg, immigrated to New York from Warsaw in the early 1900s, along with many Jews of his generation...
...Philipklein is a reporter for The American Spectator...
...His father snapped, “If I ever catch you again doing all of that dancing for five dollars, I’ll break both your legs...
...he laughed...
...In his youth, Mike took up dancing and studied under Arthur Murray, a prominent instructor of the era, and became adept at a style known as jazz eccen-tric, which was a comic type of dance that involved erratic movements and bizarre facial expressions...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
