BEGIN

9 8 Y B E G I N S I O B H A N P H I L L I P S here is Fred Astaire in his white double-breasted suit and black tie here is Eleanor Powell in blade-straight pleats and soft sleeves here are the two of them tapping on stage on screen in Broadway Melody this is 1940 their feet playing with the notes of the shadowy band in the pit sure across its silence taps never quite coming to rest only to pause perhaps they rehearsed so long the pianist quit they’d come up in vaudeville which took tap from shows where the two-colored rule meant no black dancer could ever dance onstage alone and they move as one as pure coincidence but never touch not even the slight brush of a white hem until they bow at the end hand in hand and the camera pulls back to the crowd clapping he had switched his last name from Austerlitz which sounded like a battle or a Jew and wore a dark hat to add height and tapped duets with a sister until he was thirty-two and she would be ordained in the Unity faith while filling clubs with her tapping feet and needed to lighten her freckles and curl her hair and cap her teeth to be deemed good-enough by the studio hush it is night the stars are out and the tune is Begin the Beguine a Creole term for white women from a kind of Medieval nun which became the name for a languorous tropical number in which couples twine tightly together so nothing like this tapping which brooks 9 9 R no caress every now and then without switching their steps one of them looks across at the other’s taps hopeless to catch there on the black glass of the stage the trace like the wake of a glance not to test or to beat some move no they cannot help themselves they are the whole of a show the seeing the seen in that mirrored theater shot in black and white to save money since Hitler in Poland meant uncertainty overseas for tapping in pictures we’re just two hoofers Ellie told Fred to break the ice when they met and then it was all right she tapped like a machine gun like a man he said I don’t think I will plunge the nation into war a critic wrote by stating that he is the greatest tap dancer in the world ...