Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Get up off of that thing. Dance and you’ll feel better. – James Brown
The back story: American Bandstand was an music-performance and dance television program that featured teenagers dancing to Top 40 music. From its 1952 debut, the show was televised from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and from 1956 until its final season it was hosted by Dick Clark, who also served as the program’s producer.
I often get email from this blog’s readers asking question about photography and every now and the,n from subscribers to my YouTube channel asking about movies, but once upon a time, one of the most interesting emails I received,was: “Didn’t you dance on live TV during the ‘50s?” And the answer is, surprisingly— Yes.
caption:Still photo from the 1988 John Waters; film Hairspray, which was in color but the Buddy Dean show was not.
Here’s What Happened
In the Fall of 1957, I was one of the teenage dancers that appeared each day on a local Baltimore TV show that was called the Buddy Deane Show. It was loosely modeled after, OK, it was a direct copy of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. The Buddy Deane Show also served as the inspirations for the fictitious Corny Collins TV show that was featured in John Water’s wonderful 1988 film Hairspray and the not-as-wonderful musical (I did like the music) 2007 remake.
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. I 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 you’ll see 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 movie.
Dancing with a Star
Several weeks after the Buddy Deane Show premiered on WJZ, the local ABC affiliate. the TV station 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 at best. Heck I was bad at it and still am. The person in charge of casting, who I don’t think looked anything like Debbie Harry (in the original) but I could be wrong, asked all of the boys and girls auditioning to pair up to dance to a few tunes to see if we were good enough to be on the show. I was odd man out in the boy-girl pairings because, to tell the truth I was shy about the whole boy/girl thing and here is when the goddess Terpsichore smiled upon me.
As amazing as it may seem today, the TV station has a mascot a beautiful young women who was called “Miss JZ” and who appeared in station break promos for the station typically in the persona of a (good looking) witch. Like every other young man in Baltimore at the time, I had a huge TV crush or her. You are getting ahead of me here, aren’t you? Yup, the producers asked “Miss JZ” to dance with me during the audition. Not only was I dancing with Miss JZ but she was a helluva good dancer and made me look like I knew what I was doing. Gradually dancers were tapped on the shoulder and asked to drop out, much as is shown in the 2008 film in order to get the final number of teenagers that would be part of “the committee.” When it was all over the second “committee” for the Buddy Deane Show had been selected and I was chosen to be on it. It turned put to be the most magical six weeks of my teenage life.