Dancing In The Dark Poem by gershon hepner

Driving in the moonlight, Cyd and Fred
embrace to strains of “Dancing in the Dark; ”
best way to get a girl into your bed
is drive her languorously through Central Park,
but if you’re in the mood far from Manhattan,
try singing in the rain, and make your move
dancing with her, and then wave your baton
in the bedroom, ready to make love.

Robert Berkvist writes the obituary for Syd Charisse, who died on June 17 in Cedars Sinai (“Cyd Charisse,886, Silken Dancer of the Movies, Dies, ” NYT, June 17,2008) :
She made her film debut in 1943 under the name Lily Norwood in “Something to Shout About, ” with Don Ameche and Janet Blair, and then spent almost a decade performing in small roles and sometimes anonymously before she got her big break. That came with “Singin’ in the Rain, ” released in 1952. Written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, the film established her as one of Hollywood’s most glamorous and seductive talents. Set during the dawn of talking pictures, “Singin’ in the Rain” starred Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Jean Hagen. Ms. Charisse appeared in only one of the movie’s many indelible dance sequences, but one was enough. During the “Broadway Melody Ballet, ” opposite Kelly, she was both sultry vamp and diaphanous dream girl. A year later, “The Band Wagon” brought Ms. Charisse her first leading role. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, with a book by Comden and Green and songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, the film starred Astaire, Ms. Charisse, Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray. Astaire played a fading Hollywood song-and-dance man hoping to make a comeback on Broadway and who finds himself cast in a show opposite a snooty ballerina (Ms. Charisse) . The couple do not see eye-to-eye until they take a nighttime carriage ride through a moonlit Central Park and wind up embracing languorously to the strains of ”Dancing in the Dark.” One of the most famous sequences from the film, if not in the history of dance on film, is “The Girl Hunt Ballet, ” in which Ms. Charisse plays the vamp to Astaire’s private-eye stage character….
Looking back on her work with Kelly and Astaire during a 2002 interview in The New York Times, Ms. Charisse said that her husband, Mr. Martin, always knew whom she had been dancing with. “If I was black and blue, ” she said, “it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch.” In a 1992 interview with The Times, she remembered dancing with Astaire to Michael Kidd’s demanding choreography in “Silk Stockings” and said admiringly, “Fred moved like glass.” As it turned out, “Silk Stockings” was her last major musical. She appeared in a few more movies, chiefly in dramatic roles in films like “Party Girl” (1958) and “Two Weeks in Another Town” (1962) . She and Mr. Martin took their nightclub act to Las Vegas and other cities. Her last film was an Italian drama, “Private

© 2008 Gershon Hepner 6/18/08