Once a Rockette; still passionate about dance

Three years with the famed Radio City dance ensemble was just the start for Thelma Neely.

By Mallary Tenore, Special to the Times
Published January 19, 2008

Thelma and Archie Neely try some moves at the Czechoslovak Cultural Center in Gulfport, one of their regular places to dance on Sundays. Thelma has taught everything from belly dancing to ballet. "You have to keep moving," she says.
	[James Borchuck | Times]

Dancing lessons
To contact Thelma Neely about free dancing lessons, call (727) 867-1555 or e-mail her at NYCRockette2op@wmconnect.com.

---

Thelma Neely has danced for 80 years. She danced onstage with the Rockettes, danced with 59 years of students. She has danced with lupus, danced on bad knees. She danced with one husband, and now dances with another.

She wears a bright red dress with sparkly spaghetti straps. Her red curls bounce. She is 86. Her husband is 89.

"You ready?" she asks him.

She tries to lead him, to keep him from falling. He can't stand it. He shakes his head and looks down.

Silently, Thelma counts along to the accordion music.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 2

Archie tires first, wants to rest. Thelma wants to keep moving.

"Archie," Thelma says, "I'm going to do a little line dancing."

- - -

Thelma was about 10 when her father took her to Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes.

"Daddy," she said, "I'm going to be one of them someday."

"Oh no you're not," her father said. It was the 1930s and the Rockettes were new. Thelma's father wanted his daughter to be a nurse or work in an office. "It's not good to be a dancer," he told her.

But Thelma, whose parents were separated, lived with her grandmother, who took her to dancing lessons and scribbled notes about how she could improve.

When Thelma was 16, she auditioned for the Rockettes, as she'd said she would. Come back in two years, the instructor told her. She did.

She danced with the Rockettes from 1940 to 1943.

Her parents had called her Evelyn for most of her childhood, but for her stage name, she chose Thelma, the name on her birth certificate. She has been Thelma ever since.

She performed three shows a day and four on Saturday, every day for seven weeks without a break. She toured the country with Pat O'Brien, Jackie Cooper, Phil Silvers and Bing Crosby, and performed at Atlantic City's Steel Pier with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.

Sixty-five years later, she can still kick her leg up to her head.

- - -

As she got older, Thelma created a stage in her apartment. She and Archie ripped up the carpet in her Florida room and put down a hardwood floor, creating a small dance studio. Every Thursday, students come to her house for lessons, always free of charge. Whereas she once taught dozens of students at a time, her class has shrunk to two - elderly Dominican nuns who dance to stay healthy, to survive old age. Her former students, she said, were too old to travel to her new St. Petersburg apartment, which is farther south of where she used to live in the city.

Thelma has taught belly dancing and Hawaiian dancing, and still has two closets full of costumes. A barrel in one of the closets is filled with wigs, shakers, Hawaiian skirts and fake boobs, which Thelma distributes to the men in the audience for Hawaiian dances.

A certified yoga instructor, Thelma has taught yoga to elderly people in wheelchairs. She owned her own dance studio for 35 years in New York and then Chicago and taught tap, gymnastics and ballet. She also served as an instructor for dance teachers at DePaul University.

In her studio, she sways her hips and claps her hands. Her gray country-western boots swivel, making the plywood floor crack and creak.

"Kick ball, change."

"Hitch, 1, 2, 3, 4 . . ."

- - -

The teacher in her makes her want to guide Archie, or "Awchie," as she calls him. After Thelma's first husband, Alex, died of cancer in 1980, Thelma wanted to try square dancing, but she didn't have a partner. So a friend told her of a man whose wife had recently died of cancer who might suit her.

The man called Thelma that night and the two agreed to meet at Gulfport Casino, where Thelma was a cashier. Thelma remembers telling herself, "If he asks for Thelma and he's a short, fat man, I'm not Thelma."

But Archie, a former cowboy, was slender and handsome, with bright blue eyes. That night, when they began dancing, Thelma led Archie. But Archie wouldn't have it.

"He stopped me and said, 'Wait a minute. I'm leading you,' " Thelma said. "I was floating on air because I didn't realize how good he would be." They married three months later.

Together, their shoes have tapped the floors of the Moose Club, the Azalea Center, the Ox Bow, the Ridgewood Activity Center and Roberts Adult Center. Whereas they once danced four to five times a week, they now dance together just once a week, rotating between the Polish American Club and the Czechoslovak Cultural Center every other Sunday. "You have to keep moving," Thelma says.

At night, Archie hears Thelma next to him in bed, counting softly.

. . . 4, 5, 6, 7

When Archie was sick with cancer in his left leg last year, Thelma insisted he stay active. She didn't want to lose her soul-mate, her dance partner. So she made a cassette tape for him, with four different rhythms on it, and told him to walk around the hospital and listen to the different beats. Gripping his walker, he kept beat to one of his favorite songs on the tape.

"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7"

Allllll my exes live in Texas . . .

Four months later, he was back on the dance floor.

- - -

On her 86th birthday last month, Thelma watched the Rockettes perform in the 75th anniversary of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center with Archie and a friend.

She listened to 36 pairs of feet tap the stage and watched as the smiling dancers dressed in Swarovski-crystal costumes kicked their legs high.

She counted right along with them.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 2

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 3 . . .

This time, her partner was by her side.

Mallary Jean Tenore, a freelance writer, is the James M. Naughton fellow at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a school for journalists that owns the St. Petersburg Times. She can be reached at mtenore@poynter.org.

[Last modified January 17, 2008, 17:53:47]