THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 29, 1995 TAG: 9504290345
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
Thoughts while strolling. . .
What impressed me growing up about 10 years behind movie star Ginger Rogers was, well, her ginger.
The nickname Ginger emerged from a sibling trying to pronounce Virginia, but it fit her like the glass slipper fit Cinderella.
You felt it when she was battling her way through a dance routine with Fred Astaire in their lovely musicals star-studding the dark Depression.
Their light romances, all but one in the 1930s, were just right for those dire times.
Whole families flocked together to watch them. We didn't have money to fling on grim life-like stuff. Gloom cloaked the streets outside movie palaces. We wanted escape.
Fred and Ginger obliged.
Astaire never found any partner to match him for airy grace. Everything he did we thought was effortless. He earned that state of grace in grinding rehearsals beyond our ken.
A winsome shade in top hat and tails, he dared her throughout the dance with one audacious move after another, and she, gloriously gowned, fought with furious almost comic energy to keep up, matching him step for step and in high heels and backward at that, her swirling figure fraught with frantic intensity.
The two first danced during a Broadway rehearsal for ``Girl Crazy,'' a 1930 Gershwin musical in which she was starring. Astaire, then on Broadway with his sister, Adele, visited the rehearsal.
Producers were dissatisfied with the dance routine for ``Embraceable You.''
``Here, Ginger, try it with me,'' Astaire said.
Ginger Rogers died Tuesday and for now, anyway, she outshines him in the mind as they dance.
Will they come back?'' was asked over and over, person to person and in headlines, as if referring to the swallows returning to Capistrano.
The question was whether baseball fans would return to the stands after their enforced absence during the long strike between major league owners and players.
Come back?
When there's a vagrant breeze out of left field just cool enough to make a fellow and his gal appreciate the sun on their shoulder blades as they lounge in the bleachers, where else they gonna go?
Of course, they'll come back. In time.
And here, in closing, are lyrics for the teapot song, requested last week and supplied now by Elaine Bruce of Virginia Beach and Connie Jones of Norfolk:
I'm a little teapot
Short and stout
Here is my handle
Here is my spout
When I get all steamed up
Then I shout
Tip me over
Pour me out. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
by CNB