Giving Us the Old Song and Dance

I'm trying to think if there's anything quite like the sight of 16 long-limbed women dressed in pink leotards and white feathered headpieces marching around a gigantic birthday cake, linking arms, spinning like human pinwheels, then arranging themselves in an unbroken line and kicking out their legs in glorious unison.

The launch of a Saturn V rocket? Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River? A gyrfalcon lethally descending on an Arctic ptarmigan?

No, none of these things is quite like the

"kick line" I saw last week during a rehearsal of the new Hexagon show at the Duke Ellington school.

For those of you who, like me, have heard of it but never really known what it is, Hexagon is a musical theater revue. Amateur song-and-dance lovers have been getting together every year since 1956 to put on a show and raise money for charity. Or, as a song lyric plucked from this year's opening number proclaims: "Making fun of everyone is what Hexagon does."

This being Washington, the Hexagoners have plenty of material to work with. Every chief executive from Ike to Dubya gets his bumbling turn upon the stage in this year's show, "With Levity and Jesting for All."

Groan-inducing puns are sort of a Hexagon specialty. So is the Rockettes-style kick line, which has been a staple from the very beginning. What's the appeal of a kick line, anyway, I asked this year's director, Malcolm Edwards.

"I think myself it's the precision, the energy, the craft and the beautiful legs and ladies," said Malcolm. "It's the whole package, isn't it?"

Being English, Malcolm delivers his explanation in an accent that calls to mind a Blackpool music hall impresario, or what the British call a "compere."

Malcolm, former British Army guy who works at the Australian Embassy, joined Hexagon in 1981 to meet women. Now married, and his women-meeting days apparently over, Malcolm still pitches in, helping with valet parking last year, directing the whole shebang this year.

The cast ranges in age from 22 to 70. It's full of people who acted, sang or danced in high school or college and find they just don't have much call for that as senior technical specialists at PanAmSat.

Which is what Neil McElroy is in real life.

"This guy's played Nixon year after year," Kay Casstevens whispered to me as we sat in the auditorium and Neil, looking suitably jowly and scowly, channeled Tricky Dick on stage.

When she's not choreographing for Hexagon, Kay is chief of staff for Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. Songwriter Doug Maurer, a computer professor at George Washington University, has been part of Hexagon since 1976. That year's show, "Barbs and Snipes Forever," featured two of Doug's originals: "My Pet Rock Is in Love" and "Dracula's Mood Ring."