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Moving to the Beat of a Midlife Funk
In what is one of their easier moves, John Killoran, left, Stuart Chandler, Michael Temchine, and Joseph Schilling throw their hands in the air as they shift their heads from side to side in a performance at Jammin' Java in Vienna. The four have skipped the crisis and found a midlife calling in hip-hop dancing.
(By Jahi Chikwendiu -- The Washington Post)
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But they certainly had drive, and Thorne agreed to give them hourly sessions once a week. The two guys had to round up friends to beef up the size of the class and help pay the fees.
Temchine was a fairly easy recruit -- the freelancer (who has done work for The Washington Post) had been belly-dancing for nearly two years.
Chandler took work.
He didn't leave the house much, other than to work at American Plant Food, a Bethesda nursery, where he hauled shrubbery and trees. In the evenings, while his wife worked at the small bar she owned, Chandler cooked dinner and helped their daughter with her homework.
When he did go outside, he liked to look at nature or pick up bottle caps, scraps of paper and shards of bicycle reflectors. He then glued them and other objects onto the folk art-style canvas paintings and birdhouses he created in his basement.
Schilling leaned on Chandler's wife, telling her to take Chandler to "Napoleon Dynamite," a movie that celebrates a high school nerd who shocks classmates by learning hip-hop dance. The couple loved the movie.
And Chandler's wife, well-known local singer-songwriter Alice Despard, told her husband it would be good for him to take hip-hop lessons because he could make and strengthen friendships. "You need a male-bonding situation here," she said.
And so he bonded, embarking on the journey that would test all four.
Hip-hop demands isolated movement of various body parts. Youngsters who grow up watching hip-hop videos and practicing moves pick it up more easily. To the middle-aged, it can be a foreign body language -- even to accomplished dancers such as Jane Ford, 45, owner of K2 Dance Studio in Beltsville, who has done the Lindy across floors at the White House and Kennedy Center.
Five years ago, she and several other swing instructors of about the same age decided to learn hip-hop dancing for fun. They knew what to do: Hire a hotshot teacher from San Francisco.
"We fly him in for privates every summer so we don't have to deal with those twenty-somethings," Ford said. In learning the moves, she said, race isn't a factor, but age and background can be: "Once, I brought a black friend, and he was as bad as the rest of us."
As the months went by, the four men learned as little as 15 seconds' worth of new moves during each 60-minute class. Their musical scores featured 50 Cent and a Jay-Z tune that includes the lyrics: "Y'all don't want me to spray the semi' in here. I mean, if you a fan, I consider you fam.' "
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