Dancer Birthday Quotes

Thirty-nine-year-old moderately successful Human Resources Director. Interests include regency romances, reality TV, and baking large novelty birthday cakes for other people’s children. Hobbies include drinking Tia Maria and eating Turkish delight in the bath and dining out with her mum and dad. Wanted to be a ballerina but didn’t end up with a ballerina body; however, has been told she is an impressive dirty dancer when drunk. Knows her wine, so please just hand the wine list over. Godmother to nine children, member of two book clubs, Social Club Manager for the Australian Payroll Officers’ Association. Suffers from a severe blushing problem but is not shy and will probably end up better friends with your friends than you, which you’ll find highly irritating after we break up. Has recently become so worried about meeting the love of her life and having children before she reaches menopause that she has cried piteously in the middle of the night. But otherwise is generally quite cheerful and has on at least three separate occasions that she knows of been described as ‘Charming’. Yep, that about summed it up. What a catch.

The theme of music making the dancer dance turns up everywhere in Astaire’s work. It is his most fundamental creative impulse. Following this theme also helps connect Astaire to trends in popular music and jazz, highlighting his desire to meet the changing tastes of his audience. His comic partner dance with Marjorie Reynolds to the Irving Berlin song “I Can’t Tell a Lie” in Holiday Inn (1942) provides a revealing example. Performed in eighteenth-century costumes and wigs for a Washington’s birthday–themed floor show, the dance is built around abrupt musical shifts between the light classical sound of flute, strings, and harpsichord and four contrasting popular music styles played on the soundtrack by Bob Crosby and His Orchestra, a popular dance band. Moderate swing, a bluesy trumpet shuffle, hot flag-waving swing, and the Conga take turns interrupting what would have been a graceful, if effete, gavotte. The script supervisor heard these contrasts on the set during filming to playback. In her notes, she used commonplace musical terms to describe the action: “going through routine to La Conga music, then music changing back and forth from minuet to jazz—cutting as he holds her hand and she whirls doing minuet.”13 Astaire and Reynolds play professional dancers who are expected to respond correctly and instantaneously to the musical cues being given by the band. In an era when variety was a hallmark of popular music, different dance rhythms and tempos cued different dances. Competency on the dance floor meant a working knowledge of different dance styles and the ability to match these moves to the shifting musical program of the bands that played in ballrooms large and small. The constant stylistic shifts in “I Can’t Tell a Lie” are all to the popular music point. The joke isn’t only that the classical-sounding music that matches the couple’s costumes keeps being interrupted by pop sounds; it’s that the interruptions reference real varieties of popular music heard everywhere outside the movie theaters where Holiday Inn first played to capacity audiences. The routine runs through a veritable catalog of popular dance music circa 1942. The brief bit of Conga was a particularly poignant joke at the time. A huge hit in the late 1930s, the Conga during the war became an invitation to controlled mayhem, a crazy release of energy in a time of crisis when the dance floor was an important place of escape. A regular feature at servicemen’s canteens, the Conga was an old novelty dance everybody knew, so its intrusion into “I Can’t Tell a Lie” can perhaps be imagined as something like hearing the mid-1990s hit “Macarena” after the 2001 terrorist attacks—old party music echoing from a less complicated time.14 If today we miss these finer points, in 1942 audiences—who flocked to this movie—certainly got them all. “I Can’t Tell a Lie” was funnier then, and for specifically musical reasons that had everything to do with the larger world of popular music and dance. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, many such musical jokes or references can be recovered by listening to Astaire’s films in the context of the popular music marketplace.

Here, I was home and I was safe. We were stronger together. Three years—three years since they first took me. Not that long after my eighteenth birthday and I had no idea any of this was possible. The dream I didn’t dare have.

I swallowed his cock and savored his expression. Definitely a happy birthday to me.

Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.” ― Louise Gluck

Needing a new way to regain attention for Joséphine, she and Pepito announced that they had married at the American embassy on her 21st birthday. The marriage was as phony as Pepito’s title of Count. But Derval capitalized on the sham marriage by placing posters all over town claiming Joséphine was now a countess. She played her part well, acting the bubbly, giddy bride at a press conference: “I’m just as happy as I can be. I didn’t have any idea that getting married was exciting

Olya “Lynx” Federov sat in the cockpit of her fighter. The Lightning-class attack craft that formed the mainstay of the Confederation’s fighter corps were sleek and powerful. The pilots of the fleet almost universally loved the design, save for one factor. The cockpits were too small, too cramped. But Federov didn’t care. She was slight in build, barely forty-five kilograms, and not much taller than a meter and a half. Her body was lithe, flexible. She’d wanted to be a dancer when she was younger, until she’d seen a squadron of fighters putting on a show on the vid. Flight had captured her imagination that day, and her life became a relentless pursuit of a slot at the Academy, one which saw success three days after her nineteenth birthday, when she received her billet in the following year’s class