Hanford Tap Dancer, Declassified
2005
Tinted photo
Photo from the “Hanford Historical Photo Declassification Project”.

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I don’t know anything about this woman and am assuming she is tap dancing in a talent show at the Hanford Theater. Whether she’s concentrating or uncomfortable is difficult to tell. Either she is focused on and straining to push out those beats and has forgotten to smile or she’s not the first act and knew before taking the stage she didn’t have a chance, that it was a senseless exercise , but the show must go on and while it runs her legs begin to feel too long, too naked, too short, too heavy, her feet sweat, her hands sweat, her shoulders chill, they prickle with goosebumps. She’d wanted to be Shirley Temple, Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, but her time is up and she’s on a stage sponsored by the atomic bomb rather than in Hollywood.

Or the photo could have been taken at a wrong moment and a couple seconds in the future she had blasted a hole in the floor with her mighty shoes.

But I doubt it. She reminds of the humiliated, red-head singer in Altman’s “Nashville”, whose slumped shoulders begged the timid removal of her bra during a disastrous performance turned impromptu striptease, which had less to do with her pursuit of stardom and everything to do with submission to the demands of the group of wolves amongst which she found herself, then rationalizing a fair exchange afterwards. Indeed, if I remember correctly, Altman had her dressed in a cape with hood. She was Suleen Gay, played by Gwen Welles, and one of the more heartening moments in film is when she returns home after the failed gig and Wade, played by Robert Doqui, runs off the wolf who’s carted her home, then risks Suleen’s rejection when he tells her she can’t sing and that her only pay will be to be abused and demeaned, her soul ripped to shreds if she continues. Suleen tells Wade that he’s wrong, that she’s been promised she’ll be singing at the Parthenon and stalks off. Left alone on the steps to the building, Wade says to himself, “I don’t know why I stick around. She just makes me so god-damned mad.” And it’s not sad. Wade is a dishwasher who happens to be black and knows the game and Suleen is a white Red Riding Hood and it feels like one of the more hopeful relationships in a film where betrayal is the daily diet.

This photo was numbered 5437. The photo of the group of black dancers was number 5347. They were taken on the same stage, which I know from another photo was the stage of the Hanford Theater. Perhaps they were taken the same night.