Sharing the spotlight

Tiffany Brown

DeLois LaDelle, right, watches from the wings as her youngest student tap dances during a performance at Winchester Cultural Center on Dec. 19. LaDelle once danced with the Radio City Rockettes.

By Jerry Fink (contact)

Monday, Jan. 7, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Seventy-year-old DeLois LaDelle has found the fountain of youth that flows through her feet, legs and heart, made strong by more than 60 years of dancing.

Tap. Jazz. Belly. Tango.

She does it all and for a dozen years has shared her talent with an array of mostly older students who come to her for exercise but often end up in the limelight, dancing in revues at convalescent hospitals, senior citizen centers and other venues where folks can appreciate the fine art of movement.

“I’m doing something I love,” says LaDelle, who danced in supper clubs around the world for more than 30 years before settling in Las Vegas and marrying.

It’s a love she instills in her students at the Creative Studio, 3400 W. Desert Inn Road.

“I played the piano for years but wanted to try tap dancing,” says 66-year-old Anna Diorio, a student of LaDelle’s for eight years. “I wanted to do something different. She guaranteed me that I would learn a dance number in two months. In three months, she had me dancing in a revue at a convalescent hospital.”

Diorio says she was frightened at first, but LaDelle’s infectious spirit and enthusiasm kept her going and now she routinely dances in productions put on by the instructor.

“We danced at an Alzheimer’s home and the people there just loved it,” says Diorio, a part-time medical claims investigator. “They might not be able to comprehend anything else, but music is the last thing they lose, apparently. They were clapping and swaying. It just makes you feel wonderful.”

Macrina Drylak, 58, has been a member of LaDelle’s class for 2 1/2 years.

“I needed to lower my cholesterol,” she says. “My medicine needed a little help.”

She says her cholesterol level dropped 81 points after she started the dance class.

“And the class is a good confidence builder,” Drylak says.

Melody March, head of the First Christian Child Development Center, is spreading the word about the benefits of dance.

“I’m director of a preschool day-care center,” says March, who took up dancing for exercise. “I have a dance teacher who comes to the Development Center to teach now I have eight little tap dancers.”

March says she was hooked immediately when she began lessons five years ago.

“I had never danced before,” she says. “And I’m shy, but this is so much fun. I just love it. DeLois builds your confidence.”

LaDelle, who was Ms. Senior Nevada in 2005, began tap dancing at the age of 4 1/2 in her native Virginia.

“My granddaddy kind of started me off when I was real little. He was an amateur guitar player and got me interested in music,” she says.

Her mother paid for dance lessons for almost 12 years, until she was 16 and went to New York to dance with the Rockettes for the summer. During her stint with the famed dance group she met choreographer Henry LeTang, who died last year at 92.

“Henry charged 100 bucks an hour for dance lessons and I couldn’t afford that,” LaDelle says. “But I used to watch him give lessons and I’d practice and finally he came to me and said, ‘Honey, come on in here. I can tell you have good feet.’ So he worked with me for free.”

She learned her tap style from him rapid movement, feet barely leaving the floor.

LaDelle returned home briefly to finish high school and then attended Kent State University for a year before deciding the only thing she wanted to do was dance. She hit the road and has been hoofing it since.

When she began her career in the late ’50s there were a lot of supper clubs and hotels that offered revues solo dancers, comedians, singers, musicians. She worked with the likes of Jerry Van Dyke, Vaughn Monroe, Henny Youngman, Don Rickles and Jerry Lester, and she opened for a lot of old-time bandleaders, including Charlie Spivak in Orlando, Fla.

“Charlie taught me how to sing,” she says, “how to breathe like a horn player.”

Then she put together an act, singing, Hawaiian dancing, belly dancing, tap, jazz. She performed at Hilton hotels across the country. For a while she was at Imperial Palace in Las Vegas.

“The first time I performed in Vegas was in ’74 or something,” LaDelle says. “It was at the Desert Inn (where the Wynn Las Vegas now stands). I was on a big drum that came out of the floor.”

She performed in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau, a venue being re-created on the Strip between the Sahara and the Riviera.

During one of her trips to Vegas she met the man she would eventually marry, Jack LaDelle, an entertainer and businessman who performed with legends such as Bing Crosby and Perry Como. Jack LaDelle died in 1998 at age 77.

But in the early ’80s she opened a nightclub in Columbus, Ohio, and married a Teamster she had been dating. When the marriage failed she flew back to Vegas to see Jack LaDelle.

“He asked me to marry him,” LaDelle says. “I told him I had to think about it and flew back home.”

On the flight she realized he was the only man she’d ever loved, so when the plane landed she called him, accepted his proposal and caught the next flight back to Vegas.

“My husband convinced me to teach dancing,” LaDelle says. “He knew me so well. He knew I could never settle down.”