WORLD’S OLDEST SHOWGIRL IN 2009 GUINNESS RECORD BOOK – Dorothy Dale Kloss, Age 85, Now in Her 14th Season of Fabulous Palm Springs Follies
Palm Springs, California (February 4, 2009) Physical allure, vitality, and advancing age can co-exist! For proof of this claim, you need look no further than The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies and Dorothy Dale Kloss, an 85-year-old sensation of youth and energy. She has been tap dancing on the Follies’ stage for 14 years with the skill and electricity of someone a quarter her age–continuing a dance career that began decades ago, in the 1930s.
Her legendary status is confirmed on page 90 of the just published Guinness World Records 2009 edition, where she is shown in full showgirl plumage and is designated as the “world’s oldest still performing showgirl.”
Little Dorothy Hunn (her maiden name) was already dancing when Calvin W. Coolidge was president of the United States, took lessons at three, taught the legendary Bob Fosse to tap dance when she was a teenage prodigy, and emerged at the famed Empire Room of the Palmer House in Chicago as, Dorothy Dale, a show business headliner at 15!
She was paid $35 for the first week, bought a dress for her mother, and still has the cancelled check as a souvenir. Dorothy went on to become a featured act with the touring Eddie Duchin Orchestra and appeared with other notables of the Big Band era such as Ray Noble, Skinnay Ennis and Shep Fields, as well as working with renowned comedian Cantinflas in Mexico City in the Folies Bergere.
In the early days of television, she was the first tap dancer ever to appear on the tube and had her own show at WBKB in hometown Chicago. She married and raised one son, and taught dance at the Academy of the Sacred Heart. Domesticity then took her to Florida and California and even a five-year stint as director of guest services on the Queen Mary, moored in Long Beach. But she also retained her ties with dance by running her own studios, and one of her students in Pasadena suggested in 1994 that she return to performing, in the Follies. An audition tape was sent to Palm Springs, and Leila Burgess, the company dance manager, proclaimed, “Now that’s a great dancer.” At 71, Dorothy Dale Kloss had a new career.
Just half a dozen years earlier, she had overcome a bout with colon cancer. When the doctor started to warn her, “Now, Dorothy, in five years….,” she answered, “I don’t want to hear about that, about how long I’ve got. Don’t tell me. When the time comes, that’s it.” That has remained her philosophy: “I just never thought about it any more.” And she has sailed blithely through her senior years, with a perky, positive attitude.
Ask her if her feet and body ache after a performance, one of nine weekly, and she replies jauntily (and apocryphally), “No, I just soak them in vodka.”
She revels in being a silver-blonde 5 foot 5½ inch “Long-Legged Lovely.”
“The advantage of being in the Follies,” Dorothy says, “is that when I get up in the morning, I know where I’m at, what I’m going to do the rest of the day.”
Adversity doesn’t faze her. A year ago, she was doing a back step during her tap solo in the show when her heel caught in an elevator slot on stage and she fell flat on her posterior. Wayne Albritton, a fellow dancer, picked her up, still dazed. She recalls, “Joni Naber, another of our dancers, who’s so cute, looked over and barked, ‘Hands up, Dorothy!’ It got me back on track, and I finished the number.”
According to Follies Impresario Riff Markowitz, “If the rest of my Long-Legged Lovelies are impressive–and indeed they are–Miss Kloss is nothing less than a Force of Nature! She is just like us, except she is also a miracle.”
Dorothy’s favorite song, she says with a wink, is “When My Old Wedding Ring Was New.”
But more meaningful is the quote first uttered appropriately enough in Follies, Steven Sondheim’s Broadway hit, that has become the mantra of Dorothy Dale Kloss, octogenarian hoofer:
“Good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all and, my dear, I’m still here.”
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Links/URLs:
Dorothy Dale Kloss Media Profile & High Resolution Photos: http://www.psfollies.com/pr/profiles/Kloss.php
Follies Season 18 Video with Dorothy Kloss: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSjRQQ3lHiM
Download Broadcast Quality Follies’ Season 18 Video with Dorothy Kloss: http://www.psfollies.com/pr/video.php
Follies’ RSS Media Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/follies_pr
Riff Markowitz Interviews Dorothy Dale Kloss: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRI2L6KOIu0
Bob Fosse on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Fosse
Palmer House on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_House
Eddie Duchin on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Duchin
“Dorothy Kloss Day” on CBS2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYA-UeaCqcU
Dorothy on The Today Show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ijYBv9T_Cw
Dorothy on NTV (Russian TV): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QcnQei6dio&feature=PlayList&p=A317CEFF9DD2B2C2&playnext=1&index=2
Dorothy on CBS2 for Tin Pan Alley Follies Edition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFg9tpU6Uhw
Dorothy on CBS2 with Sammy King: http://www.psfollies.com/kloss_video.php
Dorothy in Reminisce Magazine: http://www.psfollies.com/kloss_reminisce.php
Dorothy at the Indian Wells Center for Healthy Living at Eisenhower: http://www.psfollies.com/kloss_eisenhower.php
Dorothy on Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141856/
Riff Markowitz Profile: http://www.psfollies.com/pr/profiles/markowitz.php
During its 18 seasons, The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies has been seen by nearly three million patrons, and celebrates the music and dance of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s with a cast ranging in age from 55 to 85 years “young.” The show features lavish, Broadway-caliber production numbers and plays five days a week from late October through May 17. In 1997, it was the subject of an Oscar-nominated short documentary entitled Still Kicking: The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies. The show is housed in downtown Palm Springs’ historic Plaza Theatre–a charming, neon-encrusted, storybook old movie house–and is an attraction itself. Tickets may be purchased by calling the Box Office at (760) 327-0225 or online at www.psfollies.com
February 4, 2009
Posted in: United States SouthWest