Light On Her Feet

On June 21, she was surprised by her peers, who recognized her lifetime contributions to championship dancing in New England.
She was attending the Yankee Classic ballroom competition, a four-day event held annually in Cambridge, when she was called forward to be honored. Ms. French’s lifelong passion for dance started with childhood ballet, tap and jazz lessons, sessions that wound down in number, she said, as her mother tired of making elaborate recital costumes for end-of-the year programs.
It ignited again, however, when she heard the big band-era music of the Glenn Miller band, and she is now, first and foremost, a ballroom dancer.
She met her future husband, who had his own band in high school, dancing to Mr. Miller’s music. The couple honeymooned at the Hotel Pennsylvania, a location that had the New York phone number in longest continuous use, Pennsylvania 6-5000, the inspiration for the Glenn Miller song of the same name.
Mr. Miller, who was at the hotel, came and sat with the honeymooning couple at their table, she said.
As the years passed, Mr. French became a business person, confining his band-playing to gigs with friends, and Ms. French began raising their children, a son and a daughter.
While she had learned some things when she and her friends taught each other steps to the music of a jukebox, Ms. French always “wanted to really learn” to dance.
The Frenches were living in Wellesley when the children reached junior high school age. At that time, Ms. French and a Boston girlfriend decided to take an adult education dancing class.
Ms. French started as a student, then began helping out at the Cambridge dance studio of Katharine Dixon.
There, Ms. French said, she learned to be a teacher. “Once I did, that was it,” she said, “There was no holding me back. I just went on from there.”
Her husband, who died nine years ago, set her up with her first dance studio, in his Wellesley office building, eventually moving his own work to home, she said, as she took over more and more of that building’s space.
Ms. French not only worked as a teacher, she also continued to take dancing lessons, to compete at the professional level in ballroom dancing competitions, and to participate in a number of dance societies.
In 1972, she purchased a site on County Road in Cataumet, across from the Courtyard restaurant. That building, which now houses the Mary French Dance Studio, was built circa 1920 as a Seventh Day Adventist Church.
When the church congregation moved to a new building in Centerville, Ms. French converted the building into a studio, complete with hardwood floors, a wall of mirrors where the altar once stood, and three walls lined with ballet barres upstairs, and classrooms downstairs.
Eventually, she closed her Wellesley studio and concentrated on the Cataumet location.
For more than 30 years, she has been a member of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dance of London, England, and the US. The British, she said, learned the jitterbug from American dancers, often from soldiers stationed overseas, then polished the moves and sold them back to the United States as “the jive.”
Through that society and the others to which she has belonged, Ms. French has had access to some of the top professional dancers from England, she said, as well as to the highest levels of competitive dancing.
She belongs to the Dance Teachers Club of Boston and the American Amateur Organization. She also holds a licentiate, silver level, in the standard ballroom dances, and is proficient in the Latin American dances, including the Argentine tango.
Ms. French winters in Florida, where she also teaches and, as she has always done, works on her own dancing with high-level competition dancers.
A competitive dancer herself, for more than 10 years she helped run the former New England Championships, held in Boston.
She has kept up with all of the dances that have come along, she said this week, from rock’n’roll to the hustle to disco to hip-hop, not to mention country line dancing.
Ms. French, however,  teaches ballroom dancing primarily.
Sandra Maloney also teaches at the studio, Ms. French said, giving lessons in ballet, tap, and jazz.
She recently held a “Princess Day,” Ms. French said, during which Ms. Maloney taught the children their dance steps in preparation for a “graduation” dance to which they could wear princess dresses, complete with tiaras.
Ron Gursky, who teaches on weekends, specializes in the Argentine tango, currently the rage in Boston.
Teaching some of that tango’s steps can be problematic, Ms. French said. One instructor she knows wears shin guards for protection from over enthusiastic kicks.
Ellen Brodsky of the Cape and Islands Amateur Ballroom Dancers Association, who also teaches in Falmouth, takes over ballroom instruction at the center when Ms. French goes to Florida.
For most of the year, however, Mary French teaches, offering both classes and private instruction.
For a period of time when she first came to Cataumet, Ms. French said, she taught dance to the cadets at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, something the then-commander thought was a necessary part of the social graces he wanted his students to know.
She recalls that those cadets, primarily young men, were hesitant to dance with each other, but she would just tell them, “If they can do it at West Point, you can do it here.”
Those classes, held at the MMA, culminated in written invitations to a dinner-dance being sent out by the cadets.
She often gives lessons to young couples being married, as well as to their parents, in preparation for weddings.
She has also had students who met during ballroom dancing lessons, later becoming engaged.
Over the years, she has learned the patience she needs to cope with the personalities she meets. Dancing is a cooperative effort, she said, and it is sometimes hard, especially for modern young women, to give up the urge to lead.
Teaching couples to dance together, building confidence, and making people feel good are all a part of being an effective instructor, she said.
While she loves knowing and watching the children learn and compete, one of her favorite students of all time was a financial wizard who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
He was not only having memory problems, he had recently lost his wife, but he was still able to find joy in dancing. She would turn on old recordings, she said, and he would be able to sing every single word as they danced.
As his memory continued to fade, he would sometimes come into her studio with his shoes on the wrong feet. Eventually, she said, they would just walk arm in arm around the studio as the music played.