On Friday I had an MRI. I’ve had CT-Scans a few times but never an MRI. All I heard about was that it was different. Was I nervous? Of course. Could I do anything about it? No.
JH had already told me that the machine was not great for claustrophobics. I’m not claustrophobic so that didn’t concern me. I was concerned about “what” they might find although I knew I wasn’t going to hear the “what” part right away, so I was able to put that out of my head. What assisted me was the process.
You go into a stall with a curtain, remove all your garments except your underwear (and your socks), put on a short cotton robe and go into “the room.”
The machine looks like a CT-Scan machine — a long, narrow, table-like bed with a place for the back of your head and for your feet (heels). The main device is round, like a large metal doughnut-shape, like the CT-Scan. You lie down, put your arms close to your side, put in ear-plugs and close your eyes.
The doctor/operator tells you it’s going to be noisy— hence the earplugs — but that it’ll take about twenty minutes; and you must keep your eyes closed.
I heard the doctor’s voice tell me over a speaker that we were beginning. The table/bed seemed to elevate and move backwards (into the center of the doughnut, I was presuming). Then the noise began.
![]() | ![]() | | Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan dancing it up for the RKO publicity photographer, circa 1935. I was reminded that work for them (creating the dances) was long and intense but full of the fun (and laughs) that we see in this photo. | ![]() |
NOISE. Bang bang bang, beep beep beep BANG/whack-whack-whack, BANGBANG-buzz-buzz-buzz. Real racket and really loud, relentless, disturbingly loud. I was afraid that the shock of the incessant banging and buzzing and tooting and whacking was going to cause me to accidentally open my eyes. Fear? Fear of opening my eyes, forget what the machine might detect. It was very disturbing.
However. I needed to move my mind to another place in order to endure the 20 or so minutes without panicking. Time goes by very slowly when you’re measuring it, as you know. The banging, however, and the tap tap tap, whack whack whack, reminded me of: Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan.
Long time readers of the NYSD might recall that I wrote a book for Hermes Pan back in the early '80s when I was living in Los Angeles. It was intended to be a memoir and in the process of interviewing Hermes, we became friends and I got to know him quite well. Eventually I did put together a book, although we were not able to find a publisher (it was no tell-all and Hermes avoided controversy for several reasons even though he was in his 70s and his career had ended).
I called the book “The Man Who Danced With Fred Astaire.” Years later, about two or three years ago, some writer researching Hermes met his surviving family of nieces and nephews and came upon Hermes’ copy of my manuscript. The writer, whose name escapes me now, contacted me to interview me. I later learned that he’d lifted my title for his book — which infuriated me but his publisher insisted I had no rights to it. It was published and subsequently forgotten.
Hermes Pan’s life story is almost a fable, like the name he was given at birth (the Pans were Greeks and had a much longer name beginning in Pan ... but it was Anglicized by his father). The man was always a dancer from childhood, never trained but eventually became a seat-of-the-pants professional in the late 1920s in New York. He was working in the chorus of a Ruby and Kallmar Broadway musical called “Top Speed” when the ingénue, a young actress named Ginger Rogers told him she was going out to Hollywood because Talkies had come in and they were beginning to make musical pictures. This was 1930. She told Hermes he should consider the move because they needed singers and dancers for their movies.
![]() | ![]() | | Ginger and Fred dancing the carioca in Flying Down to Rio, 1933. | ![]() |
A few months afterwards Hermes and his sister and mother, in an old Ford they’d bought for $75 embarked on a trip across the country (this was long before interstates). Two years later by chance he got a job at RKO working as an assistant choreographer with a famous musical stage dancer Fred Astaire who was preparing for his first film (with Ginger), “Flying Down To Rio.” The Pan-Astaire collaboration turned out to be a karmic one — it lasted the lifetime of the men’s careers — almost forty years.
This is where my MRI business comes in. So lying there trying to keep myself calm with all this banging going on very loudly despite my lousy hearing and the earplugs, I hit upon Pan and Astaire.
All those numbers we’ve seen on the screen of Fred or Fred and Ginger, all the sound of those tap-tap-tapping that we see and hear, was done after they shot the sequence. Fred and Hermes went into a studio wearing their taps shoes and stood on a cement platform with a wooden floor, in front of the screen. When the reel began, the two men would be watching it and repeat all the steps taking place on the screen, (Hermes would be Ginger's steps) “setting the taps” recording them for the finished product.
There was no mistaking the steps because the two men rehearsed to the point (Astaire’s) of perfection. And, as I learned when Hermes recounted the experience often with a chortle or some laughter, the two men had a good time doing it. It was the ultimate challenge that was fun, and funny. “All dancers are children,” he once said, adding: “they have to be in order to let themselves move unself-consciously.”
So as I lay there on the MRI slab Friday afternoon, focusing on keeping still and keeping my eyes shut, I visualized Pan and Astaire and imagined them setting their taps to the sounds banging all around my head. They both loved percussion and these sounds would have given them inspiration for more fun. The more outrageous the better. This photograph Hermes gave me of the two of them (for RKO publicity) always reminds me of those moments. It also took me thorough a successful session.
Out and About; catching up. Out in Aspen, Ann Nitze gave a tea at the Explore Book shop to celebrate Stephanie Stokes' new book, “Elegant Rooms that Work, Fantasy and Function in Interior Design” (Rizzoli Publishers). |
