Gene Kelly amazing dance routine on roller skates......

[USALiberal]

[lapucelle]

1. Here's Fred and Ginger on roller skates

[USALiberal]

3. That is great! Thanks! nt

[PatSeg]

2. I love Gene Kelly

My all time favorite dancer!

[lapucelle]

5. I think he was pretty much self-taught.

I read that he used to drive the studio suits in charge of insurance crazy with his bold (and dangerous) routines.

[frazzled]

7. No, he had a lot of training

If the entire world seemingly knows of Mr. Kelly's contribution to film musicals, few of his fans may be aware of how far-reaching the dance background was that got him to the top and kept him there as dancer, choreographer and director.

Like Martha Graham, Mr. Kelly hails from Pittsburgh, and he too first attracted attention on Broadway under the sponsorship of the same noted producer, John Murray Anderson. Few balletomanes may know that his most influential ballet teacher, Berenice Holmes, was the original Polyhymnia in the commissioned premiere of Stravinsky's ''Apollo,'' choreographed by Adolph Bolm in 1927. One year later, Serge Diaghilev assigned the same score to George Balanchine.

A Diaghilev dancer and Bolshoi alumnus, Alexander Kotchetovsky, helped round out Mr. Kelly's ballet education in the 1930's, when he was also learning to do a mean Rumanian chain dance and Polish mazurka at dance teachers' conventions. The tap and acrobatics instilled in Mr. Kelly as a child were, as he put it, ''a piece of cake,'' by the time he found a mentor in the Broadway choreographer Robert Alton - an unsung innovator of the Broadway musical.

https://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/17/movies/gene-kelly-ballet-influenced-his-view-of-dance.html

[lapucelle]

9. Well thank you for that.

I stand both corrected and more educated!

[lillypaddle]

4. When I was a kid

I just ate those "song and dance" movies right up. Couldn't get enough of them. Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and so many more.

[Aristus]

10. I disliked them when I was a kid. I thought they got in the way of the story.

Now I love them.

I could watch the song and dance numbers from 'Singin' In The Rain' all day.

[Submariner]

6. This video makes me miss roller derby

When I was little kid candlepin bowling and roller derby on my Dad's B&W TV was great Saturday morning television. We even had a few roller rinks around town. I think they're all gone now.

[Cracklin Charlie]

8. Kicking thread to show my granddaughter.

Pretty cool.