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my mother ushered us through a club full of women, whispering to us, “Keep close. Keep close.” Later, I realized we were dancing for a party of lesbians. But I don’t think my mother cared who was in the audience as long as we got to perform. We danced at an insane asylum; at an Army hospital where the soldiers were lying in bed and holding mirrors so they could see us; and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a group of Greek sailors, who clapped like crazy watching a bunch of teenage and pre-teen girls kicking their legs up.
    We went to Fort Dix, Fort Jay, and Fort Hamilton on the Brooklyn shore where the water splashed over the wall and got us wet as we tapped. I think we invented a new step: tap-splash, tap-splash, tap-slip-fall, get up again. At a place in upstate New York, they put us on a gravel driveway. Then they told my mother that there wasn’t going to be a piano. Rather than complain, she pulled a kazoo out of her purse. She played the kazoo as we kicked gravel around.
    We were on
Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour
three times. To better our chances during the first appearance, I helped lock our competition, a group of Irish folk dancers, in their dressing room. They nearly missed their cue. But my mother played by the rules. Before each show, she put up signs in our elevator, telling people to call in and vote for us. It must have worked. We won each time and went to the finals at Madison Square Garden, where we opened for Pat Boone but ultimately lost to child star Jojo Vitale singing “That’s Amore.”
    Even though I danced like this through high school, I never thought of myself as an entertainer. I suppose I was. I do know that I got way more out my mother’s insufferable dance classes than I ever realized at the time. Years later I fell back on my ability to dance. I tapped on
Laverne & Shirley
. I did the lindy with Barry Manilow on his first TV special. I break-danced on TV before most of America had even seen break dancing. Those classes I hated so much had given me a Plan B and a lifetime of confidence. But like most people, I needed to live most of my life before I could look back and understand how lucky I was to have been tortured.

CHAPTER 6
Dear Mom & Dad

    A portrait of Penny’s parents, taken in the 1930s
Godfrey Durr
    I WENT TO CAMP EVERY summer starting at age nine, and every one of those days I was there I wrote a letter home. You had to in order to get into the mess hall for dinner. My letters were all variations on the same theme:
    Dear Mom & Dad,
Hi, how are you? How are Nanny and Grandpa?
Send candy.
    Love,
Penny
    Aside from wanting to satisfy the daily requirement to get into the dining hall, I might have asked for food so I could build up a reserve and not have to come home. I would have gladly stayed at camp year-round if it had been possible. Going was a family tradition. Both of my parents had spent their childhood summers at camp. My mother had been the dance counselor at Camp Geneva in Lake Como, Pennsylvania, and she kept going even after she was married.
    Before any of us went away, though, we spent summers taking family trips to Avon-by-the-Sea on the Jersey Shore. I enjoyed goingthere, too. It meant no dance school. My mother closed the ballroom for two months and we loaded up the family car and headed south on the highway. Within an hour or two, Garry, Ronny, and I began to throw up. Once one of us vomited, it set off a chain reaction. We all threw up. It was a sure sign summer had arrived.
    In Avon, we rented rooms in a large two-story home a short walk from the beach. After we unpacked, my father drove back home and went to work. I guess that was his idea of a vacation—life without the rest of us. However, he returned on the weekends. As a little kid, I enjoyed his company. He took me to the arcade in Asbury Park and horseback riding in Belmar. Without him around, though, my mother exhaled. She put on her satin bathing suit, covered her hair with a scarf, and spent the