If I had one wish to make...

First, I'd like to bring the theme of dancing ladies to a proper close by discussing the poll. Thank you to everyone who voted in the poll! There were 30 votes total. Personality was the winning factor, earning 20 votes (66%). Elegance was a close runner-up with 18 votes (60%). Tapping skills came relatively close behind with 10 votes (33%) and trailing along behind were high kicking legs (5 votes - 16%) and sex appeal (3 votes - 10%). One of the main reasons I chose these factors for the poll is as follows: you may or may not have noticed that Eleanor Powell is not on my list of favorite dancing ladies, despite her fame as the queen of tap. I simply don't care for her much. To me, she lacked a femininity and elegance that I think is important. I think female dancers can get by without it if they enough personality and sex appeal to carry them through. But I don't think she's very sexy and I don't care for her personality very much. So, I thought I'd post the poll to see if other people rate these qualities as highly as I do. Clearly, very few people think sex appeal is important, which is pretty interesting. Anyway, thanks again so much for voting! And thank you for sticking with me through my list of dancing ladies!

Now, to continue with the next list.

For the month of May, I want to highlight my favorite dancing couples. I was going to compile a long list of couples but then I realized that it would be best to tackle this thing in two tiers: dancers who were coupled together multiple times and the ones who were paired up for one film or even one dance. I'm going to go with the first tier first, working my way up to number one couple and then I'm going to go on to the second tier (the 'honorary mentions' if you will, although they're worth more than simple honorary mention). The second tier will all go into one post. The reason I've split these posts up, after all, is because I didn't want to overload you with videos to the point where you wouldn't want to watch them. But if I'm only talking about 5 or maybe 6 couples and, consequently, 5 or maybe 6 videos, that isn't quite so overwhelming. So, here we go. My 10 favorite dancing couples, starting with:

10. Shirley Temple and Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson


Favorite dance: oh, so many! But I think I'm going to go with this one from The Littlest Rebel



I love the way they get to infuse their personalities into this number. I'd love to read up on them as a pairing, to see what their relationship was like. I realize that what you see on the screen is not quite reality but when I watch them, it's easy to imagine that they were really good friends. In her dances with him, she's often imitating him and she seems to carry that dancing style into some of her other dances. I don't know. Just speculation. If anybody knows where I can read up on them, do let me know! I think these two are a great example of chemistry in the more platonic sense. They worked so well together.