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[Pamcake1]

Toni Basil

Fifty years ago, in June 1974, Toni Basil found herself in a New York rehearsal room with David Bowie, a stack of chairs, a pile of assorted props and a problem. Bowie had hired Basil – the dancer, actress, filmmaker and singer who found global fame eight years later with her chart-topping single "Mickey" – to choreograph his Diamond Dogs tour, and the pair were struggling to come up with a scene to follow the moment in which two backing singers Bowie had been holding on rope leashes would turn to attack him.

 

[SaintsSeptember]

Disco is still live, other thread is not.

If there is no issue with the created thread, why does a moderator inclined to remove it?

 

[SaintsSeptember]

Toni Basil

Fifty years ago, in June 1974, Toni Basil found herself in a New York rehearsal room with David Bowie, a stack of chairs, a pile of assorted props and a problem. Bowie had hired Basil – the dancer, actress, filmmaker and singer who found global fame eight years later with her chart-topping single "Mickey" – to choreograph his Diamond Dogs tour, and the pair were struggling to come up with a scene to follow the moment in which two backing singers Bowie had been holding on rope leashes would turn to attack him.


“He’d wrapped himself up in rope and fallen to his knees,” recalls Basil. “As he stood up and started to untangle himself, I saw the lightbulb go on above his head. He grabbed four chairs and stretched the rope around them to make a boxing ring. Then he pulled a pair of boxing gloves from the prop pile and started punching away at the air while singing 'Panic in Detroit.'”


Speaking on a video call from her home in Los Angeles, Basil remembers the thrill she felt watching Bowie (who died aged 69 in 2016) “seizing that dynamic wow-moment of inspiration”. Towards the end of the song, she says, “I was so excited I yelled ‘Go David! Knock yourself out!’… And he actually did!” That was how Bowie would go on to perform the song on stage: launching a punch towards his own jaw and dropping out of the spotlight.


Basil, now 80, is a conversational plasma ball, sending out sparks in all directions as she rattles off stories from her kaleidoscopic career: of dancing with “beautiful” Elvis Presley in "Viva Las Vegas," 1964; stripping naked for 1966’s "Breakaway," arguably the world’s first music video; acting with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in "Easy Rider" in 1969; and with Jack Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces" the following year.


More recently, she choreographed Playboy bunnies and go-go dancers in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film about the Manson Family murders in the summer of 1969. “I’d been on a couple of dates with Jay Sebring,” she says, referring to a man who became a close friend of Sharon Tate’s, and was murdered alongside her. “He was one of the few straight celebrity hairdressers in Hollywood at that time and a very popular guy…”


As the founder of the pioneering 1970s street dance group The Lockers, Basil has choreographed everyone from Tina Turner to Talking Heads. As we talk, she’s still got her coat on after rushing home from a dance session with former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth. Basil has devoted much of her life to making the famous look slick but, she says, she’s “never been starstruck by anyone because I grew up on the side of the stage, you see.”


Born Antonia Christina Basilotta in Philadelphia in 1943, to a vaudevillian acrobat mother and orchestra-leading father, Basil says she “had seen a thousand shows before I grew up and I was always dancing in the wings. I was that kid who couldn’t sit still – and I still am!”


The family moved to New York, Chicago and finally Las Vegas where Basil led her high-school cheerleading squad, falling for the chanting style she’d later use on "Mickey" – her punchy twist on British band Racey’s 1979 song Kitty.


“Back in the 1950s we didn’t do all the ‘mounts’ you see in cheerleading today, where they’re standing on top of each others’ heads,” she says. “But my group was good – we won competitions.” Across the latter half of the 20th century Basil believes cheerleading evolved into “a great American art form”. That’s what she wanted to celebrate with "Mickey." Although Basil was 39 when she recorded the hit, she still fit perfectly into her old Carson High School cheerleading kit for the video that inspired girls around the world to start clambering onto each other’s shoulders.


“That video was the first time many Europeans had seen real, fierce American cheerleaders on screen,” she says. “In films and TV they usually got jazz dancers to run around with pom poms. But that video showed the strong stuff!”


Although she was dancing professionally from childhood, Basil’s career really took off when she started appearing on the groundbreaking TV pop show "Shindig!" on which she also served as assistant choreographer, quickly becoming the go-to go-go dancer of the 1960s. Inspired by the funk-snap moves of James Brown, her style was urgent, intense and wide-eyed.


She appeared in three films in 1964 alone: shaking her thing in a bikini opposite Frank Sinatra in "Robin and the 7 Hoods"; spinning in the sand in "Pajama Party," and running wild as “the girl with the red dress on” that Elvis sang about in "Viva Las Vegas."


It was perhaps inevitable that free-thinking Basil would gravitate towards the counter-culture set in California’s Topanga Canyon, where she ended up living with the actor Dean Stockwell for 12 years. Although many in that crowd were using drugs at the time, Basil tells me that “dancing has always been my drug of choice. Movement changes your mood, it raises your serotonin levels, y’know? Most dancers are stoned out of their minds on it.”


Did she ever feel vulnerable, as a young female dancer surrounded by famous and powerful men? “No!” She laughs. “There were only around 10-15 girls doing all the go-go dancing in Hollywood at that time. We were always busy working, people were always watching.”


Indeed, the perma-perky Basil says she “didn’t really have a sense of anything murky going on until the Manson murders. I heard about that on the news. It was chilling; I had spent time up at the house where it happened, although that was before Sharon Tate moved in…”


She says that going to work on Tarantino’s set – for which he cordoned off five blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and redressed all the windows – “was like being on an LSD trip back in time to 1969. I used to live just up the street from the Chinese Theatre there. It doesn’t seem that long ago and yet here you are telling me even Bowie’s Diamond Dogs tour was 50 years ago…”


During the Diamond Dogs tour, Bowie’s mental and physical health was famously battered by a growing addiction to cocaine. But Basil insists that, during rehearsals, he was always “very hard working, very knowledgeable. He sent me off to watch "The Rocky Horror Show" in London to get a sense of what he was looking for. I came in on the first day with a little sketch of a gigantic woman lying across a city skyline. I told him: ‘You need to be bigger than the buildings!’ We managed that by having his giant silhouette thrown across the set as he walked on to the stage.”


After her own brief flash of pop stardom with "Mickey," Basil returned behind the scenes, reuniting with Bowie for his Glass Spider tour and choreographing films such as "Legally Blonde" (2001) – for which she created the iconic “bend and snap” man-snagging move. In 2022 she belatedly won the rights to receive royalties for "Mickey" after a long legal battle that she says “cost a fortune”. Today, she judges street dance competitions and teaches dance classes; a few years ago, a video of her still throwing razor sharp shapes went viral, proving that age cannot wither her.


“I’ll never stop dancing if I can help it,” she tells me. “If I stopped for two weeks it would take me six months to get back into shape. So I just won’t stop!”


Story by Helen Brown for The Telegraph.


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She presented very well for her age with "Micky" and its good that she got a cash boost from her career.

 

[Pamcake1]

Two Michael's from the St Kilda Football team....give Toni a Jumper, who knew!

 

[Brian Oblivion]

Then they gave a jumper to this guy ...... actually they didn't but I wish they did.

 

[SaintsSeptember]

Two Michael's from the St Kilda Football team....give Toni a Jumper, who knew!

She was 40 or so then, what a hottie.

 

[SaintsSeptember]

 

[SaintsSeptember]

 

[Brian Oblivion]

Warning - may contain swearing ........

 

[True Believer]

She was 40 or so then, what a hottie.

Demonstrates the benefit of not sitting around growing your arse!!

 

[DemurePrincess]

Demonstrates the benefit of not sitting around growing your arse!!

Growing your arse?

Sometimes it grows by itself like for blokes….things shrink!

The balance is there

 

[True Believer]

Growing your arse?

Sometimes it grows by itself like for blokes….things shrink!

The balance is there

Doesn't grow by itself!

It's like when my wife asks me "do these jeans make my bum look big?" - I tell her "No it's not the jeans, it's all the donuts you eat that do that"......

Shrinkage hasn't been an issue to date, but now you have me worried - do I have to watch out for that in the future?

 

[DemurePrincess]

Doesn't grow by itself!

It's like when my wife asks me "do these jeans make my bum look big?" - I tell her "No it's not the jeans, it's all the donuts you eat that do that"......

Shrinkage hasn't been an issue to date, but now you have me worried - do I have to watch out for that in the future?

Just say YES mate! Wow! Think the donut thought but only brave men say it!

As for shrinkage… it’s real mate! Height mostly!

 

[True Believer]

Just say YES mate! Wow! Think the donut thought but only brave men say it!

As for shrinkage… it’s real mate! Height mostly!

Great, so I'm all good as long as I'm laying down then!!

 

[Pakenhamsaint]

AI is useless

 

[SaintsSeptember]

AI is useless

Perhaps try a gypsy fortune teller.

 

[Brian Oblivion]

From The Chaser today ..........

​

​ RE: Australian government response to Israeli war crime (template)​

​

​ ​ CONFIDENTIAL - TO ALL LABOR STAFFERS, HERE IS THE FILL-IN-THE-BLANKS GUIDE FOR RESPONDING TO ISRAEL’S BOMBING OF REFUGEES, USE THIS WHENEVER THE MEDIA ASKS QUESTIONS. REMEMBER TO NEVER PUT THE IDEA OF SANCTIONS IN ANYONE’S HEAD AND ALWAYS TALK AS SPECIFICALLY AS POSSIBLE TO AVOID ANSWERING QUESTIONS ABOUT WHY WE ARE STILL SUPPLYING WEAPONS PARTS TO THE IDF. WE MUST DO THESE TO AVOID THE TRAGIC LOSS OF ANY SEATS IN THE UPCOMING ELECTION. DO NOT SHARE THE TEMPLATE WITHOUT FILLING IT OUT!!! — To whom it may deeply concern, The (term for ‘thing that happened’ that is vague and doesn’t sound too bad) that has been seen in (location) recently has been (adjective) concerning. Australia once again maintains our position that (word that means ‘violence’ but in a term that doesn’t sound as scary) should not continue for too much longer. This tragic (word that makes it sound like a natural disaster) was concerning and as such we are calling for (thing that sounds like action but isn’t). We are also disturbed by (insert claim that has already been proven false to both-sides the blame for the deaths of civilians) and hope that a solution can be found to bring the hostages home without Israel crossing any (colour of line that Israel is allowed to cross) lines. Yours in (word to help pretend like you actually care about any of the people in danger), (Insert politician name here)​

 

[BigPowerForward]

 

[Dr Spaceman]

 

[Brian Oblivion]

 

[BigPowerForward]

 

[marcus1232]

Did anyone else know the T20 world cup starts today?

 

[Brian Oblivion]

Did anyone else know the T20 world cup starts today?

Yeah - it's on Amazon Prime I think ?

 

[StFly]

Yeah - it's on Amazon Prime I think ?

Correct, is on prime. Canada v USA is on at present.

We lost to the WIndies by 30ish and spanked Namibia in the warm ups, games will be split between the USA and Windies in lead up as Bridgetown Barbados, Providence Guyana, New York, USA, Dallas USA and then they move in later stages to the Windies proper.

The USA rocking NZ national Corey Anderson for the record. and Canada currently botching it.

 

[StFly]

And the USA win the first match.

Canada started well, fell in a bit a hole, found something at the end and got close to 200.
USA started on fire, managed the run rate and Canada straight botched their bowling effort entirely. Parried 6's, slipping over, missing the ball, several wides/nb and such just shocking.

Couple Saffas, NZ and actual cricket regions with the USA team, re Canada, maybe Pakistani expats, gone are the days of native representation for the "minnow' regions.