A Dance Doctor Who Will Make House Calls

Is your jitterbug looking a bit anemic lately?

Do the dips in your waltz have no vital signs?

Whatever the dance floor ailment, increasing numbers of Southern Californians have discovered a new remedy: the “Dance Doctor.”

He’s the old-fashioned type. He makes house calls.

A Step Healer

While many of John Cassese’s patients enlist his services chiefly as a pleasurable substitute for aerobic exercise (“This is a lot more fun than working out in a room full of sweaty people,” insists four-times-a-week client Kathleen Beck), most people hire the Dance Doctor to heal their steps.

Clients include couples, like Bruce and Karen Horowitz, who called Cassese so they’d look spectacular dancing together at their wedding, and widows, such as philanthropist Anna Bing Arnold, who sought him out so she could learn to follow any dance partner.

There are businessmen, like Pacific Palisades real estate developer Glenn Berk, who never learned to dance and was put off by the prospect of learning publicly in a class full of strangers. So he arranged a weekly class for himself and his 12-year-old daughter--only to have it regularly crashed by his wife and the children’s nanny.

Even professional dancers have been known to summon the Dance Doctor. Carol Lawrence, for instance, recently enlisted Cassese to help her prepare for an exercise video featuring Broadway show tunes--and then gave him a role in the video.

And Miriam Aaron, a former ballerina and exhibition ballroom dancer, hired the Dance Doctor when a physical therapist andmasseuse weren’t helping her to recover after a long illness.

“I can walk alone now without being supported,” she says after about a year of sessions with Cassese. “It’s given me a lift in my life to be able to tango, rumba, samba and fox trot again. It’s restored some of my self-esteem.”

In addition, the Dance Doctor, a firm believer in the regenerative powers of dance, treats larger groups in weekly dance classes at the Pritikin Longevity Center.

A New Yorker of Italian descent who grew up winning every dance contest in sight, Cassese’s story is not unlike that of Tony Manero’s in the movie

14-Hour Days

Instead of heading for Broadway after high school, Cassese first enrolled in college. After a year as an accounting major, however, he went back to dancing, becoming a teacher-trainee at the Arthur Murray Studio in White Plains, N.Y.

Frequently spending 14 hours a day at the Murray center, staying until 2 or 3 a.m. to study films on teaching technique, Cassese completed the course in one year as opposed to the typical three. And he swiftly was awarded a slot teaching in the Murray Studio on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Within another year he was managing the place and personally introducing Kathryn Murray to disco.

But during these “pre-med” years, Cassese had no interest in the next rung on the Murray ladder: owning a franchise. So he enrolled in Turtle Bay Music School, formed a rock band (Pegasus), owned his own nightclub for a while, appeared in off-Broadway shows, did television commercials and performed as both a singer and dancer at such New York spots as the Tavern on the Green and Trude Heller’s.

A 39-year-old who looks more like 25, Cassese initially moved to Los Angeles in 1972 to pursue a recording career, but when that didn’t take off as fast as he would have liked, he shifted into the field of his then girlfriend: real estate.

Not Happy in Real Estate

“I was making good money buying, refurbishing and selling houses but I wasn’t happy,” he recalls over lunch at his favorite restaurant, East/West Gardens, a Melrose district spot serving gourmet macrobiotic fare. “I had a wonderful house in Malibu and one in the Hollywood Hills but it didn’t fill me up. I was very unhappy. I decided I had to make some changes, so I got back into my dancing and singing. If I had stayed with the real estate I probably could have been retired today. But that’s not what makes me happy.”

So about six years ago, Cassese returned to Arthur Murray Studios, opening and managing its Beverly Hills branch. He then moved on to managing three Anatomy Asylum exercise studios for Richard Simmons (in Glendale, Panorama City and Woodland Hills).

But as he began increasingly writing, recording and performing his own music, Cassese decided to go to work for himself as a private dance teacher. Now based in Los Angeles, he came up with the title “Dance Doctor” about a year ago (DANCE DR is also the license plate on his convertible) and had no trouble at all attracting clients willing to pay $50 an hour for his services.

Some, like 37-year-old Denise Cara, have even gone through periods of hiring Cassese to work with her as often as seven times a week.

Cara, owner of a fingernail jewelry company called Nail Gems by Cara, has now cut her sessions back to every other day as her method for staying fit, reducing stress and transforming her mood. Most of all, she appreciates the mental and emotional well-being she gains from the vigorous dance workouts.

Help With Depression

“I do this because I love it,” she says. “My head is in a strong place right now, but I can remember some negative times when my head was in the toilet and John had to pull it out. There were times when I was really depressed and John’s high energy really helped pull me out of it. That’s been the most valuable thing about this for me. There was one time I was sitting on the couch crying. He made me laugh and smile and said ‘You should just be grateful for everything you have.’ ”

If there is anything that marks all of Cassese’s house calls it is a consistent sense of joy and fun for both the teacher and the students as they lose themselves in dance.

He is known for both gentleness and humor (“Not that right foot, your other right foot”). And the doctor’s floorside manner is nothing if not encouraging, whether he’s attending Anna Bing Arnold’s fox trot or Gail Berk’s swing.

“He’s patient, friendly and not fresh at all,” Arnold attests. “He’s good goods.”

‘He’s Terrific’

“I can’t praise him too highly,” says Berk. “He’s terrific.”

Oh, there are occasional problems, the doctor admits, but nothing terminal. Asked if clients have been known to develop crushes on him and request prescriptions he’d rather not fill, Cassese says that has indeed occurred--but that such situations have been handled with a polite but firm insistence that he does not mix business with pleasure.

And there are also occupational hazards such as stereo volume antagonizing neighbors, not to mention Cassese’s enthusiasm for yelling “MOVE IT!!!” even louder than the music.

Cara, whose sessions tend to be on the raucous side and sometimes start as early as 6:30 a.m., remembers a neighbor once shouted back, “Move it yourself. Right outta here.”

But in general, Cassese claims, his practice is largely symptom-free. If there are any minor frustrations lurking in the good doctor, they appear to have more to do with his ambitions than his accomplishments. He’s still working on his recording career and, as you might expect, he’d eventually like to run a chain of Dance Doctor studios or star in a Dance Doctor TV series. Preferably both.

In the meantime, though, he seems inordinately satisfied making all those house calls.

“A big part of my service is to be sure that we have fun. It’s an important part of people’s instruction,” Cassese says. “Basically, what dancing does for everyone is make life more enjoyable. It makes it a little lighter.”