For years, ballroom dance instructor Karren Walter kept a full-size poster of Vero physician Glenn Tremml in her spare bedroom. And her husband never cared.
“All my guys are great, and I’ve loved every one of them,” she says. “They’re good sports. They let me do what I want with them.”
For seven years, Walter has partnered – outside her bedroom – well-known Vero professionals in the charity fund-raising Dancing with the Vero Stars annual event at Riverside Theatre. She convinced Northern Trust’s Andy White to dress in a shiny shirt and dance pants for a number to Michael Jackson’s “Bad” – and at one point told him, “Grab your crotch. No really. Grab your crotch.” He finally did.
And she transformed the normally shy Tony Donadio, a Vero architect, by ordering him to grow his beard scruffy, don a cowboy hat and go shirtless under a shiny black vest. “He’s got a cute little body,” Walter says analytically. She found that out in a hurry: When Donadio on first meeting confessed to having a tattoo on his biceps, Walter barked: “Take your shirt off. Let me see it.” He obliged.
“They say I’m tough,” says Walter. “But I make it fun.”
As a woman who can make powerful men drop to one Spandex-clad knee, it is fitting that director Mark Wygonik of the Vero Beach Theatre Guild has asked Walter to choreograph this fall’s production of the ballbuster – uh, make that blockbuster – musical “Evita!” Written in the style of a rock opera by Tim Rice and with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the work is loosely based on the life of Eva Perón, the charismatic wife of Argentine president Juan Peron who slept her way to power.
This weekend, Walter will conduct a two-day Latin dance workshop at the Vero Beach Theatre Guild in preparation for auditions for “Evita.”
Unlike the Dancing with the Vero Stars timeline – which includes months of preparation, post-workshop practice time is tight: Auditions are scheduled for July 17, 25 and 26.
Wygonik, who is directing “Evita,” has chosen Walter as the show’s choreographer. She has previously choreographed “Oklahoma,” “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast” and performed as a stripper in “Gypsy,” directed by Jon Putzke. “He was fabulous,” she says. “He was very patient.”
“I’d never done any acting or singing on stage before,” she says. “I wore a little gold body suit and high red suede boots. I looked like Wonder Woman.”
As she began to work out her dance for “Gypsy,” she asked the set designer for a pole, which he gladly provided. “I can be a little risqué,” says Walter coyly, offering two beats of grind as proof. “You want risqué, I got risqué.”
A certified Fred Astaire instructor – she passed an eight-hour exam of the 10 major dances, both leading and following – she taught for years at the franchise’s studio in the Kmart plaza. When the studio closed, she followed one owner, Robert Scott, when he opened Indian River Ballroom. “Right behind Arby’s,” Walter says as if by rote.
Other than an age requirement – 15 or over – the workshop is wide open, even to dance novices. Walter is certainly sympathetic – she didn’t start dancing until the age of 36.
Walter grew up on Long Island, one of two sets of twins – she remains very close to her twin sister, a banker in Miami Lakes. In childhood, Walter’s parents, who worked on different wards at the same psychiatric hospital, took the family back home to Vermont every summer. “They were social dancers,” Walter recalls. “In Vermont, they had social dances in a big barn, and my father and my uncle Morris would dance with me, the foxtrot, the polka. My uncle Morris used to knock my knees, but that’s how I learned to follow. By the time I got to Fred Astaire, I could follow very naturally from the start.”
That was in 1990. Walter was working as a sales clerk at Anthony’s when a customer who was the secretary at the Fred Astaire studio convinced Walter to come in for a lesson. “She told me, ‘You gotta come meet Eddie. You’re gonna love Eddie.’” That was Eddie Buitrago, who went by Eddie Bui.
Walter went for a couple of lessons, and started working the refreshment table at their Tuesday night dance parties in exchange for more lessons. She took a job there at the front desk, and It wasn’t long before she earned her certification as instructor, and began a long partnership with Bui on the competitive pro-am circuit.
The duo’s crowning achievement was performing at the 1999 Super Bowl halftime show in Miami. The Vero pair, among 40 couples picked from nationwide auditions, swing-danced on the 50-yard line as the California swing band Big Bad Voodoo Daddy performed “Go Daddy-O” – followed by Stevie Wonder and Gloria Estefan, who chose the couple for even more airtime: They were one of 10 couples chosen to join her on the stage for “Oyé,” the Spanish-language hit from her 1998 dance album, “Gloria!”
“They said we were the most animated,” says Walter proudly, dashing off a few poses from her night in the spotlight.
Today, Walter works as a receptionist at Kimley-Horn and Associates. After years of working at Victoria’s Secret in the mall, and briefly as a bank teller on Miracle Mile – where she was held up at gunpoint and locked in the vault – she decided answering the phones at Kimley-Horn leaves her with the most time for dancing. She has worked there 11 years.
She gives private lessons in ballroom dancing at the Indian River Ballroom near U.S. 1, “right behind Arby’s,” as she sums up by rote.
In Vero, she teaches “whenever anybody needs it,” chiefly on Saturdays. Her clients range from couples preparing for their wedding to people looking for exercise. “One elderly gentleman wanted to do the foxtrot for exercise, and that’s all he did,” she says, smiling. Another had a prosthetic leg. He came in without his wife, who dropped him off.
“After a couple of months, I told him he’s ready, ask your wife. She came in and they danced,” she recalls proudly. “His wife cried, but he was so happy.”
The Latin dance workshop for both days costs $10 and runs from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, and 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday at the Theatre Guild, 2020 San Juan Ave. The only requirement is that dancers be 15 or over. “Evita” will run Nov. 10-27.
