Gene Kelly got into street fights as a boy because he hated the dance classes his mother enrolled him in, and dreamed instead of playing shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates. This episode follows how the 1929 stock market crash turned those abandoned dance skills into a way to keep the lights on, how he left law school to run the family dance studio, and how his athlete's mindset produced the legendary work ethic of a man rehearsing alone under a single work lamp at midnight after his 1940 Broadway breakthrough in Pal Joey.

The discussion explores how Kelly deliberately rejected the Fred Astaire top-hat aristocrat model, dressing in t-shirts, white socks and sailor suits to become the dancer for the common man, and how he fused African-American tap influences from Robert Dotson with ballet and Irish vaudeville swagger. It covers his technic ...