In gratitude for that -- as well as smaller stories about the couple, such as how Al and Maxine always scraped together enough money for a yearly trip to London, but never had enough left for cocktails on the plane and so smuggled on their own vodka -- Chuck began organizing his infamous Left Footer's Balls to raise money for the Changing Scene. Held every two years, the balls featured a live band and gigantic, fancifully inept production numbers like Wanda and the Flambes, who juggled fire while skating. "They couldn't skate, and they certainly couldn't twirl fire," Chuck recalls, "but they wanted to anyway, and I said okay."
Maxine attended the 1996 event leaning on a walker, but she was amused all the same by the Senior Walker and the All Stars production number that featured geriatric dancers twirling walkers. By 1998 she was too sick to attend.
Scene from a marriage: Al Brooks and Maxine Munt in their Changing Scene last year.
Scene from a marriage: Al Brooks and Maxine Munt in their Changing Scene last year.
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"I wish she'd been there," Chuck recalls. "I mean, I met my wife at her theater."
Evalyn came to the Changing Scene in the early '70s, with a degree in dance from Colorado State University. She got a job at the Woolworth's across the street, "selling nail polish to people who wanted to match the color of the bow in their poodles' hair," she recalls. "The first time I went into the theater, they had that porn theater downstairs, and all I heard was moaning and groaning, and I thought, 'Oh, my god, what kind of dance is this?' But it turned out to be their own style. Maxine was more aware of the space around her during movement. Al was more demanding. He'd say, 'Do this!' I'd say, 'That's not possible,' and he'd say, 'Oh, well, do it anyway.' They never had children -- we ended up being something like that."
As a surrogate child, Evalyn felt she had to fib whenever she engaged in an activity at odds with modern dance -- "I lied when I sprained my ankle cross-country skiing" -- and she took Al's costuming suggestions with a grain of salt. "He always told us, 'What do you need costumes for? Do it naked!' He had no concept of how much trouble he could get into," she recalls.
Sometimes it's hard for her to remember the vitality of those days -- and the vitality of Al and Maxine. "They are both dancers and always will be," she says, "but it's hard when your mind functions but your body can't do the basic things."
Not that it's changed some things more basic than movement.
"I brought my daughter over to see Maxine last summer," Evalyn remembers, "and she's a dance major, too. She told Maxine she wanted to go to London after graduation to experience that for a while. And frail little Maxine, she had her fist in the air, and she said, 'Just grab life. Take it and run!'
"And that's how they were," she says. "That's how they were."
