“I was like, Oh yeah, I can do that, except for learning a lot of lines,” King says with a laugh. Patsy Cline and instantly envisioned King in the role of Louise Seger, Cline’s real-life friend who narrates the entire production.
Her agent had seen the Broadway musical Always. King eventually moved back to the Duke City to help take care of her mother, and she joined the board of Musical Theatre Southwest as an honorary member. She resided in Los Angeles until the earthquake in 1994 prompted her to hightail it to Hawaii for a spell. She went on to choreograph shows for Six Flags theme parks and formed her own touring nightclub act, Cissy King & Two Fellas. “I was like, jumping through the sky,” she remembers.īy the time King left the show in late 1978, she’d performed with Burgess for twice as long as Boylan had. The first dance she performed with him as a permanent member of Welk’s “musical family” was a Charleston routine choreographed by Albuquerque dancer Mike Haley. Several months later, after Boylan left the show for good, Burgess invited her back as his regular partner. King remembers that they performed an international quickstep, which is a fast fox-trot. “We just had this little, concentrated training, kind of like bringing in some wonderful art historian to train you and 14 other people,” King says.īurgess called her a few months after their fateful dance and asked her to appear as his guest partner on “The Lawrence Welk Show.” It was February 1967, and Barbara Boylan was taking a quick break from the show to get married. Vandapool had distinguished his clan by bringing in renowned instructors from abroad to teach his students the new international style of ballroom dancing. “We were like a known little crowd of dancers-the Albuquerque dancers-and we’d go to competitions and they’d go, Albuquerque’s coming.” “So I taught him probably about eight or 10 lifts.”Īnd because Burgess was already impressed with Albuquerque ballroom dancers and remembered several routines he’d seen them perform over the years at various competitions, he asked her to teach the dances to him. “I said, Bobby, you’re a big strong guy, you can do this,” King says.
Vandapool’s School of Dance in Albuquerque frequently used her as the lifting guinea pig. It just so happened that King was a lifting expert her partners from Joseph H. It was like there was no technical structure,” says King, who had watched Burgess regularly for years on Welk’s show and before that on the “Mickey Mouse Club.”Īfter she improved his pivot, he told her that his dancing partner, Barbara Boylan, was terrified of lifts. “We were dancing and I was like, Can I show you a couple things? Because I never liked the way he pivoted. When she met him for more twirls the following day, he discovered she was quite the leader, too. He commented on her ability to follow well. At a ballroom competition in Hollywood in 1966, Welk dancer Bobby Burgess asked her for a dance. King was a junior at UNM when she got her lucky break on the show.
#BOBBY FROM LAWRENCE WELK TV#
In the late ’90s, Welk-whose trademark German-Russian accent and odd utterances were instant favorites with household audiences-was posthumously named one of TV Guide’s 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time. “The Lawrence Welk Show,” with its mixture of bubbly schmaltz and performances by world-class talents, aired nationally for almost 28 years from the mid-’50s to the early ’80s.
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