The Toledo City Paper depends on readers like you! Become a friend today. See membership options
Born and raised in Toledo, Julie O’Connell left to pursue life as a professional dancer in Hollywood. Her career has taken her around the world, with Broadway musicals, films and choreography work, before eventually leading back to the Midwest. Her book “Winging it, Every Step of the Way”, published in 2004, documents the journey with all its passion, humor, trials and tribulations.
Toledo to Los Angeles
Leaving the Midwest to pursue the arts takes a lot of guts — the kind of guts you have when you’re young and fearless. O’Connell was 18, teaching dance at her mother’s studio in Toledo, when she chose to leave home. That was in 1977, before the advent of cell
phones, computers and GPS, when she drove to LA. She wound up living there for 14 years, dancing in shows and films including Breaking 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984) and Pennies from Heaven (1981), a musical starring Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and Christoper Walken. Set in the depths of the Great Depression it featured the lead actors lip-synching to recordings of early 1930s songs and stunning Busby Berkley style choreography. Walken had been a professional dancer, and Martin learned to tap dance almost as well as he can play banjo. “I was a penny in that movie,” laughs O’Connell, “what’s funny is I had just come off the show 42nd Street where I was dressed as a dime in the opening number, then I got in this movie, and I was dressed as a penny and I thought — I think I’m going down in value!”
O’Connell talks about working with Alyson Stoner in Toledo and encouraged her mom to take her to LA where she gained fame as the star of singer Missy Elliot’s video Work It, became a Disney child star before starring with Steve Martin in Cheaper by the Dozen in 2003. “We were on the set of Cheaper by the Dozen,” and I said to Steve Martin, “ ‘I was a penny in Pennies from Heaven, do you remember me?’ ” She laughs, “He didn’t think that was very funny.”
Teaching and Motherhood
All the dancers O’Connell taught in her classes in LA danced in the show stopping Bernadette Peters number from Pennies from Heaven, “Love is Good for Anything That Ails You,” a fantasy sequence in which her teacher character sings and dances with her students across desktops. O’Connell had her daughter while she was working and living in LA, but by the time her child was in second grade she found herself wondering if it was the best place to raise her daughter. “My daughter was living far from family, and I kept thinking she’s not going to have a perspective of what I called ‘normal life’.” So O’Connel took her daughter back to Toledo. “She kept saying, you know mom, I’m just going to bide my time until I can go back to LA or New York.” Ultimately, she took her daughter to New York where she was cast in the same musical her mother once danced in, 42nd Street. “Because of that, she had this cool story about both of us coming full circle with that musical.” O’Connell says her daughter is still dancing on Broadway and has lived in New York for 22 years.
Writing a Me
moir
O’Connell was traveling from Florida to choreograph a show in Chicago in March 2020 when everything shut down due to the pandemic. It was around that time she decided to write her story. O’Connell explains, “I have some girlfriends who kept telling me that I had a story for everything and I should write a book.” She took a small writing course in Toledo and decided it was time to finally memorialize her story. It took four months to write and then a year to edit, considering it was a new experience to write an entire book. “I never let anyone change my words, because I know how to tell a story. I just needed to decide on punctuation style and consistency.” O’Connell is still living in Toledo, for the moment, and looking out for her next adventure. She knows how to both tell and live a good story.
O’Connell’s book “Winging It… Every Step of The Way.” is available now at Finch & Fern Bookstore on Main Street in Sylvania or on Amazon.
