DIANE MAKAR MURPHY Dance professor spends life sharing her talent

Each Sunday at Grandma's house in Chicago was like Ted Mack's Amateur Hour for Chris Cobb. The relatives met, stayed half the day, ate and performed. Then just a skinny kid (I'm just assuming, because she is beautifully slim and trim to this day), Chris would play flute and improvise a dance; her sister would bring down the house with a Streisand imitation, and if they were lucky, the real vaudevillian, her dad, did his act. "And they'd applaud," Chris said.
"The idea in my family was that you shared your talents," said Chris, who has for 12 years been a choreographer and professor in Youngstown State University's Human Performance and Exercise Science Department.
That idea began young for Chris AND her father, Raymond Pedersen. At 16, he auditioned locally for the real Ted Mack's Amateur Hour. An agent in the audience liked what he saw, and shortly after, Ray, his brother and their friend George -- although not on the amateur hour -- WERE on the vaudeville circuit. "The Three Pretenders" lip-synced the Andrews Sisters, Al Jolson, Danny Kaye and others, adding costumes and flawless gestures. "The scrapbooks," Chris said, "are fascinating."
Reluctant start: Chris, though probably genetically inclined to pursue performance, didn't set out to be a dancer or even a dance instructor.
"I started dance classes at 5, and I hated it," Chris said. "As I think back, it was a cross between acrobatics, ballet and modern."
Too young to know what they called it, Chris said, "The only thing I loved was running across a floor and making a shape. That's a what a child wants to do, not stand at a bar and demi-pli & eacute;." She stuck it out for a year, then quit. So much for her studio dance training.
Though she performed for the family, it wasn't until high school that a teacher rekindled her love for dance by teaching modern dance in gym class.
"I was also fortunate to have friends who danced, and we did variety shows. I choreographed," she said. "What I had, and still have, was an emotional quality, a dramatic quality, that caused people to ask me to choreograph."
Forging a career: By then, Chris had plans to become a teacher. "I loved dance and found it interesting, but I never considered it as a possible career," she said. "Then a student ahead of me told me people WERE being hired to teach dance, but they were being trained through physical education majors."
She earned a BS in physical education with a dance emphasis at Illinois State University. "I worked my butt off in college because I hadn't learned the technique in studio. I remember being in tears. But I would go home and work on things and then get them for the next class," Chris said.
She ended up with most of the leads and solos during performances.
"I was extremely fortunate," Chris said. "I was a big deal in a small place because I had the dramatic side of me. The others were technically wonderful, but they didn't have the soul, to be honest."
She later concentrated on performance and choreography for a master's degree -- the terminal degree for her field at that time.
With short-cropped strawberry hair, an aquiline nose and a dancer's body & agrave; la the young Mary Tyler Moore, Chris at 49 looks terrific. Her husband, Thom, whom she met in college, teaches music at Slippery Rock University.
YSU has 14 students minoring in dance, and many others take dance as an elective. Chris is happy to teach them.
When she was young, an instructor told Chris that to make it in dance, she had to spend the summer in a workshop. Chris signed up, and though she loved it, she said, "I thought, there is no way I want to eat, sleep and drink this. ... Even then, I knew I wanted to share my life with a family. And I did love teaching. I have no regrets."
So much for the amateur hour.
murphy@vindy.com