Dancing in the streets

Life can really take the dance out of you.

I mean, it was there when we were kids, right? Jed Lifeson is reminded of that every time he swings his feet past a schoolyard.

“They cheer and laugh. They want to join. I can tell.”

Jed had the dance put back in him, big time, but it took a near-death experience, his mother’s, to do it.

Now, the first time you see Jed you might think he’s crazy — dancing along the street and through buildings while everyone else walks. He stands out.

But the more you see him, capering through his sidewalk waltz of joy, trim and nimble, in billowy pants, dapper jacket and hat, the more you think it’s we who stand out, by contrast. How graceless. Plodding, as it were, through the mud of our days. Who’s crazy?

“I always loved to dance,” says Jed, a familiar sight on the streets of greater Hamilton, which he travels dancing. Night and day, rain or shine.

“The first thing I learned was the twist, as a boy. ‘Look, ma,’ I said.”

Jed’s mother is at the heart of this. “When she woke up, the first thing from her mouth was a song.”

Jed grew up in Yugoslavia. Where he lived there was a gypsy enclave, with makeshift taverns, music coming out every open door.

“My mother would go there, get up on the tables and sing.”

Jed — his original name was Nedad Zivojinovich; the surname means “son of life” — caught her devotion, but in his feet, hips and arms, not in his voice.

“I had a phobia of singing, so I danced. I loved Fred Astaire.”

That shows in the liquidly elegant glide of his limbs from one position to the next.

Jed’s family moved to Toronto from Yugoslavia in 1968, when he was 14. He grew into adulthood, had two sons, went from job to job (trucker, bouncer, construction, martial arts instructor). One day in 2003 he visited his mother and found her going into a diabetic coma.

“I held her in my arms and thought she would die. She felt stiff, like rigor mortis.”

She was in a coma for 17 days. Then she revived. It soon became clear she would make a full recovery.

“I walked out of Mount Sinai Hospital and I was so grateful. I was overpowered with joy. It had to come out. I didn’t care if people thought I was crazy. I danced.”

He’s been dancing ever since — first in Toronto, and as of 2008 in Hamilton. He moved here to take a roofing job to get some money together for a trip to Europe. The roofing company tanked. He never got to Europe. But he fell in love with Hamilton.

“The people are wonderful,” he says, with special mention for Moe Masoudi, owner of BIZCLiP video marking who fed him Christmas dinner that first starving, jobless winter in Hamilton. Moe and Jeb are talking about crossing North America, with Jeb dancing to for various children’s causes. They set up a website —dancinguy.com.

When I catch up with Jeb at a coffee shop, he takes a tea with four sugars, insists on paying for my doughnut, and as we talk a cab driver, Karim Abdolkhani, happens by.

“Haven’t seen you in a while, man,” he says. “You’re fantastic.”