Christine Walker, Tap Dancing at the Bluebird with Rainy Day Books

Enjoy a reception with light refreshments from 5:30 - 6 p.m. then sit down for a moderated conversation with Christine Walker and Sarah Dupre. Attendees will have the opportunity to get your book signed and personalized!

Event Space: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Lens 2 Event Room

Parking: Attendees can park in the north lot for free, or can pay to park in the Nelson-Atkins parking garage. Nelson-Atkins members get free garage parking. Check out other benefits, and purchase your membership here!

This event was made possible through contributions from Linda Woodsmall-Debruce.

Tap Dancing at the Bluebird is an uplifting novel of love, family, and friendship celebrating dance and second chances across a century of change in America. Author Christine Walker begins and ends the story in the heartland. Inspired by the resilient voice found in the diaries that her paternal grandmother kept during the Great Depression in Kansas City, Christine imagined the life of an adventurous twelve-year-old girl, Mattie, whose life is set in motion by a roving tap dancing youth, Kip. He appears one day in 1932 at the Bluebird Buffet, a restaurant owned by Mattie’s family, teaches Mattie to tap, and boards with them. When the bank forecloses on the house, Mattie follows Kip riding the rails to California. Separated by a perceived betrayal and a crash, they lose each other for a lifetime.

In 2020, fulfilled by a career in dance and neuroscience and still active at ninety-nine, Mattie recalls the boy who set her life in motion. She confides deep regrets to her granddaughter, Genet, who discovers past truths for present challenges. With rhythms of tap, modern, and social dancing, the novel draws readers through time and place—Kansas City, the Southwest, California, New York, and back to KC—with characters that speak across the generations to ask: Is there still time to love and forgive?

Christine Walker, visual artist and author, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised in Prairie Village, Kansas. After graduating from the University of Kansas, she worked in progressive education in KC before moving to San Francisco in 1977 to launch her multi-faceted career as a painter, graphic designer, strategic visioning consultant, writer, teacher, and collaborator on dance stage design and songwriting. Tap Dancing at the Bluebird is her debut novel. She is the author and artist of A Painter’s Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life and the illustrator and co-author with her husband, Dennis Hysom, of Wooleycat’s Musical Theater. She has an MFA in Writing and Literature in Fiction from Bennington College, an MA in Interdisciplinary Creative Arts from San Francisco State University, and a BFA from KU. She and Dennis live in Sonoma County, California, where she’s learning to line dance and sings with the Acorn MusEcology Project.

Sarah Dupre is a poet, songwriter, choral composer, and Music Director of the Acorn MusEcology Project, a vocal ensemble in Sonoma County which endeavors to root its music within the context of deep ecology. Sarah studied music theory and composition at UC Santa Cruz and has sung in, written for, and directed various choruses for nearly five decades. She makes her home in Occidental, CA, but currently resides in Lawrence, KS, in order to be near her new granddaughter, Mae, whose parents teach in the paleontology department at KU. She recently saw fireflies for the first time and is pretty sure they are the neatest thing ever.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak Street, Kansas City, United States