Tap-dancin' Stella Foster, late-blooming star of the Fourth Avenue Street Fair and Armory Park Senior Center stages, lives on in stories as vivid as her early life was grim.
There's an image of Foster — in her trademark hat, tails, long "stems" and tap shoes — in the mural on the southeast corner of North Fourth Avenue and East Sixth Street. Not surprising, as tap-dancing was Foster's solution to nearly any entertainment opportunity — some far less obvious than others.
For years she pulled down nearly $100 an hour, dancing for tips near Caruso's Italian restaurant during the street fairs, said her son, Vincent Oreski.
Sometimes, she flat out invented her venue.
She was a regular every Friday at noon, dancing for the lawyers, judges and surprised jurors on lunch break near Pennington Street and Stone Avenue.
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Oreski said the legal lunch gig wasn't an invitation engagement, that she just decided to do it.
"She felt the lawyers and judges needed some entertainment," Oreski said. They "put a little money in her hat."
It was about the only good and lasting thing she got out of a rough childhood, said Oreski.
His mom and some of her siblings were abandoned on the streets of Boston as children, while others went with their parents to Seattle. He said his mother spent time in an orphanage before being reunited with her parents much later.
At some point in those rough years, Foster's mother gave her some tap-dancing lessons, Oreski said.
During the years when Foster lived in New York City, Oreski said she had more hard times, dependent on prescription downers, then uppers.
Tap-dancing wasn't a regular part of her life until much later, after she joined Oreski in Tucson in the early 1980s.
Here, she quickly found friends and a home at the Armory Park Senior Center.
"They would put on shows every couple months with different themes," Oreski said of the senior center events. "She'd dance to her songs, "42nd Street," "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Give My Regards to Broadway."
Once here, Oreski said, she also traded in the prescription drugs for a daily joint she smoked when she went home at lunch to watch a soap opera.
Sometimes her fans were as colorful as she was.
"One time, when she had her breast-cancer surgery and I went over to St. Mary's Hospital and all these Bikers for Jesus were in the ER praying for Stella. It was just wonderful. If it was a TV show they'd say it was just too much," said friend and fan Diana Hadley
Her favorite place, Hadley and Oreski agree, was the Armory Park Senior Center.
If there was an occasion, she'd organize a tap-dancing segment for the event.
In 2003, she pulled off what she said was a lifelong dream, dancing in front of an orchestra, rather than her trusty boom box.
She was backed up at the Senior Center by the Tucson Philharmonia Youth Orchestra.
Oreski said the Armory Park Senior Center "has been my mother's blood. The things they do for people there, quietly. . . . The woman at the center there, she was down at the hospice the night before she died. They had a little party for her."
Foster, 84, died Saturday after toughing it out through colon, breast and lung cancer, asthma and emphysema.
A memorial service is set for 11 a.m. Wednesday at the Senior Center, 220 S. Fifth Ave.
On Starnet: View more images of Foster online at azstarnet.com/slideshows
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