Sample chapters, essays, and multimedia extras live here: rehearsal clips, throwbacks, maybe the occasional conversation recorded with a government official. It’s all part of the same universe—dance, theatre, teaching, and the delightful chaos in between.
You’ll see chapters from my book about professional dance and Ohio’s “Dolly Dinkle” circus, personal essays, and other literary side hustles. I’ll also drop in audio and video snippets when a plain paragraph just can’t contain the story.
Think of this as the behind-the-scenes reel: less polished, more honest, and occasionally far more unflattering than any review I’ve ever written.
I update this page whenever a new idea refuses to stay in my head.
Books…
“Dolly Dinkle’s Guidebook”
Dolly Dinkle’s Guidebook: how to run a successful dance studio (into the ground) on Cleveland Road in Bagley, Ohio. This memoir follows one dancer-turned-teacher from real New York rehearsal rooms to Ohio’s discount-dream dance studios, where trophies are big, ethics are small, and children are styled like backup dancers for a Vegas revue. It’s a backstage tell-all: equally as much a love letter to the craft as a cease-and-desist letter to the people ruining it.
I also dig into a common practice that quietly guts teachers: worker misclassification. In my experience, many studios pay instructors as contractors while managing them like employees—fixed schedules, rules, expectations, and control—leaving the worker to absorb the tax burden and the risk.
This book is me documenting what that costs, and why I’m done calling it “just how it works.” I have fought for my worker’s rights against powerful institutions. This is how.
Part exposé, part dark comedy, part survival manual. It’s written with love for the art form and very little patience for the adults who use it as a business mask.
“Backstage
🅿️®️✊🏼d🅰️t🅾️®️$…”
Backstage Predators: An Apprentice’s Theater Tale is a first-person memoir-in-progress told by Jimmy Supek—The Apprentice, the gifted kid everyone loves to praise, reward, and place too close to adult power. It’s written like a playbill from hell: part staged script, part confession, part backstage map of how a “beloved” summer theatre program can become a hunting ground when the wrong adults run it and the right adults look away. This is not a charming nostalgia trip. The ties are too colorful, the smiles are too practiced, the rules are for children only—and the institution calls it tradition.
This book is a cautionary tale, and it is not polite. The predators and enablers in these pages do not get softness, because softness is how they hid. What you’ll get instead is pattern recognition: how grooming-adjacent dynamics masquerade as mentorship, how inner-circle favoritism becomes control, how respectability becomes camouflage, and how a town’s devotion to “good people” can turn kids into collateral damages. The goal isn’t to perform pain or ask for pity. The goal is to show you exactly how it happened—so you can spot it early, name it clearly, and stop it cold.
AI assistance: This website was prepared with research, drafting, editing, and image generation support from an AI model. All judgements and words are my own and typed by moi. I am not compensated for my opinion(s) and I pay for my own admissions and experiences (unless otherwise noted). ©️2025 Jim Becker Personal Training, LLC
This is my personal opinion and commentary of recollection. Where I describe events, I’m describing what I observed and how I understood it at the time; readers should not treat this as a statement of verified fact beyond what I explicitly document.