It's 1 o'clock in the morning at the New Haven nightclub in Northeast Baltimore and Reggie Thomas is busy doing his thing on the dance floor.

This man can really dance. He is twirling his partner now with his right hand while his feet beat out an intricate little tattoo on the polished floor.

Then he switches hands and spins her the other way from the waist before catching her in a classic ballroom pose that immediately segues into something that looks like a combination jitterbug and Lindy Hop.

And the guy never misses a step. It's like he's got his own little cesium clock ticking away somewhere inside his brain, an incredibly accurate mechanism that divides each musical beat into maybe a billion tiny slivers, then adds them all up so that every rhythmic nuance is allocated its own nanosecond of expressive movement.

"Reggie really has his own unique style," says Sharon Holly, one of Reggie's regular partners at the New Haven on Thursday nights, when the music is mostly a mix of '60s oldies and urban contemporary.

"I like to hand dance," she says, "and Reggie's so energetic you really get a good workout."

Indeed, "hand dancing" is Reggie's specialty. That's where the two partners actually try to move together instead of drifting along separately in their own rhythmic bubbles. It's what people used to call "jitterbug" or "swing," except today's version incorporates elements of all the older dances plus new movements from hip-hop style.

"Basically, hand dancing has always been around," Reggie says during a break between songs. "It's what we grew up with during the '60s and '70s, when most of the people who come here were younger.

"It sorta went out in the 1980s, 'cause everybody was doing freestyle, which is like doing your own thing," he says, sipping on a Coke. "But I guess it's fashion or something, because now people are starting to hand dance again."

And Reggie Thomas is right in the middle of the revival locally. Right now, for example, there's a group in Baltimore, Stepping Out Productions, that is organizing a series of hand-dancing contests, just like those that were so popular years ago.

Hand dancing is also being revived in cities like Washington, where it's been popular for years at clubs like the Eclipse. This Friday, Stepping Out Productions will sponsor a contest at Morgan State University between Baltimore- and Washington-area couples. (See box on Page 14.) Reggie has been tapped to be one of the judges.

"I rate Reggie very highly as a dancer," says Yvonne Stewart, organizer of the Stepping Out Productions contest. "We wanted judges who know how to hand dance themselves, and Reggie is well-known around town as a fine dancer."

Moreover, there are signs that younger people in their 20s and 30s are beginning to look back on the '70s as a kind of golden era of pop music and dance. If that trend keeps up, hand dancing could take hold among Generation Xers as well.

Though Reggie is far too modest to say so himself, the fact is women come to the New Haven from all over just to dance with him. He's a good-looking guy, a still-trim fortysomething with nice eyes and a naturally pleasant manner that wouldn't discourage anyone from walking right up and asking for a dance.

"Mostly we just all know each other from coming here over the years," says Teresa Epps, another Thursday-night regular and one of Reggie's dance partners.

"Everybody here is pretty down-to-earth, lots of fun, lots of laughs, so it's a good place to break the ice after a long day," she says.

Ms. Epps enjoys hand dancing, but what she really likes is what's called "Fred Astaire," which takes its name from the famous dancing actor of the 1930s and '40s. It's a style that emphasizes elegance over athleticism, refinement over sheer energy and speed.

"You don't do as much spinning around as in regular hand dancing," Ms. Epps says. "It's more like steps -- cha-cha, fox trot and things like that."

Of course, Reggie is a master of "Fred Astaire," too.

"I can do all those styles," he says. And he's not boasting either, just acknowledging what appears to be a very uncomplicated truth about himself.

"I really like to dance," he says simply. "It's one of the ways I express myself." BUT WHAT EXACTLY IS REGGIE THOMAS EXPRESSING? What, you might ask, is all that virtuoso footwork and split-second timing really about?

"I guess it's really about survival," Reggie says. "I mean, I'm fortysomething now and I've made it just because I've managed to survive. Because there's so many other guys I came up with who didn't."

Reggie is sitting in a Charles Street restaurant eating brunch on a Saturday afternoon.

"I've been dancing since I was a kid," he says. "We lived on Howard Street until I was about 6 or 7, then we moved to Guilford Avenue and then to St. Annes Avenue.

"I must have been around 10 then," he says. "I was already watching people like James Brown and trying to imitate his steps. There was this family of girls who lived across the street. They were older than me, but they saw me doing some of James Brown's steps so they decided to teach me to jitterbug one summer. And I was really good at it, so then they had this little kid to dance with."

By the time Reggie was 12 he was going to parties with his uncle, who was 20. "My uncle's girlfriends all wanted him to bring me along, 'cause they wanted to dance with me," Reggie says.

He was also starting to enter contests. By the mid-1960s hand dancing was all the rage in Baltimore, and dance contests were being held throughout the city.

The first contest Reggie entered was held at the old Famous Ballroom on North Charles Street in 1965, with music by Frankie & the Spindles, a popular local group. There he ran into a fellow named Travis Winkey, who was then one of the reigning princes of Baltimore's hand-dancing scene.

"In those days we were considered the best dancers in the city," recalls Mr. Winkey, who today owns Travis Winkey & Co., a pioneering black modeling agency in Baltimore.

"Those contests were really popular," he says, "and there were quite a few guys like Reggie who could really dance."

Reggie remembers a contest put on by a high school fraternity at City College when he was about 15, for example.

"My buddies kept telling me about it," he says. "So I finally got a girl who was a friend of my brother and we entered. Travis was dancing in the same contest, and by the end it was me and him with our partners dueling it out on the floor. Actually, that's how a lot of those contests ended up." Travis and his partner won first place, Reggie and his partner, second.

But Reggie also had his share of victories.

"I won a lot of those contests," he says. "Usually, I'd just give [the trophies] to my partners."

Reggie had other interests, then, besides dancing. Mainly, he wanted to be a singer, a dream he had cherished ever since he had won his first talent contest at Liberty Elementary School. During high school at City College he sang in a couple of doo-wop groups made up of classmates and friends.

But in 1968, just a couple of months shy of graduation, Reggie dropped out of City. He says he thought his girlfriend was pregnant (she wasn't), so he left school and got a job. A year

later he married her and started working for Western Electric as an installer, going around to different office buildings putting in electrical circuits. Then he got a job as a clerk at the Sparrows Point steel plant. But by then, things weren't looking too good.

"The [Vietnam] war was really starting to heat up and I thought I was going to get drafted," he recalls.

Sure enough, in March 1969 the notice arrived in the mail. So Reggie was inducted into the Army, and a year later he wound up in Vietnam.

This is not something Reggie likes to talk about, but it's part of what he means by "survival," because the experience definitely left its mark on him.

"I never knew what I was even doing there half the time," he says.

Of course he knows now, though.

On May 26, 1970, President Nixon declared an emergency and ordered U.S. troops into neighboring Cambodia. Reggie's unit was sent to reinforce a fire-support base called X-Ray near the Cambodian border.

And that was how he got shot.

Even after all this time, Reggie still flinches at the memory. Partly because after he got shot there was a long while there when he thought he'd never walk again, much less dance.

"We left the fire-support base one day and set out by helicopter for a village in Cambodia where the North Vietnamese were training Viet Cong," he says in an even voice, not showing much emotion.

What happened was, Reggie's unit jumped out of the helicopters when they reached the landing zone and started toward the wood line where the North Vietnamese army had set up a radio communications hut. But somewhere back in those trees there was an enemy sniper and Reggie caught one through the foot, which stopped him right there.

He says he crawled up in some bushes and lay there all night, and the next morning the helicopters came back to the landing zone and airlifted him out. After that he spent a couple of weeks in a field hospital, where the wound developed gangrene.

And that's why after he found out he wasn't going to die in Vietnam the first thing he had to worry about was whether he'd ever be able to dance again.

They saved the foot, but for years afterward Reggie walked with a limp and had to use crutches or a cane. Honorably discharged, he came back to Baltimore and went to work again at Sparrows Point.

But things were starting to go sour. "I was married [with a daughter, Zina, and a son, Keith] and still trying to deal with married life and being back, but it just wasn't working," he says.

He was having post-traumatic stress syndrome, his mind replaying war scenes he thought he had blotted out forever. But this was years before they had a fancy name for the disorder. He felt he couldn't do much of anything about it really except limp around on his crutches and feel bad.

When the marriage failed, he quit his job at Sparrows Point and decided to devote himself to music.

The next few years he knocked around with local bands. He worked with a group called the Chains, then one called the

Gents. Then he got a manager and went out on his own. He also started recording in New York as a backup vocalist with jazz musicians such as Webster Lewis, Mickey Fields and Dave Ross.

Lots of folks from the New Haven remember Reggie in those days.

"He had a very romantic style, sorta like Peabo Bryson," says Sharon Holly. "It was real sweet and mellow, the kind of stuff that gets your imagination going."

Meanwhile, he had taken a job at the post office.

"A friend said they were hiring," Reggie recalls. "I wanted to buy new equipment -- a P.A. system, mikes, etc. I thought I'd take the job just to get some extra money to tide me over. I went back to school, got my diploma, then went to the old Community College of Baltimore on the G.I Bill. With the record dates and the post office gig, I thought I was doing pretty well. But then I stayed [at the post office]."

Reggie still sings occasionally at clubs around town, through strictly for fun now. Reflecting on his singing career, he is philosophical.

"It was another way of expressing myself," he says. "I had learned to sing from my mother. She and my aunts all used to sing around the house and in church when I was a kid. I didn't have formal voice lessons until later, when I took voice one summer at Peabody, then did theory and voice at CCB. That was around 1978. But then I broke my ankle playing tennis, left CCB and never went back."

And that's pretty much where things stood in 1987, when Reggie first started going to the New Haven in Northwood. He liked it because it was an older crowd and because he found that a lot of the women there still wanted to hand dance even though it had been out of style for more than a decade by then.

"For a while, I was really the only person there who would hand dance," he recalls. "Pretty soon word got around and people started coming there just so they could dance with me."

I was a sweet setup, but naturally it couldn't last. Guys started pestering Reggie to teach them his steps, and eventually he had a bunch of imitators. Over the years, some even became decent dancers, which is why today if anywhere can be called the birthplace of the hand-dancing revival in Baltimore it's the New Haven Restaurant and Lounge.

Morris "Pops" Covington is the owner of the New Haven. He knows Reggie Thomas well. "He's been coming here for years," he says. "Guy can really dance, and that's been good for business."

Inside the club, Reggie is on the dance floor again, pirouetting with his partner in an elegant "Fred Astaire" punctuated by lightning-fast little steps on the offbeats and double or triple overhand spins under his partner's arms.

The guy makes it look so easy, so much like he hasn't got a care in the world, you almost forget that his dance expresses a life that, like most lives, has endured its share of pain as well as joy.

Maybe there's some deep sociological significance to hand dancing's renewed popularity -- a yearning for some kind of deeper understanding and cooperation between men and women that the go-for-self freestyles of the '80s ignored.

Maybe it reflects a need for intimacy in thought and action after years of "me generation" self-absorption, or maybe it just satisfies the simple human desire to hold on to someone in an era in which nothing seems certain anymore.

And maybe life is itself a dance, a constellation of movement and rhythmic recurrences through which we express our hopes and fears and all the lessons of our experience.

"Hand dancing is always going to be a unique thing with every person," Reggie says. "That's because you basically go by the feel of your partner. A lot of guys don't feel what their partner is doing, so it doesn't look right. But when it's done well it looks good and feels good and, hey -- that's really what it's all about."

GLENN MCNATT is an editorial writer for The Sun.

A lesson in hand dancing, or twinkle toes, he's not

What happens when a fumble-footed reporter with a terminal case of behind-the-beat torpor tries learning to hand dance?

Scuffed floors, broken crockery and deep-seated feelings of shame, that's what.

"Just think of it as four beats to a measure, and the guy pulls on his partner on the fourth beat," Reggie says brightly.

We're standing in a friend's living room and he's showing me some steps.

"OK," he says, "on the first beat move your left foot to the right and back."

Out goes the left foot. Whoa! The right foot is in the way! Then back goes the left foot. Whoops! Too far! I'm listing way over to the right. Quick, what next?

"Then on the second beat, you move your right foot left and back," Reggie says.

Right foot out. Ha! Right foot back. Mission accomplished.

"Now do almost the same thing with your left foot again," says Reggie.

What does he mean "almost the same thing"? Play it safe and do what you just did. Maybe nobody'll notice.

Out goes the left foot, back goes the left foot. Uh oh, I'm listing again.

4 "Now you kinda skip on the last beat and . . . "

Lose my balance, knock over somebody's prize china knickknack with flailing hand. Heels leave dark scuff marks on rug.

"Uh, all you need is a little practice, man," Reggie says. But you can see he's a bit concerned.

"You'll get the hang of it," he predicts. He doesn't say when, however. Get ready to see what hand dancing is all about. Stepping Out Productions presents the Baltimore vs. Washington, D.C. Hand Dance Competition at Morgan State University's McKeldin Ballroom this Friday. The evening begins at 9 p.m. with "Let's Party Cabaret Style," featuring dancing, a disc jockey playing music from the '60s through the '90s, refreshments (B.Y.O.B.) and a performance by Stepping Out Productions, a group of dancers who are trying to preserve the art of hand dancing.

The competition segment of the program begins at midnight, when dancers from Baltimore and Washington take the floor to compete for $1,000 in prize money. While most of the dancers in the contest already have been chosen -- during preliminary competitions in Baltimore and Washington -- entries will be considered up until 9 p.m. There is no entry fee.

Tickets for the program are $10 in advance and $12 at the door. Call Yvonne Stewart, the contest organizer, at (410) 298-2812 to order tickets or to receive more information about the contest.