Dance teacher: Decades of lies weren't my fault

We were kind of interested last week when we noticed the story of Frederic "Ric" Brame, the 72-year-old dance instructor who is facing a charge of sexual assault of a child. Brame, who taught dance in Montgomery County, allegedly began assaulting a former student when she was 12 or 13 years old — but that wasn't all: Investigators say that, for years, Brame has pretended to be noted movie and Broadway dancer Tommy Rall. And this weekend, the Chronicle reported that Brame claims the decades of deception wasn't his fault. Of course.

Brame has apparently been identified as Rall since the late 1960s, and published biographies, résumés and playbills all said he was the famed dancer. As the founder of Omni Dance Theatre in Montgomery County and Wilson Performing Arts in Conroe, and as a teacher at In-Step Dance and Performing Arts Center in The Woodlands, Brame apparently told everyone he was Rall: The Chronicle reports that several of his former students have put on their résumés that Rall taught them, and community dance groups have turned to Brame for his expertise. But all that started to come undone earlier this year when the actual Rall, who lives in California, heard about Brame. "A friend of my cousin said, 'There's a guy going around saying he's you,'" Rall told the Chronicle. "My son checked it out and found all this stuff."

But here's the thing: Brame now claims that the nearly 40 years of representing himself as Rall wasn't really his fault. It started, he said, when he was working in Florida in the late '60s and told someone that he had worked with Rall in California. When the playbill for the show he was in was printed, Brame said it identified him as "Ric Brame a.k.a. Tommy Rall." When he moved to Texas in the 1970s, Brame said the "mistake" followed him: A photographer he knew spread the word that Brame was Rall "because he thought he was doing me a favor," Brame told the Chronicle. Through all this, Brame apparently never tried to correct the record, even though he said he initially "walked around scared something would happen from [the deception]."

It's not clear what'll happen to Brame: He was arrested June 13 and remains in the Montgomery County Jail on a $125,000 bond on the sexual assault charge. Brame wasn't charged for using Rall's name because he didn't use it to get credit or any financial gain, but still, Rall said the damage has been done. "This is not good," he told the Chronicle. "It's not good for the people who believe in him and take dancing and believe they're getting something they're not ... I don't like somebody stealing my name and my credits."