At Quaint Coronado Inn, Guests Must Dance Before They Doze

CORONADO —  “A rock step, a two step, a rock step, a . . .”

The commands waft out through the windows of a large blue-gray and maroon Victorian house at 8th Street and D Avenue in Coronado.

“That’s right, twirl her through! That . . . no noo . . . Start again. AND a rock. . . .”

It’s the kind of house our grandma had. It features verandas with easy chairs. Dutch wooden clogs filled with flowers, and heavy redwood doors inset with stained glass windows. And one of those twist-ring doorbells that must have driven Grandpa mad on Halloween.

Inside the house--beneath a sign that says “Ballet is tu-tu much” and a picture of Gerry G. Bishop, co-host of Sun-Up San Diego on Channel 8, learning tap-dancing--Bonni Marie Kinosian takes Robert and Roberta Shiflet through their dance lesson.

Their, uh, compulsory dance lesson so they can stay the night.

Yes, you heard straight. It’s right there in the Yellow Pages’ “Bed and Breakfast” section:

Victorian Holiday. Vacation In Beautiful Coronado in the charming atmosphere of a restored 1894 Victorian Home And the Opportunity To Learn To Dance And Exercise In One Great Package!

Except, well it’s not opportunity. If you’re going to stay at the only B&B; in Coronado, you have to dance before you doze.

“ ‘You’re kidding!’ ”

“That’s what they all say when I tell them,” said Mary Kay Forsyth, president of the Coronado Chamber of Commerce. “I get these calls every day. People asking does our lovely little community have any bed and breakfast places, something atmospheric? I say ‘Of course. Bonni Marie’s 1894 Victorian--as long as you’re prepared to take a dancing lesson . . . it’s the law here.’ ”

Uh, Coronado law can make you dance ? What a place! Is this a quaint, long-lost regional custom, mysteriously preserved here? Is the isolated isle a gulag run by Zorba the Greek? Is smashing plates compulsory or optional?

No. This is just . . . well, Coronado. The liveliest democracy west of Athens. The nearest thing to a Greek city state since Socrates sipped hemlock. A place where everybody gets their 2 cents in.

It’s a city that has bigger crowds at its council meetings than at its movie theater. It has regular civil wars over what color the antiques store should be allowed to paint its frontage, what end of town the farmer’s market should go, whether three hours is enough time for a family to pack its RV before going off on holiday, whether 18-foot Cadillacs qualify as RVs.

Or whether to allow B&Bs; in Coronado. Especially whether to allow B&Bs; in Coronado.

The brouhaha stems from Bonni Marie’s 1983 restoration of her old home, which has doubled as a dance studio since 1985. So far, so good, but in 1987, when Bonni Marie applied to the City Council for permission to use her house as a B&B; as well as a dance studio, she opened a can of worms that is still rocking the city.

For some reason, B&Bs; are where Coronado reached its limit. Bonni Marie had put about $300,000 into the home’s restoration, and dance classes alone were not paying the mortgage.

So the weekend-only dance-and-doze package is the charming and bizarre synthesis of three years of hard fighting since 1987. Come Jan. 2, Bonni Marie will face the council to ask to expand her operation to weekdays, knowing that she faces a battle just to keep what she has.

“Please come up and have some fruit drink and yogurt, which I make myself,” said Bonni Marie (as she’s known to friend and foe in Coronado).

She’s a petite dynamic lady brimming with energy and emotions. We hop upstairs. Past Norman Rockwell paintings and bons mots, like “Happiness is a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it eludes you.” The happiness slogans are framed like pictures on the wall. Bedrooms feature sumptuous brass beds or high wood beds, each room named after someone directly or indirectly involved with dance: Degas, Baryshnikov, Fred and Ginger.

And everywhere, carpets. The most beautiful Persian and Turkish carpets. With the uneven patterns of the hand-woven.

“My father was a rug merchant,” said Bonni Marie, “He was Armenian-Lebanese. He came over after the massacre--on a cattle boat. To Illinois. He was very musical. He sang. My mother was a gymnast. So I guess I combined the two. I was teaching dancing by the time I was 16.”

The two attic rooms, Fred and Ginger--where the Shiflets stayed--are wonderfully intimate, partly because of the in-sloping walls and red velvet head-knock cushions where the ceiling is low. Bonni Marie points to a Victorian-looking wooden cradle with an old doll in it.

“My sisters say they used to rock me in that,” she said. Nearby is a huge old wooden-bound family Bible, published in New York in 1871.

“The will of God,” says a saying in a frame, “will never lead you where the Grace of God cannot keep you.”

“My dad said once, ‘The only way you fail is if you quit,’ ” she said. “He spoke four languages but not English when he arrived, but he’d say all you need in life is to be willing to work, speak the language, count your money and use your God-given talent. This house is giving me that chance. And I’m not a quitter.”

It is clear this house has been brought back to life at the expense of a long and bitter struggle.

A sunny room looks across to the turrets of the Hotel del Coronado. The dining room. It is all smokey chandeliers, white Irish linen tablecloths and 1920s gold-encircled teacups. A silver twin-tulips dinner bell waits to announce weekend breakfasts. Silver candlesticks. A candle snuffer. Miniature “cherries jubilee” wine glasses, caressed with entwining gold leaves, now used as samplers for that homemade yogurt--which Bonni Marie knows may send electric shocks through the taste buds of Safeway-trained palates.

She passes out fresh, steaming, health-bran muffins.

“I lived in the attic for the first 18 months,” she said. “There had always been a rumor that this house had had a . . . shady past. When Chris (Ackerman, the architect who designed the restoration) got down to the base colors, they were all pinks and mauves. So maybe it does have a more colorful history than we know.”

“This has been the most relaxing weekend I could have imagined,” Robert Shiflet said. “Not like the Marriott hotel, where we went on our honeymoon. There you were always kind of on your guard. Here, it’s so much like home.”

His wife Roberta is almost nine months pregnant, but that didn’t stop her from taking the compulsory dancing lesson with Robert.

“It wasn’t the baby that came between us,” she said. “It’s Robert who was always shy about dancing with me because I majored at dance at school. I’ve been trying to get him to do this for 10 years.”

“You were great,” said Bonni Marie, sitting down beside an address list, with one overstuffed section labeled “Supporters.”

“I was doing it in my sleep last night,” Robert said. “I was surprised (the dancing) was a must, but this is the one place I could make myself do this.”

The must-dance clause in Bonni Marie’s setup is maybe the one visible fallout of the bloody battle that has seared Bonni Marie and split Coronado.

For three years, the Coronado City Council, like a groggy tag-team wrestling duo, has been tossed between Bonni Marie (desperate to be allowed to use the house she spent so much time to restore) and a group of well-ensconced residents (seeing Bonni Marie as a sort of Judas Goat for developers intent on penetrating the residential section of a Coronado already under siege.)

From the start, the council insisted she rebuild not to state historic house standards, but to the much more rigorous (and expensive) commercial code because of the dance classes. That meant steel beam reinforcing throughout the three-story house. It meant creating parking space off the street for pupils’ parents.

“They even had her build a wheelchair ramp up to her dance studio,” said the Chamber of Commerce’s Forsyth. “I mean--a wheelchair ramp to a dance studio? Still, she complied with their wishes all along.”

But it was when she got the idea to offer it as a bed-and-breakfast that Bonni Marie ran into a brick wall.

For a large group of old-time Coronado residents, the lady had proposed her idea at a bad time--in the middle of an intense, bruising building spree. They’d been intruded on enough.

“B&Bs; are OK for the freeway,” Lula Coleman said. “She’s done a fantastic job (on the restoration of the house) but the B&B; doesn’t fit in this tight little city here.”

“It’d be akin to operating a whorehouse,” a former councilman told Forsyth, who refused to give his name.

“This is a hometown city,” said one opponent, who declined to be identified. “We don’t want (B&Bs;) scattered through Coronado. Period.”

Bonni Marie looks out the window to the St. Francis statue on her roof terrace.

“You have no idea how vicious it got . . . after the incident,” she said, remembering 1987, when she had accused a local councilman of sexual harassment, a charge that never was resolved. “People were tossing piles of garbage on my lawns. They were hammering ‘For Sale’ signs into the garden. They were making obscene phone calls. They were planting horrible pornographic magazines in the toilets my dance pupils use. They were hurling rolls of toilet paper all over my trees. It was frightening.”

Bonni Marie’s opponents are mostly residents who remember the calm of an earlier Coronado, people who have watched the recent condo and hotel building boom and felt pushed around by developers.

If Bonni Marie established a legal precedent, they foresaw every second home “going commercial,” bringing strangers, traffic and parking problems. Coronado, they said, was a town already under strain from the extra access the bridge provides, and the daily invasion of up to 30,000 workers--the population of Coronado is only 23,000--going to the two bases on the island, let alone the 300,000 tourists who swell the streets annually.

The Committee to Defeat the Bed and Breakfast Measure led a successful campaign to force a special advisory election in November, 1987. Voters soundly rejected the idea of allowing B&Bs; in Coronado.

Faced with all this, the council naturally said yes, and no, to both sides. They rejected B&Bs;, but gave Bonni Marie a special-use permit, allowing her to put up guests if they were listed as part of a special dance package. But not during the week. Except during summer. Oh, and on holidays. And all this needed renewing each year.