As soon as the Dec. 9 Margarita Ball is over, party planner Brice Evans is closing his party prop warehouse -- and tying on his dancing shoes.

For years, Brice was one of Fort Worth's most popular dance men. He taught the Cowtown social set all the proper dips and turns in a day when dips and turns mattered.

Now that gridiron great Emmitt Smith has been crowned the king of ballroom dance, people are interested in dance again. Never mind that Brice is 74. He feels like he's right there on the cutting edge.

For more than 25 years Brice had his own studio, the Cha-Cha Palace. That space became the Glitter Dome when he closed his studio in the early 1980s and opened a party planning service.

Now he's cleaning out the old studio. He needs a space to dance again.

Once he was an adviser for the United States Ballroom Council and one of the first accredited judges. There were times he had 1,000 students a week, he says. His picture and his story appeared several times in Dance Magazine.

But he stopped dancing and started teaching debutantes from the Steeplechase Club and The Assembly how to bow to society.

He danced at parties, of course, but not long ago he attended the monthly tango party at Fort Worth's Community Arts Center.

"Eureka!" he said. "Here was a roomful of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.... I thought, 'I can do that.'" So he found a class at Lockheed Martin Recreation Center and started taking lessons two or three times each week.

"I now know what it is like to be a beginner.... The group lessons are wonderful. We change partners constantly, but some of my classes need more ladies," he said.

He has planned a trip to Austin over the Thanksgiving holidays. "It will be five days of solid tango," he said, his voice raspy from the throat cancer he beat a couple of years ago. He says he might even head to Argentina for the International Tango Festival in March.

Brice is also toying with the idea of teaching dance again. "I thought that was all behind me," he said. "But now I think, why not?"

What's next? Just a few weeks ago, the Lone Star Film Society announced that it had teamed with Sister Cities to launch an international film festival scheduled to open next fall.

Now comes word that the LSFS executive director, Darla Robinson, has resigned, effective Dec. 15. Darla cut her teeth in Neiman Marcus' public relations department and has spent two years at the film society.

"It's time for them to take it to the next level, and I've got other things I'm interested in doing now," she says. "Other things" include more time with her baby daughter, finishing work for a master's degree and helping husband John Robinson market a new business idea.

Businessman and board boss Toby Darden resigned a few weeks ago, but one departure has nothing to do with the other, Darla says.