VLVL soft-shoe dancing

[Terrance]

soft-shoe:  noun. Tap dancing performed while wearing shoes without
metal taps.

American Heritage Dictionary

He did the old soft-shoe  ...tapped, clicked his heels, tapped across
the cell

--Jerry Jeff Walker 


had to stare down at her feet like an amateur tap dancer

It's a worn out cliché.  Why does P use it? 

Anyway, doesn't DL seems a bit bottled up in her ideas of the past? 
Ralph notices this. 
Who wants to hear the story of her life anyway? 
And, her fixed ideas (private ideologies drive these VL characters,
knocking them off balance) are not good guides for behavior. And she
knows it, but she can't help herself. 
Also, the characters are stuck on projections of their own compulsions
or Past compulsions (i.e., Frenesi sees Hector's madness for film). 
And, at times, they seem  incapable of seeing from anyone else's point
of view. 
Up to this point who can Prairie talk to? Who can understand her? 
Are these characters capable of emotional participation in the other?
Of               friendship and love? Or is it that these characters see
in the other only
what their own needs, anxieties, and desires put there? 
Is the other a distorting mirror of the self? 
Why do so many of the conversations in this books run on like monologues
running past each other?  Are these characters all a bit deaf, dumb and
blind? Is it, as Prairie says of her Dad, all that Shit they smoked
(Zoyd, Takeshi, Van Meter, Mucho ... drugs) and other addictions
(Hector, Zoyd, Tube, or  DL her Mother religion)?  
They seem to hear and see what they choose to hear and see. 
And more often than not, what they see is part of their schemes.