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Dinwiddie County native Roger Blaha (foreground, left) won a 1978 John Travolta lookalike, dancealike contest in Richmond. (Photo courtesy Roger Blaha)
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Blaha appeared in an ad for Primo Slacks. (Photo courtesy Roger Blaha)
Roger Blaha learned disco moves from John Travolta on the big screen, and he borrowed a friend’s white polyester suit and his father’s gold medallion, but the attitude and nerve belonged solely to the 20-year-old Dinwiddie County native.
Like Tony Manero, Travolta’s character in “Saturday Night Fever,” Blaha would drive into the city — in this case, Richmond — for some music and excitement.
Roger Blaha today (Photo courtesy Roger Blaha)
“As soon as I got out of high school, I started going to nightclubs in Richmond,” says Blaha, now 60. When he saw “Saturday Night Fever” in late 1977, he was determined to learn Travolta’s dance moves, which he absorbed by sitting through as many as three showings a night. (This month marks the 40th anniversary of when the “Saturday Night Fever” album became the first soundtrack to score four No. 1 singles, on May 13, 1978.) “Anywhere I had an open space, I’d try to replicate the moves,” he says.
On April 6, 1978, his dedication paid off when Blaha won a Travolta lookalike, dancealike contest run by Jack Alix, a Richmond-based radio deejay heard nationally on his syndicated show, “Rock ’n’ Roll Roots.” Blaha’s winning routine at Poor Boys nightclub at 1203 W. Broad St. was set to the Bee Gees’ “You Should Be Dancing,” with local media and even People magazine covering the event.
Suddenly, everything changed for Blaha, who previously worked in his family’s auto-parts store. He made paid personal appearances everywhere from the Commonwealth Club to a local skating rink and won his own white suit, albums and $100 in cash. The apex, though, was when Primo Slacks called him about a modeling gig — for a white polyester suit, naturally, and flew him to New York.
In 1980, Blaha moved to Atlanta, where he modeled for a couple more years, and then became a real estate agent and appraiser. The former Travolta lookalike settled there with a wife and two children until 2004, when the family moved to Chesterfield County to be closer to Blaha’s parents.
Blaha has never met Travolta. But for a brief time, some of the actor’s disco magic rubbed off. “I remember walking into a bathroom to comb my hair at the skating rink,” he says. “I turned to the doorway, and there must have been 20 or 30 boys peeking in there ... looking at me like I was something special.”
