Well, shoot, sengle already said most of what I wanted to.
The difference between tap and, say, ballroom dancing is that there’s no single step or steps in tap. There are certain very basic moves (toe heel, heel toe) that are put together in certain basic combos (heel-toe-toe-heel = paddle). Hop, shuffle, cuff – these are all real basic moves, building blocks that you can learn in one session. These are like letters of the alphabet. The first few lessons you start learning to get comfortable with these letters. There are certain basic combos, like the time step (stamp-hop-shuffle-ball change) or the Maxie Ford, which are like simple (or sometimes not-so-simple) words. There are certain basic combinations (like the shim-sham), which are like sentences that everyone knows.
And then – then, my dear, you learn to put all this stuff together in all sorts of different combinations, a virtually infinite array of them. You get smoother and faster and your feet learn to do stuff that your head isn’t controlling. That’s when it gets fun.
The style you want to learn sounds like a soft shoe – it’s real slow, real laid back. The lullaby dance Fred Astaire does in “Top Hat” is a soft shoe – if you can imagine doing it to “Tea for Two” (honest to god), it’s a soft shoe. You could do a soft shoe to faster music – it would take a certain amount of discipline to stay at the right tempo and not get sucked into the fast tempo of the music. I don’t watch Buffy, so I didn’t see the show you refer to, but that’s my guess. Anyway, if it is soft shoe you like, it’s the same deal, you learn some basic stuff, then gradually start putting it together.
As sengle said, if you’ve got a couple of different options for schools and/or teachers, check them out – the schools will be real fine with you coming in and just paying for one class to see what it’s like. For the basics, you don’t need a particularly technically brilliant teacher, so go with someone you like and feel comfortable with, someone who’s patient and does a good job of breaking things down and going over them till you’ve got them.
If you stay with it, you’ll start getting pickier about the teacher (my current teacher is a wonderful choreographer, so even our warm-up routines are fun and challenging), and will also decide whether you prefer dancing with music or without. I prefer without, but that’s just me.
A performance at the end of the year is pretty standard – I only perform about once every five years or so. My teacher is fine with my just learning the routine without any intention of performing it – it actually works out for her, since I can be the stand-in person for whoever’s absent at any given class.
Go for it! I tell everyone who asks – Tap is, believe it or not, even more fun than it looks.