You’d be foolish to judge a book by its cover or a man by his ballet shoes.

Dayton’s Rodney Veal proves that daily.

You might know him as a dancer, an educator or the host of Think TV’s “The Art Show.”

Rodney is also a cat daddy, a thinker and a community volunteer who is proudly “in the room where it happens” on behalf of a long list of Dayton nonprofits.

As “What Had Happened Was” host Amelia Robinson discovered, Rodney is also very, very much Mama Veal.

And her learned very young to mean what he says and to keep commitments. He’s a complex man about town.

Amelia and Rodney start light, but get read deep talking about everything from Frontline’s recent documentary about Dayton to educational inequality to cats (you can never have enough cats).