By Frazier Moore
The Associated Press

Tony Danza is proudly giving a tour.

Here's the kitchen. The piano. The performance area. The studio audience? Nice and up close. Those big doors over there? They open right onto West 67th Street.

Bright and cheery, this will be Danza's new home, live, five days a week: The set for The Tony Danza Show (noon Monday-Friday, Channel 19).

He'll have a sidekick: Ereka Vetrini, a contestant on The Apprentice last winter.

There'll be cooking - he's Italian and he loves to cook - and the occasional fitness segment, something vital to this former pro boxer. "I have never been on camera in 26 years without working out first," says Danza, who retains a boyish glow and still looks like he could go 15 rounds.

There'll be music. And, this being a talk show, there'll be conversation. And not just with stars, but also noncelebrity types - hometown heroes "with a great story to tell," says Danza.

"I want to use New York as a character on the show," says Danza. "I want to show the whole country New York City the way I see it."

Born in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood 53 years ago, he has traveled a circuitous route to get here: a talk show airing from Manhattan's Upper West Side.

His early boxing career led to his casting as lovable but dim Tony Banta, the boxer-cabbie on Taxi. He starred on Who's the Boss? for eight years. He switched from sitcoms to drama with Family Law.

He starred on Broadway in revivals of A View from the Bridge and, with Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh. He made several films. He toured as a cabaret act.

So with that checkered show-biz past, was it inevitable that Danza would finally land a talk show?

Not necessarily, he says.

"One of my problems as an actor is that I have a very recognizable persona," he explains. "You play Tony in every show, and then you're just Tony, and it's hard for a director to think that you can get beyond that in a movie. I thought if I was to do a talk show it would be the last nail in the coffin as far as my acting career goes, because it would just reinforce that 'Tony persona.' "

Then he got another bid.

"I'm a big believer in dreams," Danza says, "but I also know I could wait another 25 years for the part that hasn't come yet. Or I could take a shot, especially since they said they'd let me do the talk show live in New York.

"A talk show," he adds, "is an offshoot of my stage act: I can tell a joke, I can dance, I can put over a song. And I can talk about what's going on."

Something going on: a fax he got from his 11-year-old daughter, Emily, still back in Los Angeles with Tracy, his wife of 18 years, and his daughter Katie, who will finish high school this year.

"Emily used to bite her nails," he says, then reads her fax: "Look! Now they're long," with detailed drawings of her healthy fingernails illustrate.

Thinking about his kids, whom he misses, he also thinks of his parents. He misses them too.

His father was a sanitation worker, his mother a bookkeeper.

His eyes glisten, but he's wearing a big grin.

"I remember my father saying to me, 'If you got the goods, you'll be OK.' I've got the goods here, I think. This could be the perfect job for me. I'm just gonna try not to mess it up."