Carol appeared as a specialty dancer with Jeannie Coyne in the Keel-Grayson screaming match "Kiss me Kate". Assigned to assist Hermes Pan with the choreography, and also because she expressed a longing to perform again, she was told that she would be partnered with Bob Fosse, an up-and-coming dancer, and would appear with him in a short dance vingette at the very end of the movie. However, she probably did not know that this brief appearance would make, hers included, the careers of three prominent entertainment and dance identities.

Bob Fosse, who had been on Broadway and appeared in a few film roles before Kiss Me Kate, was to be groomed by MGM as their next "Fred Astaire". Fosse was growing more and more disappointed when his parts were getting more and more insignificant. To appear in Kiss me Kate in a part small as a chorus boy's, Fosse asked Hermes Pan if he could choreograph his own vingette. Pan agreed.

While working the choreography, Carol would make an imprint on Fosse's developing choreographic style. Gottfried, in his biography of Bob Fosse, describes excellently the dance and also Carol's influence on Fosse:

The part of "From this Moment On" that he would stage was his dance with Haney, beginning as she makes a stripper’s entrance, leading from the pelvis. Suddenly he flashes in from the wings, feet first, in a long, swooping, startling and dazzling baseball slide that lands him prone on his back at her feet. As he rises, they freeze for three dramatic beats, and at this instant the Bob Fosse style of choreography came into existence. It was born of Carol Haney and sired by the strange and striking choreographer, Jack Cole. For Carol Haney was a Jack Cole disciple.

...Carol Haney had danced for him in the movies and was the lead dancer in his nightclub act, the Jack Cole Dancers, until she quit to become Gene Kelly’s assistant at MGM. Apparently she missed performing because she was taking the opportunity offered by Kiss Me, Kate to dance briefly on screen, and that was how she came to work with Bob Fosse in “From this Moment On”. In the process of working out the number, she introduced him to the dance language of Jack Cole. Fosse did not mimic Cole in his steps, nor did he adopt Haney’s own mannerisms wholesale, although as another Jack Cole dancer said, “Jack’s dancers not only had abilities but a stylistic sense, and a way of carriage that was unique.” But as Fosse was finding his dance self, Cole and Haney had surely led the way.

In “FTMO”, Carol Haney is wearing an Elizabethan gown while Fosse is in harlequin tights. The music has stopped. They begin snapping their fingers rhythmically, a device that would be repeated on Broadway for the following decades in one or another of the elegant, miniature, quirky, detailed, accented, and syncopated dances that would be identified with Bob Fosse, the “delicate and small dancing” that so pleased Stanley Donen.

As the duet continues, he moves to Haney’s side. Both are grinning sunnily as if they know exactly what the had just discovered, and they swivel their shoulders in unison. His knees are slightly bent with an easy tension. He nods with his head, a “let’s go” gesture, and they invert their knees and toes, awkward and elfin.

He springs onto the base of a lamppost, swinging out on one arm with Haney beneath him, and again they snap their fingers in time with the big band swing of the music. Off the lamppost, back on the ground, he leads her into a famous Fosse knee slide with arms half outstretched, elbows tucked, wrists limp, hands facing front, and fingers spread, and still he grins; it is infectious and warming. It seems as if they are going to make their exit now, down on one knee and inching along, sidling off, but they abruptly pick up for a big finish, a flash finish, a Riff Brothers finish.

The energy cuts down, leaving them grinning impishly as they slip through small steps, their knees bent, their bodies seemingly relaxed. Bob pushes his hat down over his eyes, and they again edge along on their knees. They Haney returns to the stripper’s bumps that began the dance; suddenly Bob does a complete back flip. Then he and Haney shuffle off, and the whole movie might as well end right there, for nothing in it has approached this number, and nothing can follow it..."

The dance, is in my opinion, probably the best thing that happened in the film. Full of fingersnapping, the now trademarked Fosse pelvic thrusts, and the exciting contrast between minimalist movements and explosive moments, the musical arrangement was brassy and sexy, the dance turned out to be one of Fosse's favorites, and the segment caught the eye of Jerome Robbins, the famous Broadway choreographer. Fosse's sensual and dynamic choreography blew audiences away, and Carol's brilliant dancing wrote the MGM studio execs a filmic letter on just how good a dancer, and just how underused a performer she was at the studio.

Fosse, disillusioned by Hollywood, returned frustrated to the great white way. Haney returned to assist Kelly with "It's Always Fair Weather". Shirley Maclaine, a chorus girl in George Abbott's show "Me and Juliet", auditioned for a chorus part in Abbott's new show, "The Pajama Game". Maclaine got the part of one of six all singing- all dancing chorus girls.

With the "Pajama Game" producers impressed by the Kiss me Kate vingette, Fosse was offered the choreographing job. Fosse subsequently insisted that Carol be brought to New York for the show, and Carol, although wanting to stay at MGM because of her loyalty to the Freed unit, flew to New York for an audition with George Abbott, and flew back to continue assisting Gene Kelly with "Brigadoon". When she got the part, Carol was granted an early release from her MGM contract by the boss himself- Arthur Freed.

History was being made.