After graduation from Rice University in May 2002, I found myself in County Cork trying to determine my Irish shoe size. I had come on a Goliard Scholarship for summer study abroad, funded through the generosity and, let’s admit it, certain wackiness of a set of Sid Richardson College alumni and friends.
The task at hand: an assessment of tap dance’s ancestry and its potential future as a worldwide art.
My fantastic research itinerary included one month of immersion in the traditional dance of Ireland and another in modern tap dance as translated from the American in Freiburg, Germany. My host in Carrigaline, Fionán Cogan, sent me to Malloy’s with a shopping list and my first lesson: you can’t dance unless you know what makes you happy.
I flew across the Atlantic hoping to become a veritable dance connoisseur; I would return with the knowledge that it’s not how well you dance (or how well you do anything, for that matter), but how much happiness it creates that counts.
With the purchase of two size 4 ‘Irishfree’ set dancing shoes, I was off.
