Dancing was the great affair of my life, the movement of the body in time, in music, in rhythm with breath and heart and earth and cosmos. Dance with pleasure, dance with pain. Dance with lovers, dance with death. Shimmy, jiggle, jive. Smile. Always smile. As a kid I begged my parents for dancing lessons, which they couldn’t afford. And in any case, dancing was a sin. Fortunately, they didn’t forbid movies, so I sat in the dark watching Shirley Temple tapping night after night, toes on the floor tapping with her.

My Shirley Temple dream came true when I moved to New York City and my best friend, Pat, convinced me to sign up together to compete at the Regional Competition of the Fred Astaire Dance Studios at the legendary Copacabana nightclub . There we stood alongside our new friend A

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