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I have shin splints. Four nights straight of overzealous dancing and I’m crippled. But oh, what fun last night.

This was hours of fast dancing to session music on a worn wooden floor in a dark pub in a small village. With excellent dancers. I held my own. Though, disturbingly, I find myself becoming one of those American dancers who cares more about proper style than the natives. I saw this phenomenon in Tralee last year. A contigent from Milwaukee (the men scandalously dancing in shorts) were the sharpest dancers in the hall. Always precisely on the beat, I learned a great deal from them, but not about having fun regardless of one’s skill, which the Irish excel at.

But this wasn’t the problem last night. Sitting on the sidelines, my partner pointed out the vigorous battering of one renowned dancer. "I think you have to be born with that," she said. I said, "If he danced that way in Clare, they’d say he was stepping like a Galway dancer."

1 April 2000

Kinvara, Co. Clare