0%
Still working...

SHIRLEY’S ALL DANCING ALL THE TIME

 

Shirley Read-Jahn’s memoir, Dancing Through Life, is as joyous as its title promises. Not that there are no trials and tribulations in the accounts of the seventy-plus years she describes. No, indeed. But the point of all of them for her is to keep dancing and laughing and hoping and loving it all.

She has such a fascinating background, that it seems like a made-for-a -memoir script, though that was certainly not her purpose. Her purpose was not writing it, but living it. She started life in England, 1944, with her (somewhat) older sister, making her a near-contemporary of mine. Both of us war time babies, except I spent the war safe and sound in the USA, and my father was not a philandering British spy. That’s just for starters.

She grew up in both countries and spoke both languages (her propensities for languages is something else I don’t share with her.) She also had a wanderlust I could but imagine. For that, she was born into exactly the right time and circumstance. Around the world she went, she and her vagabond sister, fully immersed in the “hippie-ness” of the sixties and seventies. Her mother and father divorced, leaving their girls a bit rootless and hankering for adventure, a hankering they’ve spent a lifetime indulging. The countries and continents they’ve explored are enough to make for a full and instructive read. And always, always, fun.

She’s an Australian right now, pursuing writing and belly-dancing. Not many can live up to that sentence, but it only touches the surface of this exuberant life. I feel I know her through these pages, and I will live always jealous of her derring-do and the adventurous years she’s lived and will continue to create as her future unfolds. This is a volume 1, so please send volume 2 our way, Shirley, and soon.

 

 

Recommended Posts