By: Denise Foley

Kate and Davis Wright

Sure, the little dancers are cute with their curly wigs, shiny dresses, and sparkly beauty pageant makeup. But Frank McAneny was pretty darn cute himself in his white sateen shirt, slim black pants and vest, and purple tie. And the elementary school principal from Mt. Laurel, N.J., is no less dedicated to Irish dancing than any little ghillie-wearing pipsqueak named Caitlin.

In fact, three years ago, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, one of the first questions McAneny asked his doctor was, “Can I postpone the surgery till after the Oireachtas?”

“Since the cancer was caught in its early stages, he said it would wait,” said McAneny, a tall man with silver hair and an acerbic wit. “So I had my surgery the week after the Oireachtas and was able to dance by St. Patrick’s Day.”

It says something about a man that he organizes his life around a form of dance that attracts guys like, well, the Macy’s annual buy-one, get-one bra sale. You could count all the adult male dancers at this weekend’s Middle Atlantic Oireachtas in Philadelphia on two hands and still have some fingers left over. But that was good: It meant there were no crowds in front of the men’s room mirrors and the guys didn’t have to worry about someone jigging into them as they left a stall.

McAneny is the lone “original, surviving dancer” from the early days of Bucks County’s Crossroads Irish Dancers (last year’s “best adult dancing school” in the city’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade), founded by Langhorne’s Joanne Schneider. It is the only adults-only dancing school in the region and, like many of its members, McAneny didn’t pick up the four-hand reel till he was an adult—45, in fact. “My daughter was taking dance lessons at the Ryan School, and a lot of the parents were just sitting around,” McAneny recalls. “Then, one day, Joanne [whose daughter, Rose, was taking lessons] asked if any of the parents would be interested in learning. I and three women said yes.”

Schneider, an Irish dance teacher for 11 years, didn’t put on her first ghillies until she was in her 20s—after she went a “cheap date” with a Polish boyfriend to his friend’s ceili dancing graduation. “Watching the dancers, It hit me like a bolt from the blue,” says Schneider.  “I just knew this was for me.”

Likewise, Kate Wright, a prosecutor in Wilmington, Del., discovered Irish dancing while she was in college. Both she and her husband, Davis, a bankruptcy attorney, are now members of the Crossroads group. “It just seemed like fun, and it is,” she says.

But the Crossroads dancers aren’t just in it for the jigs and jollies. “They’re competitive,” says Schneider. “They like competing and that really becomes the focus of our year.”

In fact, like the other 3,000 some dancers jigging and reeling at Philadelphia’s midtown Marriott over three days, they were trying to qualify for the World Irish Dancing Championship to be held the first week of April 1007 in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2009, the world championships—and an estimated 20,000 dancers and teachers from all over the world—will come to Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, marking the first time the event will be held outside the British Isles. (See “What Will Happen When There Are 20,000 of Them?”)

At least in the Middle Atlantic region, the number of schools going the competitive route seems to have grown exponentially, says Schneider. “I’d say it’s quadrupled. When we first started, there were maybe two or three other adult teams. Now there can be as many as 12 or more,” she says. “The standard of the competitors has risen too, along with the numbers. But that’s good. When you dance with better dancers, you get better. They drag you up.”