While I was running errands yesterday I went into the Barnes & Noble on Court Street and came across an interesting book. It’s called The Dancing Plague, The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness, by John Waller. Full of footnotes, the book must have begun as an academic paper. It describes a woman in Germany in the 1500′s who one day began dancing in the street and couldn’t stop. She danced until her feet bled, just like in the fairy tale The Red Shoes. It was the start of an epidemic and hundreds of people danced beyond exhaustion and some did dance until they died. That fairy tale developed from a true story. Freaky.
We have a “red shoes” piece in Clown Axioms.
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