If I had a tattoo....
Clogging has been a big part of my life for many, many years. I started the month before I turned 13 years old at a summer program for elementary and jr. high aged kids, called Super Summer, at Brevard Community College (Now Eastern Florida State College). This was a fun program I attended each summer that offered tons of different fun and educational classes. It lasted two weeks and we had two classes each week, chosen from a long list of offerings several weeks before. It was so exciting getting my schedule in the mail, letting me know if my top choices were the ones I ended up with. Then, on the first day, all the kids gathered in the auditorium at BCC, waiting for your class and instructor to be called out so you can go with them and begin the fun. My instructor was Nancy Swickert, a very kind and patient woman.
If memory serves correctly, the reason I chose clogging as one of my classes is because of one single class I attended some years prior at McClarty Park in Rockledge with a family friend, Nancy Fletcher (who, sadly passed away from cancer a very short time later). I believe it was the first class of a beginner series with Indian River Cloggers, but I'm not entirely sure. While it didn't stick that very, very first time I tried it, it sure did that summer of 1986.
Looking back so many years to the very first routine I ever learned in that summer program (East Bound and Down, by the way) to now I am.... gosh, I don't even know the word... amazed?... at all that I've gotten to do and the wonderful people I've gotten to meet. I went from a little nerdy kid to a big nerdy instructor and made friends all over Florida and the country every year along the way. I've gotten to teach in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, North Carolina, and next month Michigan. I can't wait to see where I go next! I've choreographed numerous routines, show routines, routines for non-cloggers in theater shows, performed a few times at Walt Disney World in the nationally televised Easter and Christmas parades, taught at Sea World Orlando, taught at workshops and conventions, created and ran my own group (Speed City Cloggers), and taught at classes for several other groups as a guest instructor. It's been fantastic!
So all of that to say that if I had a tattoo (which I will never get), it would be somewhere on my lower leg and be of a pair of Bell Taps clogging taps. Clogging and cats have been the most consistent things in my life that I think clogging taps would be a good choice.
Wait... maybe a cat wearing clogging shoes...