In 1981, I spent my junior year in Paris. It should have been a magnificent time, something that people with English majors and literary aspirations would have called “halcyon.” There I was, 19 years old, single, and earnest in the City of Lights. I should have been Leslie Caron dancing along the banks of the Seine with Gene Kelly, or Audrey Hepburn dancing in front of the Arc de Triomphe with Fred Astaire. Instead, I was living alone, thousands of miles away from my Philadelphia home, and my father was dying of cancer. The thought of dancing never even entered my mind.