‘Itchy Feet’ Led Dancer to America

Jackie O’Leary has one goal before she moves from Southern California: to have one of her dancing students compete in the national dance championships in Ireland. Then she can return triumphantly home there.

O’Leary came to the United States nearly five years ago, looking for a chance to establish herself as a teacher of traditional Irish dancing, a national pastime back home. She had been dancing since she was 3 years old and scored very well in the national championships in 1984.

“I got what my mother calls ‘itchy feet,’ and I don’t know why but I’ve always had a dream to teach Irish dancing in America,” she said.

O’Leary, 24, was just 18 when she left her small town of Stranorlar in County Donegal for New York to be a nanny. After three months she had paid back the family for her plane ticket and a few months later left New York for home. But her wanderlust again got the best of her, and she landed a job as a nanny for a Florida family. At the same time, she applied for a visa.

O’Leary worked for the Florida family for 1 1/2 years. By then her tourist visa had nearly expired and rather than ask for an extension, she went for a 24-hour cruise to the Bahamas, thus leaving the country and automatically extending her visa for another six months.

Although the family she was with only paid her $80 a week, O’Leary said, she didn’t mind. “They were a wealthy family and took me all over the United States on family holidays,” she said.

Still, she eventually got itchy feet again and headed for Los Angeles. She said she never thought twice about leaving the safety of being a nanny.

“I’m a go-getter. All my brothers and my mother are like that,” O’Leary said. “My father isn’t, so I guess I got it from my mother. She calls me a tinker, like the Gypsies back home.”

Landing a job in Palm Springs, she took a job as a nurse’s aide and lived with an Irish family she met there. She also started teaching Irish dancing through the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.

She moved again last November, this time to Huntington Beach to get training as an optician. Again she started teaching dance, and shortly afterward got her Donnelly visa and her green card, allowing her to work legally.

“I got one, but I was doing fine without it,” she said matter-of-factly. “Not having it didn’t stop me from doing what I wanted to do, let’s put it that way.”

She now teaches 35 students in Orange County but still occasionally travels to Palm Springs to teach her first dancing pupils. She teaches three days a week, at the Harp Inn in Costa Mesa on Tuesday nights and at Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church in Newport Beach. Most of her students are Irish-Americans.

“They have their Irish heritage but they don’t know the culture,” she said. “At home, it’s No. 1 with us. In some schools, especially where they teach the Irish language, it’s mandatory.”

O’Leary, the only girl in a family with three boys, said she is very close to her mother and periodically brings her out for visits. Her mother made the costume that she wore for the national championships.

“She took the design from the Book of Kells and did all the work by hand. It took her six weeks,” she said with admiration.

The ties with her family and the love of her culture have convinced her that she will someday return home to Ireland.