The first time I heard the word oireachtas I thought it referred to a muscle or something. The first time I saw it I just overlooked it as just another one of those unpronouncable Gaelic words. I kept hearing dancers talk about it in reverent tones, and I finally decided it was an ancient Celtic god still worshipped by pagans. It isn't. It's a regional dance competition. If you're a young dancer, it's the place you qualify to go to the World Championships.

After several years of feises, dance shows, and the like, I finally got to go to an Oireachtas. You see some of the best dancing by miniature Riverdancers that you will ever see. You see adults doing flawless, geometrical figure dances and young women flying through the air like a bird with a foot tucked under them. You hear rhythms so exact and so exciting that you can't believe that sound is being produced by someone's feet. And costumes. Boy, those costumes!

Oireachtas level costumes look less like the Book of Kells and more like Book of Geometry. It's all there in glittery, metallic applique: triangles and hearts, rhomboids, trapezoids, curvilinear figures and even an octagon or two. Symmetical and bright, color combinations dazzle the eyes and sparkle under the hotel chandeliers like ice diamonds on a sunny day. Wigs with curls like overcooked pasta bounce under sparkling headpieces that must be fastened on with Superglue.

There's always some downtime between competitions, and I observed a young dancer amusing her younger brother by asking him to name all the shapes in her rainbow colored dress.

"That's a circle," he said. "That's a wectangle."

"Good,"she said. "What's this?"

"Butterfly," he said.

"Good enough," she said.

There are outstanding performers in any sport and Irish dancing is no exception. Of the hundreds of dancers I watched at the Oireachtas, the one I'll always remember is this kid I'll call Oliver. O. was dancing in under 12, but he was a very small kid. Some of the other boys were tall, and the one he danced with first made him look even shorter. People don't usually clap during a round of dancing, but when this kid jumped up in the air, they did! He glided like a little black-and-red paper airplane over the floor hanging up there like he was weightless in space. Pardon the pun, but O. rocked us.

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