I thought of very little else over the next few days. It became something of an obsession, and I was eager to know literally everything about the panty-dance. Oddly enough, I wasn't prepared to discuss the matter with my parents — talking about girls' underpants was sort of embarrassing — so I knew from the start I'd have to figure it all out on my own.

Natural curiosity spurred me on, at least at first. I wondered if women still did the panty-dance in the present day. I understood that the film's events took place over a hundred years ago (I hadn't been afraid to ask my folks about that), and that life had been much different back then. How did the dance first start; who invented it? Did only pretty girls show off their panties like that? It was genuinely fascinating; new ideas occurred to me almost every waking minute.

Most of all, I wondered how it must have felt, knowing that your lacy, white KNICKERS were on view to all and sundry. That was a question I was most determined to answer. The idea of whirling across a stage with a skirt raised to my chin made my heart race every time it crossed my mind.

Trouble was, there was only one possible way to satisfy my interest.

I knew what I'd have to do, but simply thinking about it made me blush with a kind of breathless, guilty pleasure. What if I got caught? Young though I was, I knew that boys weren't supposed to wear girls' clothing. If anyone found out, I'd absolutely die of shame – and that was the best case scenario.

Despite these misgivings, it took me less than a minute to make my decision. The temptation was too great, the desire too strong to deny. I'd have to be careful, need to sneak around while nobody was looking. At any rate, I really had no other choice: the impulse was virtually irresistible.
I would have to become a girl.

My initial attempts at dressing up were modest improvisations, using anything that resembled a skirt. I started out with one of my Mother's aprons, smuggled out of the kitchen early in the morning while everybody else was asleep. It was an old-fashioned pinafore, reminiscent of 1950s sit-coms, complete with a red gingham pattern. It seemed a natural choice, being so unambiguously feminine. That was how I saw it: only women wore aprons, so putting one on would make me a girl.

Slipping into this makeshift "dress" was incredibly exciting, awakening the same emotions I'd felt in the cinema. It would begin as I removed my pajama bottoms, stripping down to my plain cotton briefs. My pulse quickened with anticipation, raising a fine, pink hue across my features. The fear of discovery added spice to the ritual; I always glanced round to make sure no one was watching.

Wandering about in my little white knicks, I usually shivered from stem to stern. It wasn't just the morning chill, I knew I doing something extremely naughty. Goose flesh swept over my tummy as I walked bare-thighed across the floor. The bedroom was my stage, the panty-dance was about to begin, and I was the star attraction!

Having completed all the necessary preparations, I stepped carefully into the apron, passing the collar over my head and wrapping the draw strings around my waist. Naturally, it only covered my front (leaving my bottom exposed), but that didn't really bother me at the time. Being a child, my imagination was more than capable of filling in the blanks. It was long and frilly and looked like a frock. The transformation was finished: I was a girl.

It's impossible to describe the sheer delight I experienced, sweeping up my dress to exhibit my silky white underthings. Scampering around this phantom stage was a joy beyond anything I'd ever known. I could hear the roar of the crowd, the clash of the cymbals, the wild shrieks of the chorus girls. It was like entering another world, a place of blazing lights, thunderous applause and pure childhood magic.

As the weeks went by, my fantasies became increasingly more elaborate. I developed an impromptu routine which included high kicks, cartwheels and skirt flips, cantering my feet from right to left. My favourite move was the "royal flash" towards the end, where I bent over and revealed my pantied bottom to the audience. This was, of course, the climax of the show, the moment everyone had been waiting for. Inexplicably, the thought of jiggling my bottom-cheeks back and forth seemed almost indescribably wicked.

I also continued experimenting with my costume, graduating from pinafores to mock-frocks and cast-offs. Both of my sisters studied ballet, and I knew where their old hand-me-downs were stored. Most of their outfits were too big for me, but I managed to cobble together a few mismatched items that served my purposes. I didn't bother with the leotards or tutus (neither of which appealed to me), setting my sights on the jazz skirts and sequined tops. The highlight of the act was a pair of fancy-pants covered with tiny lace frills. Heart-stoppingly pretty, they were precisely my size when drawn up to the belly button. I literally couldn't believe my luck when I found them: it was practically too good to be true.

In the meantime, I finally worked up the courage to ask what the dance was called. Once again, I was reluctant to talk to my parents (Dad in particular seemed to have become rather distant in recent months), so I eventually approached my older sister, Rachel. She was only two years my senior and we'd been thick as thieves for as long as I could remember. All the same, I was still a little embarrassed about the whole topic, so I decided to wait until the right moment to broach the subject.

That moment presented itself one cool spring afternoon when we were lounging on the sofa, watching TV in the rumpus room. This was not long past my seventh birthday, and I'd noticed for close on a year that the panty-dance appeared on television at regular intervals (though not as regularly as I might have liked). I'd also come to recognize the tune — apparently quite famous from what I could gather – and figured that Rachel would have to know everything about it, being a ballet student and all.

We were watching some rattling old cowboy flick, a late-forties adventure about a Mississippi gambler shooting his way across the Wild West. Half-way through the movie, the hero ended up in a Silver Dollar casino, and we were confronted by a face-full of flailing petticoats. My eyes automatically widened at the sight of all those frilly silk panties, and I turned to my sister, barely able to conceal my excitement.

"Rachel", I asked, pointing to the screen, "what's that dance called?"
"Huh?" she replied, evidently distracted, then raised her eyebrows as the question registered. "Oh...that's the cancan."

We blinked at each other for a couple of seconds, then stared back at the TV without further comment. It occurred to me that Rachel was just as fascinated as I was, though maybe in a slightly different manner. We watched the spectacle unfold, occasionally casting sidelong glances at one another. The panty shots continued for another two minutes, during which the tension became agonizing. We were kids, a great unspoken mystery had been raised, and there were no grown-ups around. We both wanted to talk about it.

The silence was finally shattered during the commercial break. The cancan hung thick in the air between us, despite having vanished off the screen five minutes before. The conversation was a little awkward for the first thirty seconds, but then we both giggled when I asked why the girls were showing off their knickers (that's one of the best things about living in the United Kingdom: the word "Knickers" is guaranteed to break the ice in any company).

Having found a common ground, we talked through most of the afternoon, nattering away in the loose, careless fashion of childhood. She told me that the cancan was a French dance invented by a guy named Sharks Offinbark at a place called the Moolin Rooge (yes, that was precisely how she pronounced it). According to her ballet teacher, there was a special academy in Paris that taught the cancan, where only the world's greatest dancers could get in.

"What about the chorus girls in the Jekyll and Hyde movie?" I asked. "That was set in London."
Rachel shrugged her shoulders and said that the cancan was popular all over the world. This led on to various stylistic comparisons: France vs Britain, England vs America and so on. After intense speculation, we concluded that the original French version must have been the best (all the others being pale imitations, of course).

It was all terribly intriguing, especially since I had no idea what she was talking about half the time. Rachel knew her subject, and the terminology she employed amounted to a foreign language in my ears. On the other hand, I was utterly mesmerized by the notion of a Cancan school, and most interested in visiting Paris (where every girl in the city was required to learn the dance in primary school, from all accounts).

The conversation invariably returned to the revealing of the girls' knickers, and Rachel was surprisingly candid about the matter. Apparently, the exhibition of the panties was an absolute necessity.

"That's how it's supposed to be danced," Rachel explained in tones of casual authority, "you have to hold up your skirts to do all those high kicks."

It all sounded perfectly reasonable, but personal experience suggested there was considerably more to it than that.

"Do you think they actually like showing off their panties?" This sounded perfectly reasonable: the dance seemed specially designed to display every inch of their underwear.

"No," Rachel replied instantly, then gnawed her lip in evident consternation. Apparently, we were both keeping secrets too mortifying to disclose. An eye-rolling pause later, she lowered her voice and admitted that she and her friends liked to flash their undies when there were no adults around. "It's kind of fun when we do that bottom-wriggle at the end," she added, looking away to hide her pinkening cheeks.

At that second, I came as close to sharing my fantasies with another person as I ever would. Needless to say, I was desperate to know more about Rachel's private cancan troupe, but she flatly refused to say anything else, other than confiding that the last performance took place at Janey North's slumber party). From what she'd just told me, they felt precisely the same way I did, and I would have sold my soul for a chance to join them.