Chapter Six: The Birth of an Idea

Every puzzle in my life kept circling the same question: How do you survive when the room begins to close in? Budapest taught me to listen for danger; Rome taught me to breathe color; New York taught me to make rhythm my answer.

By the mid-1960s, rhythm wasn’t just music. It was movement. Andrea and I joined a Hungarian Folk Dancing Group, the kind of immigrant circle that stitched Old World memory into New World stages. Rehearsals were sweaty, crowded, alive—community halls smelling of floor wax and rosin, accordion lines chasing violin phrases as we drilled csárdás turns and verbunkos steps until our calves burned. Heels kissed wood, toes snapped, skirts flared; the lead-and-follow felt like speaking Hungarian with your feet.

Those rehearsals became performances, and the performances carried us into unexpected places. We danced before President Lyndon B. Johnson. Zsa Zsa Gabor graced the same stage at a showcase. At the 1965 New York World’s Fair, our group performed again and again, sharing the stage with technology, spectacle, and the roar of a changing world. The Fugitives played there too—our electric chords folding into my folk steps like two halves of the same rhythm. Different outfits, same heartbeat.

Music had taught me that rhythm is survival. Folk dance taught me that motion is the grammar of rhythm. Table tennis—always in our family bloodstream—showed me that rhythm plus motion equals timing. On a stage or at a table, the code was the same: count, plant, fire, recover.

That’s when the seed of invention began to sprout—not as a blueprint, but as a feeling I could finally name. Rhythm, motion, timing, capture. Music, folk dance, table tennis. Together, they formed the grammar of an idea. One day, it would surface as a racquet, as an invention, as the tool I would carry into the world. For now, all I could do was keep moving—until the puzzle I’d carried since Budapest finally revealed the key.