It’s a sobriquet that has since been hard to shake, even to this day.

She found that out, much to her surprise and delight, just last Tuesday, when she came across this old, male school friend whose name she cannot, for the life of her, recall.

Apparently they got to talking, and the subject of her phenomenal prowess as an athlete came up.

“Was I that good?” she asked.

To which he replied: “Yes! You were really fast.”

That made her day, said Kaye Richards, who dropped in on us here in Guyana last week after spending 25 years abroad.

And the only reason she did, she unabashedly admitted, was so she could adopt her two nieces and nephew, the children of one of her seven siblings who is now deceased.

But, she was quick to point out, she enjoyed every minute of her stay here.

“It was so much fun; I’m going back with a full heart,” she said.

In an interview over the telephone, she told the Sunday Chronicle Wednesday that part of the reason for her elation was the time spent in the company of members of the National Dance Company, with whom she spent two memorable days, sharing some of the vast knowledge she has acquired over the years and learning a thing or two herself about Afro-Caribbean dance, of which she has but very little or no experience at all.

A dance professor for the past four years at the University of Utah in the United States of America (USA), Richards, who left here when she was 12, said she had such fun, words cannot express how she feels.

“I feel so blessed,” she said. “It feels as if I have an extended family.”

It is not as if she’d always wanted to be a dancer, she said. As a child, she’d changed her mind about what she wanted to be when she grew up at least once a month, depending upon whom it was she wanted to emulate.

At one time it was a doctor; then a nurse. The motivating factor here was her parents, she said. Both were in the medical field; her dad as a dispenser, and her mom, a nurse.

A little later it was Law; someone in the family was a lawyer. As she got older, her focus shifted to engineering; she wanted to build bridges.

By this time she was living in England, where the family had moved to when they left here. She was the only girl in the class who was doing technical drawing and electronics.

All that changed the day she met Linda, who hailed from Dominica and whom she admits she “used to follow around” as a teenager.

But even before then, she recalled, she had begun feeling a bit charitable towards dance, and the thing that brought this about was watching ballet on television, a privilege she feels she was “very fortunate” not to have had while living here in Guyana.

It was not until she was 20, however, which was rather unusual for one aspiring to be a dancer, that she was to formally take up dance, first at the South East London College now called Lewisham College.

But even then, she said, she still was not certain that this was the career path she wanted to take. What helped her make up her mind was a documentary she saw on the prestigious Alvin Ailey Dance Company of New York, and the person she has to thank for this is her teacher, Ms. Theresa Noble, who made it her duty to expose her students to all aspects of dance.

The deciding factor, she said, was seeing professional Black dancers in action.

“That was what was most important to me,” she said. “The experience was inspirational; mind-blowing.”

She spent about two years at Lewisham, before moving on to the London Contemporary Dance School, which, at the time, was the best outside of America.

There she won a summer scholarship, one of two available at the time, to Alvin Ailey’s. So enthused was she with the experience, she said, she had wanted to stay on after the workshop was over, but couldn’t because they didn’t give scholarships to foreign students.

But fate was on her side, because just then, there was a notice being posted at Alvin Ailey’s which said that Martha Graham’s, another contemporary dance academy that was on par with Alvin Ailey’s, was auditioning for new students. This was around 1991.

She went to the audition and won herself a scholarship. A year later, she was invited to join the Martha Graham Ensemble, through which she was able to tour the entire USA.

“It was a very exciting time for me,’ she recalled.

Not only was she a soloist, but also the company’s costume mistress and tour manager. There were 15 of them in the ensemble, she recalled, and they came from all over the world.

“We were a little United Nations (UN),” she said. Some came from China, Japan, France, Italy and the Basque Countries. She, of course, straddled both England and Guyana.

She spent four and a half years with the ensemble, and five with the school.

Then, it was time to move on.

“I had this burning desire to go back to school,” she said, so she enrolled at the University of Iowa to pursue a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts, specialising in choreography.

Upon graduating in 1998, she joined the staff at the University of Utah, where she now is, first as a visiting professor, then full-time.