It was a beautiful Sunday morning in Gainesville, Florida. Sunlight was streaming through the windows onto the dance floor. The band Steamshovel and caller Alex Deis-Lauby were guiding us through an amazing morning of dance. I said to my partner, “Isn’t this a lovely way to spend a Sunday morning?” She replied, “BEST CHURCH EVER!”
It is a sentiment we’ve heard on dance floors across the country. Many of us consider the music and dance community to be our spiritual community or extended family. We recognize in the friendships and the transcendent experiences, an element of the holy.
Most of us go to our local dance events, plop down our $10, have fun, and go home. Maybe we bring a bag of cookies for the snack table, or we stay late and sweep the floor. But if this is really our spiritual community, our extended family, shouldn’t we be supporting it with our money? We should give more than the price of admission and say “keep the change!”
Beyond that, it is possible to set up automatic deductions from your bank or credit card to go to your community and to CDSS every month. And to keep the joy for generations to come, remember CDSS and your music and dance community in your estate planning.
When we first thought about including CDSS in our will, we were concerned that we would need to call in the lawyer and rewrite the entire will. But when we pulled out the will from where it had been filed in a drawer for years and read it again, we saw that there is a paragraph stating that at any time, we can add a letter to this will to designate specific gifts to specific people.
We wrote a letter stating that an amount of money would go to CDSS and another amount to our local dance community, signed it, dated it, DONE. Yours might be just as simple!
If we value our music and dance communities as the spiritual communities and extended families that they are, supporting them with our money as well as our time, they will continue into the future as “church” for many joyous dancing pilgrims.
Thanks to the Massachusetts Cultural Council for their generous support.