This year we celebrate the 20th anniversary Sundance 2007. Wow! Twenty years of the same event. I’m either a masochist (my décor team might say sadist) or there really is a secret Sundance source of eternal magic and rejuvenation. Whatever the reason, Steve and I are still here, and still "sundancing" after all these years—and so are a whole lot of other people.

Thinking about the 20th year made me remember the first year, so I got out the photo album (from the days when I still had the time and inclination to make a photo album) that contains pictures from the very first Sundance back in 1988.

That summer we were all feeling the weight of the first devastating decade of AIDS and we knew we had to do something—no matter how small—to help, or to at least make us feel not so useless. That year was the 10th anniversary for Steve and me, and when our housemates wanted to have a party, we decided to make it a fundraiser. At the time we had not yet started CAMP Rehoboth and SCAC was still a "kitchen table organization" and not yet incorporated, so the money was given to Whitman Walker’s Schwartz Housing Program in Washington and the Health Education Resource Organization (HERO) in Baltimore. That year we raised a little over $6,000 for the two organizations. Last year, by comparison, Sundance cleared $180,000.

That first year Steve and I were joined by 19 friends, bringing the first host list to a grand total of 21. This year we have over 350, including more than 50 logo level sponsors. Looking back over that original host list, a copy of which rests under a clear plastic sheet in my old photo album, got me thinking about my old friends. Some of them are still Sundance Hosts, Supporters or Sponsors, including: Don Baum, Steve Hayes, Emilie Paternoster, Mary Beth Ramsey, Bob Ramsey, Jodi Renbaum, and Albert Scariato. Four of them, beloved friends all: Michael Brossette, John Moore, Dick Sewell, and John Van Meter, didn’t survive the intervening years between the first Sundance and the advent, in the mid-1990s, of the drugs that started keeping HIV positive people alive for a longer period of time.

Originally the event was called "A Sun Dance" because we planned it as an outdoor dance. Fortunately we had the forethought to include a little note at the bottom of the invitation. "In case of unkind weather," it read, "please join us at The Strand, 137 Rehoboth Avenue for a Rain Dance." A good call, I must say, because it poured all day long. The next year the name was changed to simply "Sundance" and not long after that the word "rainbow" was added to the ever changing sub-theme and it’s been there ever since. In retrospect, I get a little kick out of the fact that a rainbow is only possible when there is both sunshine and rain.

Time has a way of changing our perspective on the past. Looking back to that first Sun Dance, I’m incapable of seeing it as we did back then. For me it exists through a long line of Sundance lenses all compressed and faceted into one big Sundance experience. I can’t view one without looking through the 19 that follow. I can’t see the original hosts except as a nucleus—a heart—bracketed by the hundreds who have joined us in the years between then and now. When I think of the decorations, I visualize all of them floating around together in my head. Could I separate them by year? Maybe, but I couldn’t do it without a lot of concentration and my carefully kept Sundance binders and files.

This way of remembering is not unique to me or to my Sundance experience. All of life takes on a compressed quality as we live through it. The past is the present and therefore the future as well—and we are all that we have ever been—the good and the bad, the joy all mixed up with the sorrow.

Sometimes when Steve and I are working away on the host list or some other aspect of Sundance, a friend, long dead, will suddenly sit down with us for a time—John Van Meter, holding his head and concentrating on the year’s financials; Richard Erskine, explaining a new lighting plan; Eric Cabrera, with some special music he wants us to hear; or Michael Brossette dropping off a check…the list goes on and on.

Sundance is important now because both CAMP Rehoboth and SCAC depend on the money it raises to do their work. But it is also important because of the structure and family it has created over the years. None of us understood back then that we were starting something we would still be doing 20 years later. None of us envisioned throwing a party that would last for two decades or become "a Rehoboth tradition" as it has been referred to of late.

Only a few years after the first Sundance, CAMP Rehoboth was born. Much of what I’ve said here also applies to CAMP Rehoboth and, for me, they will always be intertwined. The greatest lesson that Steve and I have learned from both is that starting something is only the first step. Making a commitment to it is the hard part—and in the end, the most satisfying.

Who can say what will happen in the next twenty years or when we’ll be called upon to "dance the last dance," but right now I’m ready to celebrate Sundance for the 20th time in a row. I hope everyone else will join me as we honor and remember the 19 people who danced the first dance with us all those many years ago.

September 4, 1988—The host list from the first Sundance.

Murray Archibald
Steve Elkins
And their friends
Don Baum
Michael Brossette
Hal Creel
Blair Ferguson
Steve Hayes
Rick Hutto
Robert Lancelotta
Barry Latham
David Mackay
John Moore
Emilie Paternoster
Tom Poston
Mary Beth Ramsey
Robert Ramsey
Jodi Renbaum
Albert Scariato
Dick Sewell
Tim Sites
John Van Meter

Thank you to all the CAMP Rehoboth Community Center Volunteers for the period of July 26—August 9.

Tony Burns
Jim Byrnes
Bob Chambers
Harvey Chasser
Terry Colli
Chuck Flanagan
Joe Garitta
Tony Ghigi
James Hagiehenth
Steve Janosik
Spencer Kingswell
Donald Krzyzkowski
Charlie Lee
Tony Meyer
Stan Mills
Michael Muller
Bob Nagy
Jim O’Dell
Jerry Oshinski
Roy Perdue
Jean Rabian
Barb Ralph
Ken Reilly
Chris Sampson
Guillermo Silveira
Rich Snell
Martin Thaler

Rainbow Thumb Club

Matt Carey
Ward Ellinger
Rob Freeman
Tony Ghigi
Steve Hoult
Shawn Noel
Bud Palmer
Ken Reilly
Tom White

Follies Bartenders*

Brian Allen
Frank Catagnus
Rob Dick
Brett Doe
Betzi Moose
Connie Wilson