Sundancing (Up Close and Personal)
This Labor Day weekend we will dance the Sundance for the 24th time, and there is no way that I can be objective about that fact or about the event itself. Sundance is personal to me: it always has been; it always will be.
The first Sundance was in 1988, three years before we started CAMP Rehoboth. As we’ve said many times in these pages, Sundance was started as a tenth anniversary party for Steve Elkins and me. That was 24 years ago. Do the math. This year we are celebrating our 34th anniversary.
Even the first Sundance was a fundraiser, but since that time it has not been about our anniversary, even though we continue each year to recognize that original purpose. Back then, Sundance was personal in an even more profound way: our friends and loved ones were dying of AIDS, and we felt a great need to do something about it.
Though times and situations have changed since 1988, and though we now have help in countless ways and from a multitude of sources, Steve and I have continued to be the driving force behind Sundance. I repeat: there is no way that I can be objective about it. It has become as much a part of my life as Christmas or New Year.
This year’s theme is The Wonderful, Glorious, Amazing Light of the Watercolor Rainbow. I have to confess, my memories of the last 24 years of Sundance have run together like that watercolor rainbow in this year’s theme. If I let my mind skip like a stone on water across all the years of Sundance, it touches down in some very interesting places. Here are a few of them:
One year, as the dance ended at 2 a.m., I was in the light and sound booth on the stage of the Convention Center with the Sundance tech crew. Haze from the light show still lingered in the room, and the lights had come up slowly as the last of the night’s dancers exited the building. Suddenly one of the crew members jumped up and pointed to the center of the room. “There’s somebody in the truss,” he said. Sure enough, a wayward dancer had somehow managed to avoid detection and climb all the way up into the lighting truss in the center of the room. As we watched, he scrambled down, dropped onto the empty dance floor, and sauntered out the front door.
At another Sundance, a young man rushed up to me not long before the dance was to end. “Pipes broken in the bathroom,” I finally understood over the music and his slurred speech. Not only was the pipe broken, it was spewing water like Old Faithful. By the time I realized that it would take more than my bare hands to stop the water, I was soaking wet from head to foot.
One of my favorite stories and still my favorite Sundance line after all these years, (and yes, I’ve recounted it in these pages before) comes from Robert Kovalcik of South Pacific Florist. A couple of hours before the doors opened on the auction night, one of the gigantic flower arrangements towering over the bar imploded. “Oh my God,” Robert exclaimed dramatically when summoned to make repairs, “it collapsed under the weight of its own beauty!”
Perhaps the oddest thing of all: one year Kathy Weir came looking for me at the dance with a young man in tow. Apparently, instead of earplugs, he had rolled up some pieces of toilet paper and shoved them into his ears. “I don’t know what happened,” he exclaimed, visibly upset. “The pressure in my ears just sucked them up inside. Do you have anything to get them out?” Even with a flashlight I couldn’t see anything, and I wasn’t at all keen on digging around in someone’s ear with one of the tools I had on site. “Please,” he begged, “do something.” Finally, I thought I saw something way down deep in his ear, and using my smallest pair of needle-nose pliers, I extracted an inch long roll of paper from in his ear. He was happy. Would I have let a stranger put a pair of needle-nose pliers deep into my ear? Not a chance.
Sundance is full of personal stories, and all of us who have worked on the event over the years have them. Some, like these, are humorous. Others are of the more esoteric variety.
The longevity of Sundance has given it meaning. It has become the way we end the summer—the way we welcome the fall season. For some, I’m sure, it is just another auction, just another dance. For others of us, it is the last dance of the summer season; a time when we gather our beach house families and friends together for one final summer celebration.
I don’t know why, other than that my life has become one with the rhythms of a summer resort community, but I always feel changed after Labor Day—and at my most creative. Somehow my spirit is always renewed by the efforts it takes to produce Sundance. I may not be able to move my sore body the day after it is all over, but my spirit is strengthened. I am always reminded that Native Americans danced the Sundance as a rite of passage. It never left them unchanged.
Yes, Sundance is personal to me. Looking over the list of hosts and sponsors who make the event possible, I see the history of Sundance unfolding. Some of them have been a part of the event from the very beginning; many others have supported it for years. All of them are there because they feel a connection to one another, to this community, and to the hope that together we can change the world for the better.
In the 24 years of its existence, Sundance has raised a lot of money to fight AIDS and to support the work of the CAMP Rehoboth Community Center. Every year I am amazed at the time and money that our volunteers and donors are willing to give to Sundance. I suspect that they too feel changed and renewed by the experience—and each one, I’m sure, has a personal Sundance story to share.
Please join us on Saturday and Sunday, September 3-4 for Sundance 2011: The Wonderful, Glorious, Amazing Light of the Watercolor Rainbow. I promise is will be wonderful, glorious, and absolutely amazing!
Murray Archibald, Founder and President of the Board of Directors of CAMP Rehoboth, is an artist in Rehoboth Beach.