Garland’s Glimpse features a column about previous events that occur at Parkrose Ballroom
On Saturday June 8th, 2019, The PDXSteppers4Health held their “Spring Into Summer” event at Parkrose Ballroom. This event featured Chicago Style Steppin’. The PDXSteppers4Health use dance to bring together the community, creating a safe space to socialize and have fun while improving mental & physical health. This event was truly inspiring and went smooth as their dance moves! If you are interested in more information about PDXSteppers4Health, you can find them on Facebook and they also offer classes on Wednesdays located at Legacy Emanuel in the Courtyard Conference room (the old gym/swimming pool).
May had five Fridays, so on the 5th friday ( May 24th) there was a dance held at Parkrose Ballroom, with Susan Vandervlugt as the guest instructor. Over fifty people attended this dance event and as always, every one had tons of fun. Susan taught Rumba and showed off another talent of hers by being a DJ as well!
Every month we look forward to the 4th Friday Dance event! Linda Springstead lead this event like a champ with a lesson on Nightclub 2 Step, teaching over fifty people! Several dancers mentioned how much they enjoyed the lesson with Linda and the dance afterward.
On May 17th, there was a dance event featuring Lisa Boucher! The type of dance being taught was Foxtrot. No, Foxtrot does not involve an actual fox, but is still a lovely dance style that everyone should learn. I must say, Lisa taught it well on Friday and it was a blast!
Wow! If you forgot to mark your calendar, April’s 4th Friday Dance hosted by Linda Springstead was a success! Over 50 people attended and the atmosphere was fabulous.
Hello Everyone,
If you missed our previous event on March 23rd, Spring into Dance, then you missed out on a magnificent time! I attended the event for the whole day, and was quite impressed. Susan Molitor taught Ballroom Basics to a room of about 70 people, which almost all of them were brand new dancers. In the space of 50 minutes, without a headset, Susan got them dancing their hearts away! Then she taught a 50 min Nightclub 2-step. Again, these people were actually dancing NC 2-step as beginners and were doing a great job. After Susan's lessons, there was Linda Springstead with Salsa; then Lisa Boucher with Rumba who jumped in to substitute for a teacher, who at the last minute could not make it. Lisa had recently recovered from a foot injury but confidently and gracefully jumped in. By golly, injured or not, she taught Rumba - and not easy patterns I might add, without batting an eyelash. Leilani Nagakawa was next up with West Coast Swing. As some may know, WC Swing is one of the harder dances to teach, in fact it is incredibly hard. Within Leilani's allotted 50 minutes, she had people dancing WC Swing! What a testimony to her teaching abilities! Rachel Lidskog-Lim taught a Waltz class accompanied by her husband, Jack Lim, who entertained the class while also being a fantastic partner for the occasion; followed by what people described as a "hoot of a Tango class" taught by Mary Ann Carter.
We ended the wonderful day with Joy Davina teaching Foxtrot & East Coast Wing, fusing them together. There were many who started the day with us at 10am and ended the day with us at 7pm. They stayed all day! Not only that, some of these same dancers took advantage of Lisa's offer to go over to Rose City ballroom after the Spring Into Dance event where Lisa let the participants of our event in for FREE and taught Cha Cha, something that was not taught during the day.
While our Spring Into Dance event took place a month ago, we are still getting positive feed back and there have been new dancers coming into the dance community. There were over 200 participants and over half of them signed up for additional information. This will definitely be a yearly event!
A big thank you to Parkrose Ballroom for donating the ballroom to the teachers who taught throughout the day, and to Sesame Dance Club for sponsoring Spring Into Dance.