Dear Friends,
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month!
We are so grateful to all of you who joined our Stop Drop and Dance fundraiser for B4BC, Boarding for Breast Cancer, for the 4th year in a row! Thank you to Lisa Hudson, who hosted the event for B4BC and brought decorations, breast molds for cancer education, and drinks sponsored by Suja juice!
Thanks to you, our Power With Grace community has raised over $14,000 for B4BC over the years to help promote early detection, healthy lifestyles and support for breast cancer survivors!
A special thank you goes out to our breast cancer WARRIORS Gina Mazza, Shel Saxon, Gina Perri, Amy Poirier and Seran Kim, as well as several anonymous warriors who also attended class.
We Stand By You!!!
Happy 50th Birthday Kim Lewis!
It is just the best feeling to catch someone smiling while they dance. Like, really smiling.
On Tuesday, we celebrated Kim Lewis with a 75 minute Stop Drop and Dance playlist of her favorite songs, and she was smiling non-stop (along with many others who attended class!).
Kim just turned 50 last Monday and she requested a GOLD theme for class. Her last song was one of our originals from almost 10 years ago, our favorite birthday finisher, “Da Da Ding” by GENER8ION.
Thanks to everyone who came and brought their energy to share with Kim and caused her to smile from start to finish!
A reminder about the UUMarin sewer project:
Just a heads up that our normal weekday UU Marin venue (240 Channing Way, San Rafael) will be updating their sewer system for ONE more week!
Our regular class schedule is still happening!
However, please be prepared to see some construction in the parking lot, and plan ahead to use the bathroom somewhere else before class! There will be a port-a-potty if you really need to use the restroom, but water insidethe church will be turned off completely.
Thank you for your understanding!
Beautiful Trauma
If you're reading these newsletters each week and/or attending classes with me, I'm pretty sure you know some of my core values and what fills my heart.
In 2019, I was invited by my friends, Andrea and Grace H, who had an extra ticket to P!nk's "Beautiful Trauma" concert. I knew of P!nk and liked a few of her songs, but didn't really know much else about her and had no expectations for the concert. Honestly I just went to hang out with my friends.
However, the moment P!nk got on stage, I FELT something different.
I was in awe that I could feel P!nk's genuine EXCITEMENT to be on stage and she wasn't just performing, she was LIVING and GIVING her whole heart. I remember the moment she shared about her daughter's own insecurity about being "ugly," and I was shocked that tears were streaming down my face! And P!nk's finale.. well, let's just say she literally FLIES through the air to SEE her fans all over the arena.
After that concert, more like...that experience, P!nk became hands down my favorite music artist, because she goes beyond songs and singing and performance.
She made my heart burst wide open.
TRUSTFALL
When P!nk announced her 2023 TRUSTFALL tour, it was no question for me. Out of all the concerts, that's the one I prioritize the highest. So last night, my high school girlfriends and I went together to Chase Center to watch P!nk perform, and my conclusion stays the same... she is my absolute favorite music artist for the following reasons:
JOY & LAUGHTER
Life is full of sadness and bad news left and right. Seriously!!! So find something you truly truly truly LOVE to do and surround yourself with people who love the same thing, then joy and laughter emerges. P!nk dances impromptu running mans and goofy moves throughout her concert, because you can see she genuinely loves to dance! And she is so funny! People were giving her red vines and twizzlers from the audience, and she cracked jokes about how it was the best day of her life. The thing is, her joy and her laughter was infectious. Everyone in Chase Center couldn't help but dance and laugh right alongside her.
TRUTH & COURAGE
One of my favorite moments (among many) during her concert, was this interlude where one of her female dancers came on stage wearing a flowy, white outfit, and she was dancing huge, hard-hitting, wild movements to the soundtrack of a fast heart beating. Over the course of the routine, you could hear P!nk's voice encouraging her to breathe in and out, her words trying to calm the dancer. At the end of the piece, the heartbeat soundtrack slowed down as well as the dancer's movements, and P!nk appears next to the dancer in an embrace, reminding the dancer to just breathe. And the dancer surrenders. It was such a beautiful, artistic representation of how we all struggle and deal with powerful, raw emotions that lead us out of control. But when we breathe, when we support, when we love one another... we save each other.
CREATIVITY & INSPIRATION
Not only is P!nk an extremely talented singer that can truly SING, but also she continues to grow and challenge herself with new talents and skills. She roller blades in the "Never Gonna Not Dance Again" video with shopping carts and pink flamingos, she hangs upside down and twists and turns on aerial fabric while she sings, she even learned to play the piano and performed "Make You Feel My Love" while cameras found cute couples in the audience to spotlight on the big screen. For the song TRUSTFALL, she had trampoline acrobats falling and flipping over and over again. For the finale, she once again flew around the arena just like the previous concert! I love that she is unafraid of being different, unique, and amazing!
FAMILY & COMMUNITY
You can tell when there is a genuine chemistry among groups of people. P!nk takes the time to highlight each of her dancers, vocal backup singers, and her band, giving them a solo moment to shine as well as tell stories about some of them. Her piano player has been performing with her for 23 years and gives her a pop quiz of one of her songs at every concert (if she gets it right, she gets candy). She made fun of her guitar player having 100 guitars that all sound the same. She also shared that last night, October 15th, would have been her father's 78th birthday and she told a story of how he was a pilot and wanted to come back to this life as a bird of flight. Outside her 17th floor window of her San Francisco hotel, a hawk circled outside her window the day before and she knew it was her dad. Stories. Real heartfelt stories.
GRATITUDE & AUTHENTICITY
What I loved about P!nk wasn't just her performance, her talent, her songs... it was seeing her authentic, grateful self on stage, just doing what she loved. P!nk is one of the few artists that I've seen lie down on the stage to try and reach audience members to high five them or to sign t-shirts. She would get to the corners of the stage and stop singing in the middle of the songs just to point out people she saw - the girls with the "hair lights," the man with the glowing beard, the young girl who was being carried by her mom and P!nk said she was so beautiful... those moments where she was SO present with the audience,that she would openly admit she forgot the words of her song! But she'd just laugh it off, then continue singing. P!nk to me, is a true performer because she creates a two-way experience and the audience is not just an observer, but a participant. I know I certainly felt her heart, her rawness, her gratitude, her entire being, committed to soaking in everything in the moment.
I LOVE P!NK!!!
I hope I've convinced you to join me the next time she goes on tour!
October Important Dates
I hope to see you this week for our regular class schedule! Please save the dates for some special classes during this second half of October:
Thursday, October 26th 9:30am 75 Minute Stop Drop and Dance
@UU Marin (240 Channing Way, San Rafael)
Happy Birthdays to Jessica Kissane and Lisa Butcher!
Theme will be announced in next week's newsletter!
Saturday, October 28th 9:30am 75 Minute Stop Drop and Dance *HALLOWEEN COSTUME CLASS*
@The Garage (1 Thorndale Drive, San Rafael)
We will dance for 60 minutes and then spend the last 15 minutes recording the new Trolls song by *NSYNC and Justin Timberlake, "Better Place"
Wear a Halloween costume or join Grace in a TROLLS theme (aka wig)!
Tuesday, October 31st: NO CLASS
Class will be cancelled so that some of us can attend our kids' Halloween school parades in the morning. Thank you for understanding and classes will resume on Wednesday, November 1st with HIIT at 9:30am and Yoga at 10:45am!
"Close your eyes and leave it all behind
Go where love is on our side
It's a trust fall, baby
It's a trust fall, baby"
- Pink
Love,
Grace
