In December, 2019, I got official. After starting Nia at Dance Place seven years earlier, I went to the County Building and filed papers to make that my business name. And then I remember sitting in the studio on a Saturday in mid-March, just in case anyone hadn’t seen the note I’d sent the day before, saying classes were cancelled “for the next few weeks” because of Covid. But I sat in an empty studio. Everyone knew. The world had shut down. Thank heaven for Zoom. 

I was ready to get back to Dance Place in Summer of 2021, after most people had been vaccinated. I bought a new laptop. Jack and I went to the studio, and he figured out the tech for a hybrid class. But then came a new Covid variant and, after that, Jack’s cancer. 

At last, in January, we returned to Liberty Station on Sundays. And yesterday—the final day of Passover and Easter Sunday, two sacred times with messages of returning to life—we were back at Dance Place!!! Doing a routine for the two holidays with lots of hallelujahs. People remarked that they felt an energy in the studio (rented from Malashock Dance) from the brilliant movement and creative sparks that have been there. There’s an energy to the building with its 11 dance studios. 

And our new Dance Place home, studio 204, is sweet. Intimate, airy. A place for new life. Hallelujah!