Last Monday, I was enroute to Beauty Night when I received a call. DJ had borrowed Tricia’s phone to let me know the power had gone out. A hawk flew into the power line and died. It knocked out the power line. When I arrived to see if it was possible to open, there was a cluster of police men looking up at the power line. They said it would depend on BC Hydro when things were able to move forward. When I walked into the centre, an alarm was beeping. After speaking to staffers at Bridge Housing (which runs the building) and DEWC, we were advised to shut down for the night. Throughout this, many of the participants kept coming up and asking if we were going to open up. We waited until 6pm, put a sign on the door to let everyone know we would not be open. I am sorry for everyone that I was unable to reach before you arrived at DEWC. Hopefully this week, everything will be back to normal.
Tuesday night brought some new faces into the Beauty Night arena. When everyone arrived, Alice, the program coordinator from DEWC came up to speak to me about the power outage. There were several things that we had to adjust as the power had not been restored completely. Whether or not it was because they missed us on Monday or due to adjustments during the day at DEWC, we had a full house on Tuesday night. Thank you for everyone for pitching in and making the night flow as smoothly as possible.
One of my favourite parts of the evening was having the dance area. Debbie, one of our yoga instructors and Marlene, one of our pilates instructors and movement teachers encouraged the ladies to dance. Based on the ladies requests for dance classes, Marlene and Debbie (similar to Lauren & I a few weeks ago) asked the ladies to dance. I could hear tons of laughter as the women grooved and moved. At the end of the night, Debbie and Marlene suggested using gentle music for the last hour of the night to get the ladies to stretch and relax. I think this will be a great way to get some of the ladies to try pilates and yoga movement. Most of this will be done in chairs as some of the ladies can not get down to a mat on the floor. Marlene wrote a beautiful piece on our blog about the experience: Connecting Through Movement
If you are interested in writing a blog post for our site, please let me know. We are always looking for volunteers to share their experiences about Beauty Night.
