This inspiring story was written and submitted by Arthur Lorenz, Administrator at San Joaquin Connect I, II, and III.

I’ve been trying to come up with a wellness activity at San Joaquin Connect that was fun and would help staff blow off some steam as Stockton is heating up these days. I had this idea to do a dance-off in our chairs. The plan was that everybody in the program would get on Teams at 4 p.m. on Thursday and dance in our offices or our cars. The winner would get a bag of fruit from the farmers market, get to choose the next song, and also decide the next winner when we did it again the following week.

So, 4 p.m. comes. I hit the meeting button. One by one, staff join the call. I’ve got an iPad with a highly danceable song blasting. I announce that, as promised, we are having our dance-off.

And…nothing. Everyone just stares at me as if frogs are coming out of my mouth. Their eyes fill with horror mixed with pity. Nobody moves a muscle. Except for Katema—Katema is in her car, and, God bless her, she is dancing her heart out, all perfectly in time with the song pounding out of the iPad.

Alexis, our peer recovery coach, joins the call late, and she’s, like, “What’s going on? Are y’all having seizures, or what?”

So, it turns out that our program has a very sophisticated and very effective noise reduction system that has filtered the song out completely. The people on the call can’t hear a darn thing. No music = no dancing.

Needless to say, Katema won the contest since she was the only one who danced. I still couldn’t figure out how she kept the beat. Later, she admitted to me that she couldn’t hear the song either, but said, “I just matched your groove.”

My groove? My groove! I was dancing too and I didn’t even know it. I blame you, oh, Ohio Players with your funky mid-seventies bass lines.

Anyway, we’ll try again next week. Our prescriber wants to join, and we’re all a little intimidated since rumor has it that she’s got some moves.

I don’t know what will happen next, but hopefully, there will be music to it!