The Daily Campus

Issue date: 2/25/08 Section: Focus

Media Credit: Matt Lin At the end of HuskyTHON 2008, participants learned that their endless hours of dancing had raised $56,920 to benefit the Connecticut Children's Medical Center in Hartford.

Parties are all about the moment. You have a great moment, then another - one after the next, fueled by thumping music, good friends and buffalo wings. You feel supercharged, raw, alive.

And then the moments have passed you by and you have to wake up the next morning and clean up that giant purple stain and who knows how you're going to replace your mom's antique dresser. And you don't feel very alive any more.

But what if you woke up the next morning and, instead of destroying your house, you had raised over $50,000 for sick children?

As it turns out, you feel pretty good.

Hundreds of students gathered in the Greer Field House for HuskyTHON 2008, dancing their way through Saturday night and through to Sunday morning. Sporting colored shirts to denote their status, staff members, volunteers and dancers alternately danced, ate, hung around or participated in the bevy of activity stations donated by SUBOG. And everyone was part of the fund raising operation: every blue-shirted dancer had to raise at least $100 in order to be considered a registered participant, and with over 200 dancers participating, the donation money quickly built up.

"In terms of dancers, this is one of the best years," said Eric Teisch, the marketing director of the event. We had something like 100 last year and we've more than doubled that this year."

And then, with a hurried farewell, Teisch dashed off to one of the two opposing stages set up in the middle of the room, joining the rest of the volunteer staff, the program directors and the pink-shirted Morale team in the hourly "morale dance." The DJ spun a genre-spanning mix of popular dance tunes, and the volunteer staff paired elaborate choreography with each one.

"We keep everyone pepped up - [the dancers] are here all night," said Teresa Ireland, a 6th-semester communications major and one of the Morale crew. "So are we, of course. We're like the cheerleaders for [the event]."

Continued...

Page 1 of 3 next >

Article Tools