About a week before this year’s edition of Moving Day SF – the annual Parkinson’s Foundation fundraiser held Saturday, May 4, at Crissy Field in San Francisco – I decided to check out the long-range weather forecast. Last year’s celebration featured a meteorological mixed bag of light rain, fog, cold wind, bright sun, then more fog and cold wind blowing in under the Golden Gate Bridge. I achieved my exercise goals that day just by putting on and peeling off my multi-layers of sweater, vest, windbreaker, and heavy coat, and still ended up half-frozen. I wanted to do a more efficient bit of layer-planning for this year’s event; hence the early weather check.

I wasn’t expecting rain; San Francisco’s last round of wet weather had ended on April 13, and scanning my iPhone’s forecasting app, I saw a week’s worth of sunshine leading up to May 4, and another week of sunshine afterwards. But there on the 4th itself, isolated from all the smiling suns on either side of it, was a lonely dark cloud with raindrops falling from its cartoon underbelly. There was a 65% chance of rain that day, the tiny blue text told me.¹

I didn’t worry too much about it at that point. Lots of times those predicted rainstorms don’t materialize. The “% chance” diminishes as the day approaches and finally disappears altogether, the little dark cloud at last swallowed up by yet another inanely smiling sun emoji. I figured that’s what would happen here, too.

But as the day approached, the “% chance” increased steadily, so that by Friday, the day before the event, we were looking at a 95% chance of rain on May 4. It got even worse. Drilling down into the forecast, the heavy Saturday rain was predicted to peak between 9AM and noon – the exact hours of our event.

I read all this on my phone at 5pm on Friday, a hand held to my forehead to shield my eyes from the brilliant sunshine pouring from a beautiful San Francisco sky. As far as I could see – all the way to the Pacific Ocean on the horizon, maybe all the way to Japan – there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. How could heavy rain be possible within a few hours? Where was it going to come from? Okinawa?

But the weather in San Francisco is prone to change at the drop of the hat that just blew off your head, and change it soon did. By 8pm it was cloudy and misting, around midnight the rain started for real, and by morning the whole city – including Crissy Field, the Moving Day site – was soaked.

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Elisabeth and I rose bright and early to the sound of rain blowing against our apartment windows. There was no question of Moving Day being canceled, though; a series of pleading emails from the event organizers reminded us that things were going to go ahead as planned, come rain or shine. Message received, we dressed in weather-appropriate gear: for me, a SF Ballet shirt, a light sweater, then a heavier sweater and a wool vest, topped off finally by a new-ish rain jacket. Elisabeth wore a variation of my outfit, including a matching rain jacket. We looked like a pair of eggplants.

Our original plan had been to walk to Crissy Field from our apartment in the Presidio with our good friends, Pauline and Tom (who had hydroplaned the 50 miles from their home in Santa Rosa that morning to cheer us on), up over the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge, and down a steep set of steps to meet up with our SF Ballet team (a.k.a. “Shake, Rattle and Pointe”). It’s normally about a 45-minute walk, but, figuring it would take about twice as long, given the weather (and maybe even longer, as we would likely have been blown off the bridge and right into the Bay), we opted to get there old-school style. We drove.

We arrived at the SF Ballet tent right on time. Team members and volunteers had been trickling in over the last hour; you could tell how long a given individual had been there by how closely they resembled a corpse. Recent arrivals still had some pink in their cheeks; earlier unfortunates were pale, blue-lipped and stiff-jawed. Only their teeth-chattering shivers gave them away as still being among the living.

And there in the middle of the tent area, rallying the troops with donut holes and hot coffee, was our unsinkable teacher, Cecelia Beam. (She brought the pastries; the coffee was begged from the Rock Steady boxers next door.) I’ve written about Cecelia and all that she means to those of us with PD in past posts (here and here). Suffice it to say, only Cecelia could stand there, drenched to the bone, water pouring from the brim of her yellow bucket hat, and say, “Isn’t this a great day??” with such heartfelt enthusiasm that, by God, you’d swear cinematic beams of sunshine were right that moment breaking through the clouds. (They most decidedly weren’t.)

A number of our SF Ballet classmates had braved the weather to be there, too. We were scheduled to do a chair-dance demonstration, showing prospective future classmates what our class is like. We had rehearsed our dance numbers over the past few weeks, and Cecelia was counting on us. We weren’t about to let a little firehose-caliber downpour stop our show.

After much slopping and slogging about, trying (and failing) to find a bit of dryness somewhere, a garbled microphone voice at last called for our attention: as promised in all those frantic admin emails, the festivities would be starting precisely on schedule. Shake, Rattle and Pointe would be performing third. (I don’t remember who went first or second; I couldn’t feel my feet.) When our moment finally arrived, Cecelia waved us toward the stage. Surveying her tired, huddled, frozen mass of a team, she called to us, her hands held megaphone-style, through the squall. “Whatever you do, look like you’re having fun,” she cried. “We don’t want to scare off any potential new dancers!” ²

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I should mention here that the stage, in this case, was just a modestly raised platform, a roughly 15-by-18 foot extension of the tent under which the DJ was keeping as dry as a DJ can, given the rain coming in horizontal bursts as well as by straight down deluge. Elisabeth and I took our seats in the last row of chairs on the stage – edge-of-the-tent positions that kept our heads out of the rain, while leaving our legs unprotected. I chose my spot strategically: I wanted a chair with a direct visual line to Cecelia, so I could do whatever she did when the music started, and no direct visual line to the audience, so I could chair-dance in peace, unencumbered by fear of public guffawing. Judging from the accompanying photo, it looks like I succeeded…

We soon discovered that we weren’t as clever as we’d thought, seating-wise. While it was true that our heads were more or less protected from the downpour by the edge of the tent, our legs were still outside of it, getting rained on. We also hadn’t taken into account that the rainwater up on the roof had to go somewhere, and that, as the tent had no downspouts, the water would simply accumulate, reservoir-like, until the tent roof at last exceeded its capacity, breached its levee, and dumped what felt like gallons of ice water into our laps. This drench-pause-drench cycle continued throughout our time onstage, with alarming frequency and breath-taking force. We thought about moving, but by then the performance had already begun – meaning we would have had to shove the people in front of us off the stage and steal their chairs, something of a no-no in the ballet world – and anyway, we couldn’t get any wetter or colder than we already were, so what was the point? We endured the periodic aqua-dumpings, succumbed to a bad case of the “kids-being-naughty-in-church” giggles and soldiered on.

Our first number consisted of a series of basic ballet moves, adapted for chair dancing. We did tendus, ronds de jambe, and ronds de jambe en dehors with our pointed toes, and some graceful fluffy stuff with our arms, to the song “Don’t Worry About a Thing,” by the noted Jamaican ballet choreographer, Bob Marley. We followed this with two excerpts from Swan Lake: the Big Swan Dance, followed by the Little Swan Dance. (I could be getting the names wrong – they probably sound cooler in French, anyway.) The Big Swan Dance came first, with dramatic swoops and little feathery hand flutters powered by what Cecelia referred to as our “swan arms”: elbows leading on the upswing until wrists nearly touched overhead, then down slowly. Repeat over and over until all the Big Birds have flown away. (All of us flying together was a lovely sight, and would have been lovelier still, had we each had a bit more room to move about onstage than your average corporate-farmed chicken. Picture a lot of colliding elbows… ) The Little Swan dance came next, and was the most fun of the three for me – we got to “march” in our chairs, turn our heads sharply up and around like tiny birds, march some more, tilt our heads from side to side, make nine final marching steps and then finish with a big “ta-daa!” move to wow the crowd.⁴

Through it all, Cecelia was her usual inviting self, urging the crowd to dance with us, and dance they did. At one point there were several dozen people, many of them swathed in the clear rain parkas handed out by the event staff, swaying, taking their cues from Cecelia, trying out their own swan arms. They looked like a bunch of soaked, happy, shrink-wrapped humans.

When our performance was done, we all hung around in the gale rather than seek higher ground, because we knew what was coming next. Cecelia was called back to the stage to receive an award from the Parkinson’s Foundation, well-deserved recognition for all that she’s done, through her love of dance and teaching, for people with Parkinson’s. I can safely say there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, because by this point in the festivities there wasn’t a dry anything in the house. Once the congratulatory hubbub subsided (we would have carried her off the field on our shoulders, if our shoulders were still capable of that sort of thing) everybody climbed into the nearest rubber raft and paddled for shore.

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I’m writing this on May 11, one week after Moving Day. I’ve since learned that May 4 was the wettest May day in San Francisco in nearly 30 years. The total – an inch and a half or so – may not sound too impressive to those of you who live in parts of the world where total rainfall is spread more evenly throughout the year. But here in the Bay area, where May typically marks the beginning of the dry season – we may see no more rain at all until autumn – May 4 was a rare, monsoon-like event. Add in that the bulk of the rain fell within just a few hours, half of it blown in sideways on 40mph winds, and you can maybe understand why this was a big deal for us.

It hasn’t rained a drop since Saturday (in fact, the clouds dispersed and the sun broke through later that same afternoon), and from the looks of the extended forecast, it isn’t going to rain for at least the next ten days, and probably longer. The downpour on Moving Day, then, centered as it was on our Bird Dances, may well turn out to be San Francisco’s only appreciable rainfall between mid-April and Labor Day. Maybe even Halloween.

In other words, Mother Nature has it in for Moving Day SF. So, lesson learned. Next year, I’m packing a suitcase full of all-weather gear: wool sweaters, a vest, jackets (heavy and light), a rain jacket (and rain pants this time), an ice axe, a furry hat with ear flaps, a hardhat to deflect golf-ball sized hail, hip-waders, a set of battery-powered hand warmers, and, just in case Mom throws us a curveball, shorts, a tee shirt, flip flops, maybe a pair of swimming trunks, and a tube of sunscreen. Then I’ll strap the whole thing to a dogsled. Because, hey – when it comes to San Francisco weather in early May, you just never know.

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Footnotes:

1. I’ve never been clear on what a “65% chance of precipitation” actually means. Is it that that there’s a 65% chance that rain will fall somewhere within the city limits on that day? A 65% chance that the whole city will get wet? A 65% chance that raindrops will fall on my head? And how much rain are we talking about? Is the mere spitting of a few drops on my windshield enough, or does it need to be a Texas-sized gully-washer? Any weather-people reading this – can you explain it to me? Please?
2. Note to prospective dance recruits: With the exception of Moving Day, our class is held indoors, in the dry and cozy confines of the SF Ballet School (and chair-dancing is optional; we do center floor and barre work as well). We’re not “Flash Dance,” people.
3. I’m the ominous, eggplant-hooded shadow lurking at the back of the second row from left.
4. I’m not, and never will be mistaken for, a dance writer…