Em’s Spotlight translates dance passion to opportunity Jun 15, 2004, 10:38

The Emily Silverman Foundation will hold a camp in The Upper Room at 5930 Swope Parkway Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

By Bridget Heos
bheos@everestkc.net

At her funeral, Emily Silverman received a standing ovation.
Not for being a saint, but for being a dancer — graceful amid hardship and in love with the spotlight.
Emily attended St. Elizabeth’s Elementary School and Notre Dame de Sion High School. When she was 2 years old, Emily began dance lessons at the Betty Tillotson Studio of Dance.
At age 19, after studying dance for less than a semester at Missouri Valley College, Emily’s 1993 Buick ran off highway 65 near Marshall, and rolled several times. Five days later, on Mar. 21, 2003, she died.
While Emily’s mother Vickie and father Paul waited in the University of Missouri Hospital, Vickie Silverman worried that there was some treatment the doctors in Columbia didn’t know about.
The Thompsons, a family that was in Vickie Silverman’s childhood parish, had had two daughters suffer from head injuries. Silverman called the father, Byron Thompson. After talking to Silverman for an hour, he called his son, a neurosurgeon. It turned out, Emily had one of the best head injury doctors around.
But as Emily’s brother Cary traveled to Columbia, Emily took a turn for the worse. She died that night.
Returning to Kansas City, the family discussed a memorial fund for Emily. But where should the money go? In unison they said, “Something to do with dance.”
They called Thompson again, and within four days, he had helped them establish the Emily Foundation, which provides opportunities for central city kids to take dance classes.
The foundation accepts donations of dance shoes and costumes people grow out of, spiffs them up and gives them to central city kids. An anonymous donor covered all administrative costs, so donations go straight to kids who want to dance but cannot afford lessons.
This summer, the foundation will hold a camp in The Upper Room at 5930 Swope Parkway, which offers several summer classes for youth, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Children will learn tap and jazz or hip-hop.
Kate Cofran, who danced at Betty Tillotson with Emily, heads the camp, and several young dancers are volunteering to teach.
“When she was alive, Emily wanted to open a dance studio for children who couldn’t afford it,” Cofran says. “This is exactly what she wanted to do with her life.”
“There’s going to be 72 kids dancing this summer that wouldn’t have been able to dance,” says Vickie Silverman.
Silverman and her friend Marta Williamson nicknamed the foundation “Em’s Spotlight” after Williamson said that in heaven, Emily is in the best spotlight of all, with God’s love shining on her.
Emily’s spotlight was the theme of Cary’s eulogy at St. Elizabeth’s. Though just a high school student, Cary was adamant about writing and delivering the eulogy himself.
It would be too hard, his mother told him — too hard to speak at the funeral, too hard to describe her from one point of view. Mother, father and son would write it together and have a fourth person read it, she said.
But Cary didn’t like that idea, and his mother was too tired to argue. Just let us hear it first, she told him. And she said, “The number one thing I don’t want you to do is make her a saint. She was obnoxious. She was a kid.”
Cary worked and worked until finally his mother told him he was putting too much into it. She’d been to many funerals and couldn’t remember a single eulogy.
The night before the funeral, she told him, “Go upstairs for ten minutes. Pray to the Holy Spirit to give you the right words. Edit whatever you want. Then don’t work on it anymore.”
Cary came downstairs to read it to his parents. They had waited up five nights while Emily was in the hospital. Once back in Kansas City, several visitors had come in and out of their home. They were tired.
As soon as Cary started reading, they fell asleep.
“That’s a good sign,” Cary joked.
He began reading again. They fell asleep again. Paul turned to Vickie and said, “We’re just going to have to trust that it will be OK.”
At the funeral, the pastor at St. Elizabeth’s welcomed the crowd. He had allowed the Silvermans to plan an unconventional service. Emily was not a practicing Catholic, and though her mother believed she would return to the faith, she wanted to honor Emily’s religious convictions at the time.
A pastor from the River City Community Church, where Paul Silverman is a member, led much of the ceremony. Emily’s dance teacher and students from the first class Emily taught, performed two different dances at the front of church.
Emily’s friend sung a cappella with no microphone and his voice filled the church. People talked and laughed while they looked at eight poster boards filled with pictures of Emily.
During his eulogy, Cary spoke directly to Emily. You always tried to be in the spotlight, he said. But you overcame your obstacles with style and grace.
Then he said, “I want everyone to stand and join me and give my sister the one last standing ovation she deserves.”
A thousand people stood and clapped.
As Vickie Silverman tells the story, tears come to her eyes. She remembers thinking, “Wow. Where did that come from?”
One obstacle Emily faced was obsessive-compulsive disorder, which Silverman says, “manifests as weird behavior.” Because of this, Emily struggled academically and socially. Dance was her release. Silverman remembers listening to the intensity of Emily’s taps to determine what kind of day she had had.
“The OCD probably helped with her dancing because they like patterns. They like repetition. They like perfection. They like to do it again and again until they get it right. Those are good qualities for a dancer,” Silverman says.
Still, dance was a struggle. “You know how there are people who play the piano and there are pianists? Emily was a person who played the piano,” she says. “She got to be a good dancer, but she had to work hard. She had to work hard for everything.”
That made her a better teacher, Silverman says. For six or seven years, Emily helped teach younger students at Betty Tillotson’s.
Her dream was to open a dance studio unlike any other. It would cater to people who had no rhythm and no aspirations of performing on Broadway. She’d call it “Klutzes Studio.”
At Emily’s interview for the dance program at Missouri Valley College, the teacher asked her about this studio. Emily stood up, her pitch getting louder and gestures bigger as she spoke.
“I want to open a place where people aren’t saying no to people…I want to open a place where if you’re mentally ill you can express yourself…If you’re paralyzed and you can move one finger, you can dance…” she said, finally screaming her ideas.
Her parents looked at each other. They’re never going to admit her to the program, her mother thought. In fact, they’re going to send her to the insane asylum.
But when Emily finished, the teacher had tears in her eyes. She hugged her and said, “Emily, you have it. You have what it takes to be a dancer. You have what people leave here with their masters and they still don’t have.”
“We’re so happy they have each other,” her parents thought.
Though Emily was only at the school from January to March, the town remembered her in many ways. Casey’s General Store, where Emily worked, closed for an hour and put a cross up at the site. Many people from Marshall came to the funeral in Kansas City, and the school held a memorial.
At the funeral, Silverman says, a lot of people knew her husband and her better than Emily, but at Missouri Valley, they only knew Emily.
“Parents often see teenagers for their mistakes. I mean, we were proud of her and we always told her so, but sometimes we’d think, ‘What is she doing?’ But these people were telling us what good they saw in her.”
Speakers at the memorial service said Emily often spoke of God and her family and memories of growing up.
As time passed, a teacher planted lilies at the crash site. Another teacher made a gold-plated cross.
Meanwhile, the memorial fund in Kansas City grows shoe by shoe.
The Silvermans saw a man at an International House of Pancakes who they thought they had taken square dancing classes with. It turned out he was a master ballroom dancer, but his “lady friend” square danced. The Silvermans told her about the foundation.
Later, she delivered eight pairs of square dance shoes for the cause. With taps added, they are exactly like tap shoes.
At a thrift store, Silverman saw three pairs of shoes. She began telling the owner about the foundation. “We’re closing,” he said. “Just tell me what it is you want.”
“These shoes,” Silverman said.
“Take them,” he said.
At the print shop, the bill was just $70. “Is this right?” Silverman asked.
“The rest is our contribution,” they said.
For the Amy Thompson Run to Daylight, Silverman wanted Em’s Spotlight t-shirts made for foundation supporters walking in the race. The t-shirt shop charged $9 per shirt, as opposed to the $20 standard rate for two-sided prints.
They had made memorial t-shirts for the Betty Tillotson dancers. “We’ve just heard so many nice stories about Emily,” they told Silverman.
As they passed out flyers at the race, several people said they knew Emily. A couple people had gone to school with her at Missouri Valley College.
Every dance studio Silverman has talked to expressed interest in having a shoe bin, and 50 pairs of shoes have been pledged so far.
At the funeral, families wrote large checks to the foundation even when they didn’t have a lot of money, Silverman says.
Silverman is not a holy roller, she says. But since her daughter’s accident, there are some things she can only attribute to God.
“This is supposed to happen. That many coincidences don’t happen in two weeks. God doesn’t give you that many confirmations that you’re on the right track,” she says.
“Everyone says, ‘Good comes out of everything,’ and I thought what good could possibly come out of her dying in a car accident, but something did,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, I would rather have her here. But this has been amazing.”

To donate shoes, costumes or money to the Emily Foundation, call 816-363-3204 or visit Emilyfoundation.org. Tax-deductible donations can be sent to 6944 Edgevale, Kansas City, MO 64113