Moves for mental health: Dancing With the Stars an annual fundraiser

A gym owner, a Realtor, an interior designer, a filmmaker and a property developer walk into a bar … and do the tango?

Bet you didn’t see that coming.

Neither did they.

Last summer, five “local celebrities” were tapped to compete in Dancing With the Sioux Falls Stars, the second annual fundraiser for local nonprofit Empire Mental Health Support, being held Saturday night at The District.

Since the invite, all five participants and their professional partners have been rehearsing jazz, some waltz, “something poppy” and maybe even some freestyle for the big night.

There may be stunts? But there will definitely be sequins.

“This will be the night of my dreams,” says Phyllis Arends, board treasurer for Empire Mental Health Support. She helped to begin the mental wellness advocacy troupe four years ago, which raised around $60,000 for last year’s fundraiser. “The event is so gorgeous and meaningful. It’s a dressy, intimate affair, everybody has a good time talking to one another.

“I’m getting goosebumps just talking about it! It’s so magical.”

As is the work of Empire Mental Health Support.  

Before EMHS, Arends worked with NAMI Sioux Falls for two decades. Dancing With the Sioux Falls Stars was a successful fundraiser for NAMI as well. When their local chapter shut down in 2020, Arends saw to it that the work ― and the dancing ― went on.

“We still needed that level of mental health support in the community,” said Arends, a retired nurse who touts her prima networking skills and collaborations among a tight-knit community here in Sioux Falls as tools to see EMHS to fruition. “I really just want to help people understand their worth in this community and that they are not out there alone.”

A personal story for an intimate cause

Empire Mental Health Support offers free services ― like weekly support groups, educational programming and connections to local professionals ― provided by people who also live with mental illnesses or are the loved ones for people who do.

They are a “determined” board of eight volunteer members who serve as advocates in our community and as confidants for an invisible illness that’s equally in need.

“Everybody has somebody they know who is dealing with their mental health,” said CJ Wehrkamp, one of the competition’s local celebrities and owner of FitBody Boot Camp. He says he will have clients often use the gym merely as a healing outlet for both their physical and mental well-being. “I have even had clients tell us one of the reasons they are still living is because of our gym community.”

Arends says that each contestant of the competition will talk about their personal connections to mental illness and the importance of speaking out.

“Our dance tells a story of losing someone,” says Tara Allen, CEO of Allen Edge Real Estate Team and will compete with professional dancer Clinton Store. Just this past summer, Allen lost her brother, who also struggled with his mental health, from an unexpected accident.

“Clinton and I have both lost people to mental health,” she said. “This process has been like therapy for me, it couldn't have been better timing.”

Arends estimates there are over 40,000 community members in Sioux Falls with a formal mental health diagnosis, but so few of them are unaware of support services or are reluctant to actually seek treatment.

“When you go through these things, you’re not always well-received in the community,” Arends said. “We want the Sioux Empire region to be a more welcoming and comfortable place for people whose lives are touched by mental illness.”

This effort includes not only making connections between a service and a community member but also advocating for existing services, like Southeastern or Avera behavioral health centers, that they receive proper funding and support.

“There’s just such a need here,” said Sarah DeWitt, local interior designer and co-owner of DeWitt Designs. She’ll be performing on Saturday with local professional dancer Tony Bartholomaus. “But, as it is in many illnesses, there’s also such a variety of ways to help somebody. It hits everybody differently, so it’s difficult to maintain a self-sustaining program that would work for everybody.

“What we are doing here is one small step to help, but it’s still a step,” she says.

Advocating for something 'bigger than ourselves'

Our local celebrities were chosen partly because of their success and outreach in the community ― DeWitt has been serving both regional and national client homes for well over 30 years; Wehrkamp’s successful “Fit & Healthy” podcast streams weekly; Allen’s real estate team just hit a milestone of serving 2,000 families over the past decade; videographer Vince Danh just completed his Mission 100 goal of serving over 100 businesses within one year; and real estate developer Nate Welch recently made a big change from finance and government.

“But we don’t have to talk about that here,” Welch said. “We are all so identified by what we do, reputation is so huge in Sioux Falls. And then when you make a career change, you often have to think about how you want to talk about that, but what’s so beautiful about this event is that we don’t have to advocate for our work or for ourselves.

“This one isn’t about me, and it’s one of the reasons I’m so honored to be a part of it.”

Addie Graham-Kramer, owner of The Event Company who is helping to host the fundraiser and dance competition, said it’s an equal honor to work with Arends and the EMHS mission.  

“To be seen and to be heard is so important through the work that EMHS does,” Graham-Kramer said. “One of my favorite parts is that community leaders from all walks of life will come together just to raise awareness for mental health education.”

A learning experience for the competitors

Wehrkamp said he had never danced before this big event. “Maybe at wedding dances!”

His gym is not a ballroom, but right now the ballroom is his gym, and he is so invested in this opportunity to serve his community.

“I find myself driving in my car and just thinking about our dance,” Wehrkamp says, who will be dancing with professional Magen Richeal. “Magan is putting all this together for us. I want to make sure I do well for her!”

Welch does have some performance background, as a former mascot for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and some nationwide theater tours since then, but there is still intimidation for him.

“Being on stage is not the scary part,” said Welch, who will be performing with reigning mirrorball trophy winner McKenzie Kock and said he’s even been practicing dance moves with his family in their kitchen. “Dancing with talent like this and for such a good cause, that’s the nerve-wracking part. I only have these dance moves to tell a story.”

Local videographer and business co-owner Vince Danh, too, has some experience having once learned ballroom dancing from his godmother as a teenager. He and his professional dance partner, Stephanie Kessler, have bonded thus far on their unique music choice.

“I’ve never had the courage to go up and dance on a stage, but I look forward to when we have our practices together,” Danh said. “We have a lot of fun with this, I just want it to be true to ourselves.”

As a well-known interior designer, DeWitt prioritized her focus for the competition on costume design, colors and presentation ― “I’m going to have the coolest dress!” ― while her partner choreographed “an art form” that reflects her personality.

“He read me so well,” DeWitt said. “I love it. I feel comfortable, and I’m enjoying it. I really am.”

And what about Phyllis?

“Oh, I am no good!” she says. “I do not like making a fool of myself on the dance floor. I am just ‘Hostess with the Mostest’ and will make sure everyone has a good time and feels appreciated.”

The Saturday charity event expects around 300 guests, who will surround a “round style” dance floor underneath the spotlights. Judges will decide a winner at the end.

“They’re going to be almost part of the audience in some respects,” Arends said. “It’s going to be really, really special this year.”

Sioux Falls poet embraces dual identity

I am a privileged white woman in the middle of America, where I walk safely to my car at night, fit in most everywhere, and usually get the job. I also live with you in a progressive community, where we push boundaries and put up a fight at city council meetings and honk when we see a fellow Rainbow Buffalo pass us by on Minnesota Avenue. What could be wrong here? I fool myself when I see a little less oppression where I live and think we’ve met equality in my country. Yet I still couldn’t possibly walk comfortably in a minority’s shoes when he is ridiculed at the grocery store or attacked in a park. I wonder, could I rip the tape off my mouth and defend myself as much as they have to? Would I cry in private because it’s become too exhausting to teach the ceasing of hate? 

Here we have Angelica Mercado-Ford, a small and ferocious Mexican American activist in Sioux Falls who does not cry. Her family has had to hide in their home only to open their doors and choke on injustice another day, but her throat is clear. Mercado-Ford is ten years younger than me and yet is teaching me that the greater group of people who suppress a lesser group of people are also the only ones who can save them. 

So she comes to America for partnership in making sense of her dual identity, only to thwart the discrimination her family warned her about. But she still mustered one step farther than her ancestors, and she is running. 

My supple tongue speaks for two, she says in her poem “Tongues” as she strives today to honor both her parents’ sacrifices and broach her own isolating experience. When Mercado-Ford moved to Sioux Falls eight years ago, it was through art and poetry that she urged her community to better understand the life of an immigrant: a “journey toward becoming,” she says. It was in her writing that she raised her fists.

“There was something in me that needed to come out,” she says, “and I didn’t know about it until it did come out.” 

In America, migrant dreams are flightless birds.

In America, you, the migrant, cannot dream, lest you are dead.

This is what happens, you see? 

When the world becomes devoid of empathy, 

Filling in blanks with new names of the murdered, 

Of the lost, 

Of the forgotten. 

To the ones in power: We demand action. 

Words mean nothing

When Claudia cannot read, cannot see, cannot live. 

When motherless children have dreams

Of light-up sneakers,

And survival. 

Ejected from courtrooms, 

For their profane silence

When their mouths have yet to hatch the word ‘mama.’ 

– an excerpt from Mercado-Ford’s poem, “Freedom is a Fleeting Thing”

Mercado-Ford wrote her first book of poetry in 2019, an effort that still finds itself in the hands of seekers nationwide. Before publishing, she was invited to host an art installation featuring her work at the Washington Pavilion, which was the first bilingual exhibit for the venue. Mercado-Ford was also the first Latino woman to host a solo show.

“I featured poems in Spanish and in English so my parents could experience an art exhibit in their language for the first time,” she says. “It was so successful that they extended the show for a whole month. The community showed up.”

Her book is titled “Todo Revoluciona”: In it, her subtlety reminds us that, despite how much we may resist, everything changes, ideas transform, and humans evolve. We are not silent – as some people need us to be in order to participate in their own convention. Mercado-Ford speaks over this. She uses her fear to fuel her fury as her family watches on in worry and in frustration. Before she fought the world around her, she also fought inside her own childhood to deter conformity, and her book reflects as much. 

I have tasted autonomy,
and I know
I will never go hungry again. 

– an excerpt from “Todo Revoluciona”

It’s valiant that Mercado-Ford would not give up on her mission, even without the initial support of her family, but the demand to do so began early in her upbringing in small-town Fremont, Nebraska, where she and her family emigrated from Mexico. But even a resting place that could fulfill the “whole immigrant dream” was poisoned with its own anti-immigrant rhetoric. So they fought for their rights without hiding their homeland – her father in “cowboy boots, the kind that make him look hombre” – and Mercado-Ford brought that unabating retaliation to here in Sioux Falls, where she implores her community now to overcome the same “dissolution and disappointment” she faced growing up. She knew contempt at home and then everywhere else, and she wanted less of it. 

“I’m proud that my family’s cultural traditions were very strong and alive, but I feel like I created Angelica here. I didn’t know who I was before this,” Mercado-Ford says. “I knew I needed to get out of there for my own survival. People were not accepting, I felt isolated, and my escape was education. 

“I needed to take my power back.”

Her family comes to the art shows and commends her beautiful work and has grown as she grew, too, but breaking those family expectations was at first taxing, and she admits she felt defeated. It was so much pressure to put on one person, forcing conversations at the family dining room table.

“We talked about what it means to be a queer, Mexican woman in America,” Mercado-Ford says. “We also started conversations about my mom’s role as a woman in the household. She never thought about anything more than what role was assigned to her, but she’s not just a mother and a wife.

“My mother always told me, ‘People will treat you the way they perceive you,’ and we always kept up with that. But I said to my parents, ‘I’m doing this to better myself.’ ”

Her family wanted her to be more brown, and her America wanted her to be more white, but it’s ok to live in the in-between and not be like everyone else, she says. We are all “in the gray,” and that doesn’t make one person less than another.

“There have been tough times where I put in so much of me, and it feels like no one sees,” Mercado-Ford says. She writes in her book, In my chest, a storm is brewing, but you will only see the sun. “But I read this quote once, ‘I don’t want to die on a day I went unseen,’ and it always resonated with me because I just want to leave a footprint that I was here.”

Today, Mercado-Ford teaches at Washington High School as the head debate coach, where she reminds her students that “any little thing they build upon can mean hope and liberation.” This optimism floods into an entire community who’s listening to her, too. 

“Growing up as a new American, I could not imagine a path toward ‘greatness’ … without a profession deemed serious or noble by my family and peer groups,” says Ngoc Thach, a Vietnamese American entrepreneur and marketing executive in Sioux Falls. “I never felt like I was enough, but (Angelica) acted as a beacon of truth and hope at a time when I couldn’t spare any for myself. 

“She is a voice of peace and power.”

Mercado-Ford says “confidently” that she does not face adversity in Sioux Falls the way she once did. Here her advocacy is not ignored, it multiplies. She came here to “feel seen” but stays here to discipline us, enough to mature our meager marches into a sprint until our queer Latino poet in the Midwest is no longer fighting alone. 

I am immune from her ache, but I am not unable. Together with the roar of Mercado-Ford and the voices she is giving us, we become the safe space. 

One day a new dawn will come and I will meet my people face to face and we will both know home and we will not worry about crossing over to the other side. – an excerpt from “Todo Revoluciona” 

As published for Sioux Falls Live.

‘Shared history’ compels work

When Patrick Hicks was eight years old, he sat on the floor of his living room in Stillwater, Minn., and wrote a short story about World War II. Using a beat-up IBM typewriter his parents bought for him at a garage sale, the typeball would pivot before striking the paper, darkening with one sentence after another as Patrick The Kid shared a universal story with curiosity and ease.

This fervor never let up.

Next month, the U.K. celebrates Remembrance Sunday, when veterans march past the London War Memorial to pay their respects. In February, we honor Black History; in March, it’s Women’s History; and in May, we mind Asian American and Pacific Islanders. 

To us, this is an improved awareness of the past resurfacing itself. But to local author and educator Hicks, it has become a life’s work.  

“I was always a big reader,” he says. “My mom is an immigrant from Northern Ireland, so she gave me a lot of children’s books she grew up on. I read everything by Enid Blyton. How does this woman I’ve never met control my mind? I wanted to copy that.” 

To this day, many of those worn stories from Stillwater are still here, packed into shelves in Room 111, where Hicks sits as the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana, a university he’s called home for over 20 years. 

On a bottom shelf rests a few books on Winston Churchill, gifts from his Irish grandfather he no longer has use for, “but I’m not going to get rid of them.”

Writer Joan Didion once said that “character is style,” that who we are and what we think about is reflected in our success, and this is how we know Hicks. As a third grader, with an entire future of possibility and plans ahead of him, he instead thought about what happened before him, immersing himself in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” while his friends played sandlot baseball on a sunny Sunday afternoon. 

And we are all better for it. 

This month, Hicks launched his third novel, “Across the Lake,” a fictional tale based on the Holocaust about an all-female concentration camp: gender, violence, and survival, all recurring themes in his writing. 

To Hicks, we are not immune from the historical subjects in his books today. He writes not only with concertedness and the same interest he had as a young boy, but to “cast a light on a part of our shared history”: If it happened then, it can happen now. If it happened to them, it can happen to us, and there is bravery in that “clarion call” Hicks bellows through his books.  

“We’ve seen a substantial rise in fascism in our own country just in the past several years,” Hicks says. “That’s deeply worrying to me.” 

Even though the characters in his books are made up, the experiences are not: a cloudy day in Auschwitz, a pregnant woman in Ravensbrück or the reek of the gas chambers in Majdanek all happened to someone a long time ago.  

“I’ve spent 15 years writing about the Holocaust,” Hicks says. “I’ve visited 12 concentration camps, interviewed survivors. It’s taken such a toll. But I am really obsessive about my projects. Darkness just engulfs me, as it has to if I’m going to write authentically. To try to portray that monstrous darkness as anything other than that would be a crime against historical accuracy.”

To re-enact, he reads. “The Commandant of Auschwitz: An Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess” and “Hitler’s Furies” by Wendy Lower introduced him to his characters in the novels we read today. 

“I become really close to them – the good ones,” Hicks says. “Eli Hessel, the main character in ‘In The Shadow of Dora,’ it saddened me when I had to say goodbye to him. He was such a good guy. My main character in ‘Across the Lake,’ Svea, bad things happen to her, and she’s such a good person.”

But if not for fictional characters Eli or Svea or even Hans in “The Commandant of Lubizec,” we might not know the truth. 

“I don’t know exactly where the desire to write about the Holocaust came from, but sometime in the late ’70s, I saw this documentary on PBS showing the British footage of Bergen-Belsen: the bulldozers pushing the bodies into mass graves,” Hicks says. “I was just stunned at that monumental injustice, even at a young age like that, and the feeling has never left me.”

But sometimes, it must. Hicks says, “for his own mental stability,” he plans to take a break from writing about the Holocaust and is actually heads down on a book of nonfiction about his home state of Minnesota. There will still be history, but this time there will be humor, too. We can expect it later next year. 

There’s also his devotion to poetry, a subtle departure from the haunts in Nazi Germany. Not one to stray from his first love, we read about history in his stanzas alongside love letters to Europe, but here the words are mostly light, not dark; mostly playful, not scary. 

When I imagine how my parents met
in a Montreal bar, on a Wednesday in 1967,
I worry that it might not have happened –
that they might have turned from each other
to unconsummate me. 

Nonexistance begins when
my father walks to the restroom
his stylish lambchops blinkering his sight
and my mother drops something on the floor,
lipstick perhaps. They never make eye contact,
and I am blinded,
unloved. 

– an excerpt from “Lipstick Traces” by Patrick Hicks

Even though his office space at Augustana is no more than maybe 12x12, Hicks has two desks, two computers. On one he writes poetry, and on the other, he invents characters. I don’t know whether this is intentional, but the fiction-writing desktop is in the corner – in the dark and with his back to the door – and the other, the one on which he waxes poetry, sits right next to the light of the window, where students walk by and he gets a sure glimpse of the weather that day. In which space do you think it is easier for him to write? 

In many ways, Hicks is two writers for us – a dual personality he must succumb to, two different places he must go – but he is connecting us all the same. 

While his poetry can validate the universal experiences among all of us today – buckling in and tightening the car seat, riding on trains, traveling, and funerals – his fiction reminds us that, no matter how many generations have come before us, we haven’t changed as much as we might think. “There is still work to be done,” he writes in “Sitting on the Berlin Wall.” 

He has a masterful responsibility as he encourages us to weep and remember, understand and participate. In the dark and in the light, from his courageous quests to your reading nook at home, Patrick Hicks is steadfast in teaching us and then showing us the way.

As published for Sioux Falls Live.