As a dance teacher and studio owner, I have rarely ever made money off my hard work. I've broke even most times and a lot of times had to put in funds from my own pocket to keep things going in the lean years. As I took a solid year to determine the next steps of going full LLC for both The Amused Life Studio and The Follies Girls separately, a meeting with my business advisor changed my perspective.
I've always believed that women who are sometimes less apt to take dance classes due to our age or our body size or type, should have themselves reflected in the staff of an organization designed to teach them. Being a plus sized dancer since age 13 when puberty took my thin frame as a child and turned it into a constant struggle, it became clear to me that there was a need for fostering the love and ongoing pursuit of dance no matter what size you were/are and there should be some spaces that offered the ability to make modifications when you physically couldn't make all the choreography fit with your abilities. I was not bold enough to pursue this belief myself until my 30s when I first started SIZEMOLOGY Dance designed to be an all bodies dance format, then tried and failed miserably to pursue my first studio The Amused Life Collective because I was attempting to meet all the needs of a location that lacked parking while doing my first real life lessons as a sole proprietor. As an entity, my husband Jim and I lost a lot of money on that endeavor and spent a ton of our own money to keep it afloat.
With failure though, comes a TON of life lessons and I am definitely a student apt for each challenge. When I started teaching dance again as "Black Pants Girls" I was successful for the first time. Then in losing my partner in 2022 suddenly the ache to try again was the fuel to keep my own personal flame alive. So, The Amused Life Studio was launched, and being me I decided to rebuild The Follies Girls with a lot more wisdom and a lot more inner strength to navigate it as I should have over a decade ago. I've watched the right women find their way to me and some found their way back to me. It's been the most nurturing and hard work of my life and I am proud of what the women I dance with are creating. They've been privvy and given a front row seat to all my decisions as a business woman and when it became clear that the mission and vision I had personally was the same as The Follies Girls it became clear that the focus was to be less on thinking this was a "big money making endeavor" and more about making dance, performing arts education and opportunities to perform a non-profit organization that will work towards teaching women how to pursue endeavors like myself and how to build an organization that could provide compensation for the hard work and dedication these women show me each week.
In November we officially filed our paperwork with the state and the federal government and with the dawn of 1/1/2025 will gladly be an organization dedicated to expanding performing arts opportunities for women and making them accessible for as many people as we can. We have an incredibly supportive home venue in The Bird and The Book, and we aim to bring ourselves to new heights in what we will deem our 2nd year back at it as our "strengthening" year. The foundation has been laid and now its onward and upward with the hopes of finding lost souls along the way and continuing to create a megaphone for the older woman who is starting to feel "invisible" by society's standards. Visibility, courage, creativity and support is what we want to provide to our community and beyond and now we will hopefully have some support to forge a pathway to create more pathways to exploring one's life in terms of the arts.
Thank you to everyone who has listened to me, understood me as best they could, and supported these dreams since I even dared to try in 2008 - Anna Maria Terlinden Rogers / aka / Nipsy Tussle