Legacy of Women Award
On August 16, I received the Ann Kathryn Flagg “Artist or Art Supporter” Award, one of the West Virginia Women’s Commission’s 2024 Legacy of Women Awards.
The West Virginia Women’s Commission is part of the West Virginia Department of Human Services. Every two years, the commission solicits nominations for women who serve as role models and provide inspiration for women of all ages across West Virginia to receive awards in nine categories.
Jim Wallace nominated me in the arts category. If you would like to know more about me, here is what Jim wrote in the nomination:
I hereby nominate MaryLouise King for the West Virginia Women’s Commission’s Legacy of Women Award. I believe she qualifies for either the Ann Kathryn Flagg “Artist or Art Supporter” Award or the Lena Lowe Yost “Educating Women” Award.
MaryLouise should be honored for her outstanding efforts to empower older adult women through the art of dance and other physical movement and for encouraging baby boomers to keep themselves healthy and out of nursing homes by developing two aspects of their lives: movement and socialization. Through her work, she changes the outlook and productivity of women in the autumn and winter stages of their lives. Dancing and creative movement help keep MaryLouise and the women she influences more youthful and engaged in life.
“Lovely, Light Living, finding JOY in movement” is both her logo and her brand.
Through her business, Mary Louise King, LLC, with a dba of Charleston WV Dance, Mary Louise interacts with at least one hundred older adults (mostly women) each week in a personal, physical way and thousands more through her YouTube channel that has more than 1,100 subscribers and more than 460,416 views. MaryLouise also posts many free dance lessons on her YouTube channel to help people try this kind of movement in the safety of their own homes in West Virginia, as well as anywhere in the world.. Links to her social media can be found on her Linktree (https://linktr.ee/lovelylightliving).
In person, MaryLouise constantly communicates joy and creativity, as well as encouragement and inspiration, to West Virginia women, partly through fitness classes (yoga, Pilates and SilverSneakers®) that she teaches in Charleston, South Charleston and St. Albans, as well as through her dance activities.
Online, she also influences many women around the world by being a role model for ways to activate each woman’s personal abilities and strength, no matter what her age or physical condition. In every way, MaryLouise is dedicated to helping people find joy through movement and improving their lives.
During most weekdays, MaryLouise teaches fitness classes, often with 30 to 40 students per class. Seven of her classes each week are held at a community center that also feeds older adults through its senior nutrition program. She also teaches at assisted-living and independent-living facilities. Her students tell her often about how the weight-bearing class exercises she leads them through have reversed their osteopenia and strengthened their bones. Students with back, hip and knee pain have often found relief through MaryLouise’s class movements. In addition, they benefit from the socialization they get in the classes. MaryLouise recognizes that, when a woman’s world gets bigger and she can get away from sitting at home, her health and quality of life improve.
MaryLouise takes her responsibility to serve women of all ages seriously. She also encourages men to have fun while exercising, which is another way MaryLouise makes life easier and better for the women in the lives of those men.
Providing the right atmosphere for men and women to enjoy fitness, fun and friends is an art that MaryLouise has honed and practices daily. Through her creative endeavors, she sets the tone for friendships to occur. Without socialization, people lose their vision for life and start to wither away. In addition, socialization helps women understand the needs of others and enables them to network and help each other.
MaryLouise serves as a role model to grandparents and other caregivers who are students in her classes. So often in today’s culture, older adults are taking care of younger people and children. MaryLouise helps women caretakers to be strong, to have lives outside the caretaking, and to meet friends who can support them when they need some type of care.
When MaryLouise broke her foot on August 18, 2022, her students “paid it forward” to her by helping her find knee-scooters and walkers and providing transportation for her at no cost to her. MaryLouise knows the art of developing a network of people who help each other. She realizes that networking is one way that women can reach their higher potential.
Although MaryLouise is a baby boomer, soon to be 70 years old, she is also actively involved in the lives of younger women. Her business, Charleston WV Dance, helps women of all ages who want to learn to dance with their partners at their wedding receptions. Along with me, her dance partner, she works tirelessly most evenings until 9:00 with couples who are excited about spending the rest of their lives together.
MaryLouise and I teach Latin and ballroom dance in her home studio on the West Side of Charleston. Many of our dance students are young couples who want to dance well at their wedding receptions, along with some of their parents who also would like to dance well at those wedding receptions. We have taught more than 80 couples for their wedding dances and have been voted one of the best in WV Weddings magazine.
Other dance students are older adult couples who have long wanted to learn to dance but have waited to take their couple-time until after the children have left the home nest. We have been told that we have saved some marriages through sharing the art of dance.
MaryLouise has been a leader in reinvigorating the Charleston area ballroom dance community that was established several decades ago. In recent years, the seven longtime dance clubs have been challenged by the area’s population decline and demographic changes. One way that MaryLouise has addressed those challenges is by establishing the first-ever Facebook page (Charleston WV Dance) that promotes all the activities of the long-established dance clubs, as well as supporting younger people as they start new groups in the area, such as the Salsa group and the West Coast Swing group. This is entirely a volunteer effort on her part.
Further, MaryLouise is a motivational speaker. Examples of her talks can be found on her MaryLouise King Lovely Light Living channel on YouTube. One of her talks was for “Three Things,” the monthly event held by FestivALL in which participants speak on the subjects of “my first, my favorite and my future,” however they want. Here is a link to her speech:
https://youtu.be/TT8pMXXKljk. Several times, she also has spoken at Unity of Kanawha Valley. Such talks are an outgrowth of the work she does regularly in her fitness classes in which she encourages her students to drink water, improve their posture, use their muscles and be kind. Her smile and enthusiasm light up every room she enters.
MaryLouise certified to be a yoga and Pilates teacher and a licensed Medicare Advantage exercise teacher in 2007. Although she teaches yoga and Pilates on a mat on the floor, she also leads exercise for older adults who want to sit in a chair or stand next to a chair for support. In January 2024, she flew to Los Angeles at the request of the Coalition for Medicare Choices to demonstrate her skills and be interviewed for videos to advocate for Medicare Advantage programs.
Although she began teaching fitness classes several years before her marriage ended in 2015, her divorce led MaryLouise to expand her activities to help others find joy in movement and live healthier lives. After 37 years of marriage, many of them as a stay-at-home mom, she found herself with a low income. Ballroom dancing was one activity she and her former husband explored to save their marriage. Although he didn’t like it, she loved it and continued to learn all she could about it. Her ability to dance so well is even more an accomplishment for MaryLouise who had weak legs as a child, and that is no doubt why she is so dedicated to helping others overcome any handicaps they might have. After her divorce, MaryLouise decided she could use her ballroom dance and fitness talents to help others in a business she opened in December 2016 with help from Doug Spalding of the West Virginia Small Business Development Center. She turned a downstairs room in her home into a dance studio, where we teach private lessons in ballroom and Latin dance styles.
MaryLouise benefited from further instruction on her business development from West Virginia State University EDC through a class taught online by Clinton Arnold during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This class, "Opening Soon," was made available to Mary Louise and others through a grant from The Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation. MaryLouise learned more about becoming an entrepreneur and helped other students in the class who wanted to start new businesses.
MaryLouise is also a member of the West Virginia Women’s Business Center. This organization provided MaryLouise with her mentor, Nancy Bruns, CEO and co-founder of J.Q.Dickinson Salt-Works. Nancy assisted MaryLouise in setting up her YouTube channel. MaryLouise also met Roxy Turner of Marz Strategies, LLC, and Melody Belotte, media specialist, through these organizations. Roxy helped MaryLouise understand social media, and Melody updated her website, MaryLouiseKing.com
The late Sandy Wells of the Charleston Gazette-Mail wrote about MaryLouise’s life in a story titled “‘I Learned about Inward Grace,’ Introspection, Joy of Dancing Leads to Pain-free Life” on August 1, 2016 (Page 3A).
With my help, MaryLouise has volunteered to dance at many events and venues to add to the entertainment and encourage more people to get up and get moving. Those events include Charleston’s Live on the Levee concerts, the Sternwheel Regatta, the Malden Salt Fest, City Center Live at Slack Plaza and local parades. While being involved in those activities, MaryLouise has responded in other ways to people’s needs, such as helping them climb steps, sharing water, holding a baby for a mother who didn’t have enough arm strength while also struggling with a disobedient toddler, and just giving hugs to people who need them. When she is out engaging in social activities like dancing, she tends to seize opportunities that arise to help others, whether it is one person or a whole group at one time.
Here are some examples of MaryLouise’s volunteer work:
1. As part of her efforts to promote dancing, she and I competed in and won a dance contest at the South Charleston Summerfest on August 14, 2015. It was the first time our dancing was covered on local television news.
2. Mary Louise and I danced at Bollywood Night sponsored by the India Center at the Charleston Civic Center (as it was then called) on April 30, 2016.
3. On July 1, 2027, MaryLouise and I danced on Victoria Row, outside the Confederation Centre of the Arts, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, to a live performance of "O Canada" to commemorate Canada's 150th anniversary of confederation. The musicians jazzed up the rhythm of the song, so we could dance an East Coast Swing to it.
4. On January 1, 2019, we were interviewed by WCHS-TV for a report about the benefits of dancing as a healthy activity for a new year.
5. On Thursday, April 11, 2019, MaryLouise and I danced at the John W. Berry Fine & Performing Arts Center at the University of Rio Grande for the Rio Grande Symphonic Band under the direction of Gary Stewart.
6. On June 30, 2019, we danced to the music of Rubber Soul WV, a Beatles tribute band at the request of the band’s leader, the late Mark Scarpelli, on the stage of the Grandview Theatre near Beckley.
7. On August 23, 2019, MaryLouise and I gave a free swing lesson at Vino’s Bar and Grill before Live on the Levee that night. We did so at the request of John Lilly, a local musician with Blue Yonder, who was playing at the Levee that night with the Hot Jazz Jumpers and their sister band, the Scooches from New York City. A local non-profit, FOOTMAD, put a wooden dance floor down in front of the stage for us and those to whom we had taught swing dancing earlier.
8. On April 17, 2021, MaryLouise and I provided ballroom dancing lessons at Berry Hills Country Club for homeschooled students from the St. Albans campus of the Classical Conversations Challenge program.
9. MaryLouise and I dance often at Charleston’s Live on the Levee and the Sternwheel Regatta, volunteering our entertainment to contribute to the festive atmosphere. Photos of us dancing have appeared many times in the Charleston Gazette-Mail (such as when we danced on July 3, 2022, to the music of Landau Eugene Murphy, Jr.) as well as in many online posts.
10. On June 14, 2024, we taught another free swing dance lesson at Vino’s preceding Live on the Levee as part of FestivALL. We taught using the music of a local band, the Carpenter Ants.
11. In 2023, Mary Louise and I danced for the Huntington Symphony Orchestra’s Disco Night at Barboursville and the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra’s Fourth of July performance at the Charleston Sternwheel Regatta. We danced at both events at the invitation of orchestra officials (Ian Jessee and Maurice Cohn). During 2023 and 2024, the Sternwheel Regatta used a photo of us dancing during the 2022 Regatta on the “About” page of its website.
12. On September 9, 2023, we promoted dancing by participation in a dance-a-thon at Ken Ellis Memorial Park in the Campbell’s Creek area during a celebration of the park’s anniversary. We danced to 1960s music in hippie costumes in the late summer heat for four hours from noon to 4:00 p.m. with just a small break each hour.
13. We also regularly dance at ArtWalk in downtown Charleston and Art After Dark at the Clay Center – monthly events during most of the year – as well as at many City Center Live at Slack Plaza events. When musicians see us coming to dance to their music, they are encouraged and uplifted because they know dancers are listening and responding to their music. Once we start dancing, others are much more likely to join in the dancing.
14. MaryLouise has served on the board of directors of local dance clubs, helping to revitalize them and bring in younger members.
15. During 2022 and 2023, MaryLouise and I volunteered to teach couples involved in the local Dancing with the Stars competition, which is one of the biggest annual fundraisers for the United Way of Central West Virginia. In 2022, we taught Doug Harlow of WCHS-TV & WVAH and Samantha Carney of Shawnee Park. They raised $11,842.20. In 2023, we taught attorney Gordon Chin and Gina Marini of WCHS-TV & WVAH. They raised $101,292.00 (about 35 percent of the total for the event) and won the People’s Choice Award.
16. Beginning in June 2024, MaryLouise has been attending monthly dances with the independent living residents at Edgewood Summit to provide the male residents with a dance partner, so they can enjoy ballroom dancing.
17. MaryLouise and I also danced at local wedding expos to show engaged couples the possibilities for their wedding reception dances and to add to the spirit of the events.
Looking ahead, MaryLouise and I are booked to dance Tango around and through the crowd at the Evening in Transylvania fundraiser at the Cabell County Public Library on October 26, 2024.
In 2018, MaryLouise conducted a session for members of the West Virginia Bar Association that was held in the House of Delegates chamber. Her topic was: “Putting Order Back into Your Own Court: Keeping Fit and Managing Stress in a High-pressure Job." This class counted toward their continuing legal education (CLE) credits.
In addition, MaryLouise has facilitated many wellness retreats to help women of all ages.
Like Lena Lowe Yost, MaryLouise teaches women about their personal abilities and strengths. Like Ann Kathryn Flagg, she teaches people through the arts. Each dance she does is completely different because it is all lead-and-follow. We create the choreography as we dance, so each dance is different.
MaryLouise’s goal in life is to help herself as well as fellow baby boomers to stay out of nursing homes by combining movement and socialization through dance. Studies have proven that ballroom dancing wards off dementia because it engages the mind and the body at the same time. The leader creates the dance moves as the follower responds. It is a combination of spontaneous moves that require the intellect and motor portions of the brain, movement that resembles how small children learn to walk and play.
Mary Louise deserves to be honored for her efforts to promote dance and music in our state so that couples can participate together, making stronger families and increasing their happiness here in West Virginia.
MaryLouise majored in interior design and graduated in 1976 from West Virginia University. While there, she was runner-up for Miss Mountaineer in 1975. She grew up in Irwin, Pennsylvania.
Thank you for your consideration,
Respectfully submitted by Jim Wallace.
If you would like to see video of me at the Legacy of Women Award Ceremony, please check out these YouTube links on my channel:
How I was Introduced as the Recipient of Artist or Art Supporter Award, Legacy of Women:
Acceptance Remarks for my Award at Legacy of Women Award Ceremony, West Virginia Women’s Commission:
Surprises for me at the Legacy of Women Award night, West Virginia Women’s Commission:
