State Employees Just Wanna Dance, Dance, Dance!
By Joe Eskenazi
True, San Francisco is the kind of city where a guy in a three-piece suit may turn more heads than a man wearing a sarong and beating a conga drum.
Yet the sight of 50 nice, middle-aged ladies doing a soft-shoe to treacly show tunes on City Hall Plaza is hard to miss, even for the most jaded San Franciscan. The usual thought that runs through one’s mind when witnessing a large group of people rhythmically swaying to bizarre music in public – “It’s a cult!” – is assuaged (somewhat) when one discovers that nearly all of these ladies are state employees. Rather than utilizing their two 15-minute breaks for cigarettes or donuts, they can be seen every day from 10 to 10:30 a.m., gyrating away in the shadow of City Hall’s golden dome.
The dance troupe is the brainchild of Linda Wang, an accounting officer for the State Compensation Insurance Fund. Four years ago, she and a handful of co-workers began doing tai chi on the plaza and dancing on Fridays. The occasional tourist or homeless person joined in – and so did fellow state employees. Before the Insurance Fund transferred many of its workers to Pleasanton, Wang was sometimes leading roughly 100 dancin’ state employees to tunes such as a techno version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” or a schmaltzy take on “New York, New York.”
“You know, I was feeling back pain and neck pain and finger pain. So I thought, ‘OK, let’s start some exercise,'” explains Wang.
The footage accompanying this piece was shot on Friday, Aug. 22. And while Wang wasn’t able to make it that day, the dancers were led by her right-hand women, fellow Insurance Fund employees Sophia Yeo and Htay Daw. Both the women are in the Fund’s accounting office, but it really is break time for them because there are no fees involved to come out and dance.
“It’s mostly State Fund people out here, but we’ve got people from City Hall and the Department of Industrial Relations,” said Yeo with nods at the grandiose office buildings surrounding City Hall Plaza.
And while Wang says she’s feeling less back, neck and finger pain than in days past, she concedes that one thing her group isn’t good for is meeting a man – the dancers skew about 98 percent female.
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