Tag Thon

Dance of the Year

Michael 6 Comments

Happy Not Really Presidents Day. Yeah, yeah, I sound like a broken record (under 30s ask a real adult) but there is no such holiday. Never was. Should never will be. I guess the United Kingdom celebrates the Queen’s birthday but does anybody else set aside time for the collective past chief executives whoever they may be. Neither do we. Today is Washington’s Birthday (although it really isn’t, that’s Feb. 22) because he did a bunch of stuff that got this USA started. The other 44 are just hangers on.

If you want a good discount on a car, mattress, or living room furniture, today is your day. If you want to relive my in-depth look at the weirdos who have occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., check out last year’s post. If you want to really celebrate something special, keep reading.

Today is, in addition to a federal holiday, the day after Thon. Thon is the Penn State IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon, a year-long fund raising effort to combat childhood cancer. The money raised is donated to Four Diamonds at Penn State Children’s Hospital. How much? Since 1977 THON has raised more than $157 million for Four Diamonds. The Four Diamonds fund offsets the costs of the pediatric cancer care not covered by insurance and provides other services such as specialty care for the mental, emotional, and spiritual needs of the children and their families. Research and medical support are also funded by Four Diamonds.

Maybe today should be a federal holiday because of Thon and other student groups across the country. Surely there are other similarly focused almost adults, but Thon is the poster child for these poster children. The largest student run philanthropic organization in the world, Thon has over 16,500 student volunteers participating in the year-long effort and more than 700 dancers took to the floor for this weekend’s 46 hour marathon.

For years, starting every fall, “canners” would fan out across Pennsylvania and beyond collecting coins at business entrances, sporting and cultural events, and traffic intersections. Mini-Thons, alumni, business partners, and “Friends of Thon” have helped but the physical canvassing raised a huge percentage of the total donations. This year was the first when due to safety concerns, canning was officially banned. Instead crowd funding and THONvelopes replaced the corner canners presence. And still they added to the “over $157 million.”

THON2019They’ve raised over $157 million. How much more? Add another $10,621,683.76 from this weekend. That’s short of the $13.4 million record from 2013, and far far less than say the $700 million donated to St. Jude’s Hospital last year but Thon’s overhead is probably a little less also. And you can’t argue that is still quite a total for a bunch of kids just helping out another bunch of kids.

So if you have a few minutes between mattress shopping and you’d like to justify your day off with something worthy of celebration to celebrate, now you do.

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Photo by Patrick Spurlock | Onward State

Different Potpourri du Different Jour

Michael Leave a comment

Yesterday completed the year-long fundraising effort by Penn State’s Pan-Hellenic Council to benefit the Four Diamonds Fund at Hershey Medical Center children’s cancer unit – or more lovingly known by the PSU crowd as “Thon.” The pinnacle event is the weekend long dance marathon with the fundraising reveal wrapping up the festivities. This year Thon raised over $9.77 million dollars for the charity, still the world’s largest student run philanthropy. Thon typically runs on about a 4% administrative cost. That means that 96 cents of each one of those dollars goes to the charity. Compare this to the American Cancer Society, no slouch in fund-raising themselves, who manage to work on about 84% costs netting their charity efforts 16 cents for each dollar raised. It would do us well to remember that the student can sometimes be the teacher.

I was standing in the super market line and saw this blurb on one of the magazines that festoon the check-out lines. “Lose weight and gain height with new diet!” It went on to claim one could lose 5 pounds in weight and gain 2 inches in height in the first week. It could just be me but I’m suspecting some monkey business with those figures. I think it is quite possible to lose 5 pounds in a week but I can’t figure out any diet that adds heights, unless it’s to eat anything but eat it while being stretched on a rack.

Speaking of diets, a different cover screamed at me that I could lose weight just by cutting out sugar. I’ll remember that while I’m gorging on french fries and cole slaw while scarfing up double bacon cheeseburgers and washing it all down with several bottles of beer. If figure if I do that 4 or 5 times a week I can positively disappear by the end of next month.

Speaking of french fries, shouldn’t it really be frenched fries referring to manner in which they are cut. What became of the “ed?” I wonder if that was what the potato lost when it eliminated sugar from its diet.

And speaking of nothing that we’ve already spoken of, Spring is really around the corner. It was a balmy(!) 55 degrees this afternoon and I spotted my first non-fat guy wearing shorts. There is no surer sign that spring is here.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?