By Neil Farrell
Local dance students will be losing their muse, as Karen “Miss Karen” Garman, says good-bye to Pacific Dance Studio in Morro Bay.
Garman, 58, is leaving the dance studio she has headed up for more than 15 years, on Aug. 31, turning over the keys to Shawna Marie, a local native daughter whom readers will recognize as lead singer for the local party band, Captain Nasty.
Through a lot of tears, inter-mixed with laughter brought on by fond memories of a lifetime introducing thousands of children to dance and musical theater, Miss Karen explained the life change she is going through that led to the decision to leave the studio.
“It’s really hard,” she sniffed. “It’s too hard to keep talking about it. I spent the whole month of July crying.”
Many parents and students already know but she chose to break the news publicly with The Bay News because of all the many times her students have been featured in photos and stories in the newspaper.
She especially loved coverage of the annual, Spooktacular Halloween recitals the studio put on outside Spencer’s Market.
“You and Stan [Thompson] from the Sun Bulletin were always so good to us,” she said in a phone interview from Laguna Beach.
That’s where she has moved to care for her ailing parents. Her dad just recently went into Hospice care, she said. And her mom is very attached to the beachfront home the family bought in 1966. That’s where Garman grew up and where her parents have always lived.
She’d gone down to Laguna Beach intending to bring her parents back to Morro Bay but it didn’t turn out that way. “Mom is incredibly married to this house,” she said. “She’s just glued to this place. She said she wants to die here and what am I gonna do?”
One plus to the turn of events is that she is now much closer to her two grown children — Greg and Michele — who live within blocks of each other in North Hollywood. Both are Morro Bay natives and each has met great success in Hollywood — Greg as drummer for pop star Selena Gomez and Michele as a dancer and choreographer.
Garman, who is taking some dance classes and teaching a little down there, is very happy to reconnect with her children, who have always been good about coming home to Morro Bay and teaching at the studio.
“The only thing that’s been taken away is the Pacific Dance site,” she sobbed. “Everything else is the same.”
She’s been in Laguna Beach since late spring-early summer, with the exception of several gigs she comes up to drum with her band Shameless, something she plans to continue to do while she’s living in Laguna. “Thank God for John Wessel and Shameless,” she said with a laugh. “He hasn’t given up on me.”
She tried to run the studio from a distance, but it just wasn’t working, she said with resignation. So she’s giving up the thing that has identified her and enveloped her since 2000. That’s when she was handed the keys to the studio by the property owner, Ellen Fields, a wonderful woman who “made a killing in the stock market and wanted to give back to the community.”
She offered the dance studio to another local teacher first but after a year that didn’t work out, “so she came looking for me,” said Garman.
At the time Garman was teaching 300-plus students a week in classes at local community centers, including regular classes she taught for many years in Morro Bay. When she left the community center circuit she had just 12 students register at Pacific Dance.
That’s when the reality of owning a studio hit home — the overhead like utilities and maintenance and keeping the studio busy, essentially the travails of running a business — which she didn’t have at the community centers.
“In Morro Bay, dance is like Siberia,” she laughed again. “It was hard to get people to commit.” Kids might take a season or two and then drop out for other interests, but many, the ones she’ll always remember, started out with her as not much more than toddlers and eventually outgrew her classes to pursue dance in high school and college, too.
“My babies!” she cried. “I will miss my babies.”
She said some in the last class of newby dancers were children of the little ones she had at the beginning. “Shawna was one of my little ones,” she said of the woman who will take over the studio. “Graham Yates, who drums in Captain Nasty, was one too.”
They usually had 125 students a session, she explained, and put on two musical theater shows a year. An average of 20 percent of each starting class stayed all year and the list of graduates “is huge,” she added. “This year I had the second generation — babies of my babies! You could see their faces light up when I’d bring out the old props I use to help them with their balance and coordination.”
She has been honored three times for her work with the town’s children. Mayor Bill Yates gave her a City Treasure Award, Ken Vesterfelt and the Car Show gave her another living treasure award and the Chamber of Commerce named Pacific Dance Studio its Business of the Year a few years ago.
“What was cool about Business of the Year,” she said, “is the politicians like [Sen. Diane] Feinstein send you a certificate to frame and put up on the walls.” Her certificates proudly hang on the studio wall. It’s something she’s glad she won’t have to take down, along with the rest of the dance studio apparatuses.
“The good thing is that I don’t have to strip the building,” she said. She feels the new studio owner will do fine. “I really think Shawna’s going to do a fantastic job, it’ll be different [from what Miss Karen did] but fantastic.”
Shawna Marie told The Bay News that she does plan a different take with her studio, which will be renamed, “Ignite Movement Studio,” with a new goal of becoming an “epicenter for connectedness, movement and healing — all different kinds of arts aside from dance.” She plans to have yoga classes, meditation, Flamenco, Hula-hoop, fire dancing and focusing more on adult activities, though she’d love to get the children’s dance going again.
She also plans to hold art showings, and put in a retail space for local artisans and jewelry makers.
She wants to ask the community what kinds of classes they want and is running an Indiegogo campaign right now. She praised Garmen and all she’s done for the community. “She’s been such an inspirational figure in our community. I feel honored to be stepping into her space.”
Garman’s said she benefited over the years from one partnership in particular that she feels especially grateful for. “The [SLO] Youth Symphony,” she cried again. “Michael Nowak and Nancy Nagano, have been so good to us. They let the little children have the same experience the teenagers were getting.”
She plans to return to the City by the Rock and to the profession she’s worked in for more than 40 years. Perhaps she’ll start up the little ones’ dance classes again, she said, either at the studio or maybe back at the community centers.
“So yeah,” she said with another tear, “I am going to come back. I just don’t know when or to do what?”
