Four years and a dozen Gaskells ago, our founders brought forth on the Bay Area,
a new dance venue, conceived in Waltzing, and dedicated to the proposition that
all dancers are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great anniversary, judging whether that dance venue, or
any dance venue so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on
a great evening of that anniversary. We have come to dedicate a portion of that
evening, in recognition for those who here gave their time that that dance venue
might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

It is for us now, the present dancers, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who taught here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be
here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that this venue, under Dance,
shall have a new birth of collective joy – and that waltzing of the people, by the
people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.