A year ago, a driver plowed an SUV through a Christmas parade in the nearby suburb of Waukesha, killing six people and scarring many more.
Pam Junion, 65, and other members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies practice in a parking lot in Milwaukee on Nov. 2, 2022.
Somehow, they held on. They drew on resilience banked well before the tragedy, during bouts with cancer and divorce, the loss of jobs and loves ones. They accepted that to keep going would require taking a risk on new ways of doing things, with new dancers who had not lived their history. “Ginny was our glue — she held the group together,” one of the others dancing that day recently recalled.
At a restaurant next door, Brian Peterson, an off-duty paramedic, glanced out the window just as bodies clad in vivid blue were flung through the air. Wandering through the chaos, Schmeling found fellow dancer Sharon Millard, a teacher’s aide so invested in the group that she had called to sign up the night before the birth of her first grandchild.The pain of the weeks after Waukesha was followed by doubt.“There’s no leaders. There’s no history. There’s nothing left,” Jeannie Knutson, one of the Original Grannies, recalls thinking.
The group chose two Grannies to be their new leaders: Knutson, because of her work in human resources, and Jan Kwiatkowski, a family therapist and ordained chaplain. Streng had pulled through with no memory of what happened. But after Peterson contacted the group, her family reached out to him and a few nights before Christmas, he and his wife rang the Strengs’ front bell.
Before Waukesha, many Grannies had followed what now seemed like an outdated ethic, keeping disagreements to themselves. To keep going, Kwiatkowski and Knutson decided, dancers needed to tell them about tensions surrounding the group’s reorganization so they could be resolved in meetings after practice.
Early on a frigid Saturday the group gathered in the lobby of a Milwaukee hotel, ready to dance in a parade for the first time since Waukesha. Ginny Sorenson would be so proud, her husband, Dave, told the dancers, before a toast. But as more trainees mastered the dance routines and were promoted to Granny status, there was much to celebrate.
The rest danced on. To Allenton in August with five new members promoted to their ranks. To the Wisconsin Dells in September, with the names of those they’d lost printed inside hearts on costumes echoing the Packers’ green and gold.It had long been clear at least one of the Grannies would be called to testify at the trial of Darrell Brooks, 40, charged with murder and numerous other counts stemming from the violence at Waukesha, which came after he fled a heated dispute with his ex-girlfriend.
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