Kicking Up Her Heels to Champion a Good Cause

From the time she was a young girl in Iran, Mimi Lippold loved to dance. Since she first performed traditional dances for her family, as her father accompanied her on an Iranian string instrument, she always liked the way the movements and music picked up her spirits and helped her cope with problems.

Later, when she moved to the United States, she took up ballroom dancing, just like her mother, whom she'd watched perform years before. “I had it in my vision that I wanted to follow in her footsteps,” she said.

Along with learning to dance, she and her husband raised their two children as she worked at the Elizabeth Arden day spa in Washington, D.C.

In 1995, Lippold decided to open her own spa. Together with her husband, she wanted to run a place that would cater to an average clientele. But just after they signed the lease, they got terrible news. Lippold’s husband was diagnosed with a cancer that had progressed into advanced stages and was untreatable.

Six months after the diagnosis, her husband died, and Lippold was left trying to run the new business on her own, even while having to cope with the loss of her husband.

But instead of being overwhelmed by her emotions, Lippold decided to use her feelings for motivation. Together with some of the professional dancers she knew, she organized a Dancing for the Cure gala at the Washington Plaza Hotel, with dinner, dance performances and mini lessons for participants.

Tickets were sold, with all the money going to breast cancer research, a cause Lippold chose after two of her long time clients died of the disease.

Though she was hopeful things would go well, the dinner was far more successful than she expected. It lasted for hours, progressing from the performances by the professional dancers to when the audience, which exceeded a hundred people, proceeded out onto the floor, learning to dance and enjoying the music.

That dinner started a tradition that has continued for nine years, leading Lippold to create the Unique Foundation, a completely volunteer-run, non-profit organization which, since its inception, has donated thousands of dollars to breast cancer research.

Over that time Lippold has seen a great deal of progress in the fight against breast cancer. She said that when she first started hosting the event, the treatment for breast cancer was simply a mastectomy, then chemotherapy, toxic enough to be fatal at times.

Today, research has progressed to the point where, if caught early, treatment targets specific areas of the breast, and when a mastectomy is necessary, removed areas are often replaced by plastic surgery.

Lippold added that women have also become more proactive in taking care of themselves. As part of that effort, Lippold hosts presentations at her spa about self-testing and mammograms, in hopes of catching breast cancer in its early stages. If detected in its first stage the survival rate is 98%, but if allowed to progress to Stage Three the rate drops to 56% and in Stage Four it is less than 20%. The importance of early detection has added urgency to the challenge of both funding research and educating women.

Lippold said that organizing her annual event has required her to constantly adapt to the changing needs of the organization, including turning the event into the basis for a non-profit organization, then later developing it to qualify for tax exempt status. Even as she was working to build the organization, Lippold continued to run her growing business, a daunting task in itself.

Despite the challenges of organizing it, though, Lippold continues to enjoy the event. Four years ago, the Dancing for the Cure event changed from a dinner to high tea, allowing Lippold to lower the ticket price, while keeping the overall funds raised the same. The change in format also allowed greater flexibility for people to get something to eat and take part in dancing at the same time.

Lippold pointed out that audience participation is what makes the event so much fun. With professional dancers on hand to teach, Lippold said that anybody can take part. “If you can walk, you can dance,” she said. “It’s definitely more fun than simply going to a dinner.”

This year, at the Old Town Hilton in Alexandria, Lippold will oversee the ninth Dancing for the Cure, and she has started to become very familiar with the process. Still, she never gets tired of watching people dance for a good cause. It is a powerful symbol to a woman who has used dance so often in her own life to overcome personal adversity.