Beach House Helps Throw a Sober Dance Party for Recovery Community
In the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, Beach House helped host a free night of dancing, live music and desserts for members of the local recovery community, on Saturday, February 10, from 7pm to 10pm, at The Triangle Club.
The “Pink Cloud Ball,” as it’s called, happens every year around Valentine’s Day, and is hosted by Palm Beach County’s largest 12-step recovery meeting clubhouse. Open 365 days per year, The Triangle Club serves over 58,000 members in recovery.
“[The dance] is a way to show you can have fun in sobriety and don’t have to get high or drunk to have fun,” Beach House Alumni Coordinator Jared DiCianno said.
He enlisted the help of a group of Beach House alumni who volunteered their time to assist in the set-up and clean-up for the event. Beach House also donated $250 towards set-up and supplies.
Why “Pink Cloud Ball”?
As for how the “Pink Cloud Ball” got its quirky name? DiCianno explained that the term is a bit of a double entendre: it’s a play on the red and pink theme of Valentine’s Day but is also “a colloquial term” sometimes used in recovery circles. “Pink cloud” is slang for the time in early recovery “when someone first gets sober and they’re feeling really good, motivated and grateful,” DiCianno said.
He anticipated that roughly 75 to 100 people will be putting on their dancing shoes for Saturday’s event, many of them from Palm Beach County’s halfway house and sober living community.
They came “to show you can have fun in sobriety and don’t have to get high or drunk to have fun.” For DiCianno, that’s what the Pink Cloud Ball is all about— that and “expanding one’s recovery network.” As he put it, the annual dance is “an opportunity to have fun and fellowship and form connections with people I never thought I’d meet or get along with … because If we’re not having fun, there’s no sense in staying sober.”
DiCianno drew insights from his own recovery to explain why Beach House is involved in helping to host Saturday’s dance: “The more I put myself out there and meet new people and make connections, the value and quality of my recovery is increased just by expanding my network.”
In that same vein, event organizers used the dance to promote joining a home group and getting active in service with a 12-step program. A representative from the career development services group Career Source PBC was also on hand to provide career and educational resources and advice.