Paula Hess’ smile lit up the North Shore even as it became harder for her to smile.
Hess, a Glenview native, will be honored Saturday as the IHSA’s competitive dance official of the year at a banquet in East Peoria that will recognize an official from 20 different IHSA sports. The ceremony will occur almost a year after Hess died following a lengthy battle with breast cancer.
“She had the most amazing smile in the world,” Hess’ younger sister Dina Rizzi said, beginning to choke up as she described what it was like when Hess entered a room. “Her smile would just take everybody’s breath away. Her smile and the look in her eyes, it was something you had never seen.”
That smile was a constant and her amiability was one of her greatest gifts, according to Glenbrook South dance coach Julie Smith.
“She could send you a text that would have you laughing for days,” Smith said. “She was one of those people who could look at the world and have her own little bent on it.”
That sense of humor was particularly useful at prestigious dance competitions, where Hess, a longtime mentor, would help the girls laugh away their stress.
Hess, who graduated from Glenbrook South in 1990, was a member of the committee that helped devise the IHSA state series for dance. She also served as the tournament manager at the first state final competition in 2013.
Hess went through a great deal of pain in her later years, as described on her blog. In those journal entries, she discussed switching from one medicine to another, sometimes with devastating results. She described watching women she had met online die. That, she confessed, was one of the hardest parts.
“The mystery to me is, at what point do you know you’re about to die?” Hess wrote on her blog. “They seem to be going along, doing okay, and then they disappear. That’s the part that terrifies me.”
But like Hess herself, her blog sparkled with humor. Hess titled one post: “ONT-10/Varlilumab Clinical Trial & Coming to Terms With Being A Fat Old Lady.”
Rather than take Hess away from dance, cancer made dance more important in her life, according to Smith and Rizzi. If Hess had to confront some of life’s hardest questions in her darkest moments, she never let that change her dealings with the outside world — particularly when it came to dance.
“She very much felt it was important to live life to her fullest,” said Diane Erwin, Hess’ mother. “That’s not to say she didn’t have her bad times, but that’s part of survival, too. When the bad times hit, you can’t just ignore them, but you have to learn the art of pulling yourself out of the hole and finding the joy out there.”
As Rizzi explained, “You just have to put your big girl pants on, put on a smile, put on your lipstick and just go out there and live a positive life as much as you can.”
“She was having dark days and stuff like that, grappling with a short life and thinking about her children (two boys) and the fact that she won’t be able to see them grow up,” Rizzi said. “That was difficult to know, but she didn’t want people to think of her like that. She wanted people to stay positive. There was no point in being negative.”
And so she wasn’t. Even after cancer forced her to step down from her role as a state director with the Universal Dance Association, she never stopped dancing and teaching dance. Two weeks before her death, she taught at Bremen High School in Midlothian. One week before, she was at Glenbrook South, ensuring the Titans girls understood their choreography — and even dancing a little herself.
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“That was her enjoyment,” Erwin said. “It wasn’t a mask. It was really heartfelt for her. That’s where she found a lot of her joy. She wasn’t hiding it from the kids. She was transcending it.”
Throughout her 43 years, Hess influenced a wide number of dancers, dance coaches and others in the dance community. She mentored dancers from Japan to the United Kingdom, Erwin said, but her greatest influence was back in the Chicagoland area. Smith said Hess connected with young dancers thanks to her “incredible openness.” Smith said that many conversations still turn to, “What would Paula do?”
“A little piece of her stays alive in these people,” Erwin said. “Even the smallest interactions can change someone’s life, and she was very good at that.”
She danced, taught, and most important, smiled.
Jonah L. Rosenblum is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Twitter @Pioneer_Press