Camas’ “Dancing Lady” knows the feeling of unbridled joy.
It swept over her a few years ago during a Dead & Company show in the middle of the Gorge.
“I’m a Deadhead,” Karen Lasher, the “Dancing Lady,” told an audience at Portland’s Old Church Concert Hall in March 2019 during a Portland Story Theater event. “It’s where I found my tribe, where I felt at home … felt loved for who I am and not for my job or how much money I had or what I had on.”
Music, she said, had always been able to take her to a place inside herself where she knew she was “powerful and beautiful and divine.”
And on this day in 2017, Lasher found herself just letting it all go at a Grateful Dead revival show in the Gorge. She let her limbs swing, let herself forget about her failed downtown Camas restaurant, about her frustration over what might come next. She just danced.
“I was in the Gorge. It was summer. The sun was shining, and I absolutely let it all out,” Lasher said. “I 100 percent released joy, hope, possibility, love and light. It was a pure expression of me.”