Some of those strolling around the Tennessee Aquarium on Sunday got a little surprise: about 140 dancers moving to the rhythm of a newer version of the 1941 hit, “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”
The dancers, mostly from Chattanooga, ranged in age from 4 to 60.
Most were past and present students of Lindsay Fussell, a Chattanooga Theatre Centre dance teacher and the event’s choreographer.
“To get that many people together and have everybody get along really well and have a good time,” she said, “I think I’d count that as probably the greatest achievement for this event.”
The idea for a mass dance in Chattanooga was first thought up in early June by Ann Coulter and her co-workers at her strategic planning business, Kennedy, Coulter, Rushing & Watson.
“We thought, ‘Let’s do something neat for Chattanooga that says all the right things and [that] people have fun doing,’” Coulter said.
A group of dancers practiced for four consecutive Sundays before the big day.
The dance was supposed to be a surprise, but some friends and family members gathered before the dancers showed up to step, stomp and strut their stuff.
“I noticed when I got up on the roof (of the aquarium) to watch it, they were all just standing in a line waiting. It wasn’t quite as impromptu as we would have liked,” Fussell joked.
At the end, all the dancers dispersed into the crowd except for 16-year-old Chattanoogan David Couter, who gave the crowd of several hundred their last little bit of dancing entertainment.
David said he’d never danced in front of people by himself. “But I always wanted to,” he said. “If anything, it made me kind of proud to be from Chattanooga.”
“I had a lot of people come up to me and say they haven’t worked on anything this fun in a long time,” Coulter said. “It was really kind of a magical, one-time thing.”
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