Mary Castro: Joyful Noise and Community Service

Mary Castro can point to two factors responsible for her effervescent vitality at age 78: spirituality and tap dancing.

Scripture says, “Make a joyful noise,” she reasoned, grinning.

Seemingly indefatigable, Mary suffered a sciatica flare-up right before an interview at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Hampton Bays. Undeterred, she arrived in the parish hall sporting a whimsical walking stick, adorned with a painted zebra head on top.

“I’m on holy ground here,” she said, snuggled in a fireside chair.

She and her husband — “Everybody called him ‘Jimmy,’” she said of her late partner — joined the church when they moved to Hampton Bays in 1991. While she admitted that spirituality came to her later in life, “it has grown incrementally, bit by bit,” she said.

Raised Catholic, she was thrilled to find a new way to worship and loves the Episcopal philosophy — St. Mary’s, in particular, striking a chord. “I do not have to check my brains at the door,” she said. “They encourage thinking and full discussion.”

She credits the church community with opening her to the wider presence of God, as well as the rewards of helping others. “The work we do in the community, you can see, touch and feel it,” she said. “If I’m not being of service, I’m just taking up space.”

Volunteering at St. Mary’s — assembling blessing boxes, helping people when they get sick, coordinating Maureen’s Haven efforts for the homeless — is how she looks out for her own soul, she said.

And those sparkly spirits that dance to a lively beat?

That’s where tap comes in.

Born in Manhattan, Mary was living in the city when she decided to join a theater in Brooklyn Heights. One day, she was rehearsing in the chorus for the musical “Fiorello!” when the tap dancers came to the stage.

“I thought, ‘What a happy sound!’” she recalled. “I saw them come on stage and thought to myself, ‘I could do that.’”

She learned steps from other dancers “in the wings,” off stage, then sought out lessons. Moving to Hampton Bays, she looked again for classes and came upon Doris Dunn, a former Rockette, at REDancers Studio in Riverhead. The pair became fast friends.

But then the instructor moved away and the tap classes dissolved, until Doris called Mary asking if she still had her costumes — which she did. And so, she brought them, along with her tap shoes, to classes that Doris was teaching at Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton and joined in — becoming her teacher’s assistant and eventually taking over at age 68.

“I was so honored to step into her shoes,” Mary said. “Those are big shoes to fill. But, 10 years later, I’m still at it.”

She believes teaching tap is one of the ways she is of service. “I look at the dancers in my line and there are women who are in constant pain,” she said. “They take off their shoes and for one hour, they leave their pain and their troubles with their street shoes. I always tell them, when class is over, your problems and issues will be there waiting for you. So for this one hour, let’s just dance.”

Why choose service, why make the joyful noise?

“I want to see the face of God!” Mary said. “Jimmy is buried here in the garden of remembrance. And every now and then, when I go by his ashes, I say to him, ‘So, Jimmy, what’s he like?’ And every once in a while, he answers me: ‘You’ll see.’”