Smiles rarely need to be coaxed out of Williams, her friends say. They are there as she teaches countless numbers of children to dance through volunteer work at the church and such community organizations as the West Side Civic Theatre, also in Lewisville, and Salem Academy.

“It’s therapy for me,” Williams said of her dance work. “The movement, the music - you can get lost in it.”

What is therapy for her has served as an inspiration for others. Williams has kept up that smile during difficult personal times, such as fighting diabetes, breast cancer, and most recently, coping with her husband’s open-heart surgery, which was performed in November.

“I’ve never seen anybody with a more positive attitude no matter what comes her way,” said Lynn Hall, the stage manager of the theater group. “”She has a kind of life-changing effect on people.”

June Craft Hayes, the director of Christian education at Lewisville Methodist, said that Williams’ dancing can move her to tears.

“She certainly lets the message of the music lead her in how her choreography works,” she said. Williams started dancing as a child at the Academy of Dance Arts on Hawthorne Road. Under her instructor, Vinni Frederick, a former Rockette at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, she learned to love the discipline it takes to dance well, she said.

At Reynolds High School, she was a member of the Dancing Boots; as a senior, she choreographed the group’s routine for the annual Key Club Follies.

The diabetes was diagnosed when she was 19.

She majored in psychology and Spanish at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and afterward spent time teaching high-school English and running her own catering business.

But her love of dancing never left her. In the spring of 2000, she attended the West Side Civic Theatre’s inaugural performance of Oklahoma!

She joined the group for its next production, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, helping with the choreography.

The group had just started auditions for The Sound of Music in the spring of 2001 when she found a small lump in her breast during a self-examination. The lump was later confirmed to be breast cancer.

Williams said she was startled by the diagnosis - she was only 35 at the time and had no family history of the disease.

Friends rallied behind her and her family, including her young sons, Walt and Noah.

During her fight against the cancer, she endured six surgeries that ended up limiting her motion - she couldn’t, for example, lift her arm over her head - leaving her unable to choreograph the next six shows for the theater.

The diabetes was also a factor in her treatment, leading to hositalizations after each chemotherapy because the treatment made he blood sugar spike.

She fretted over whether she should join a support group. She said she didn’t like the idea of going into a gray room and sitting on folding chairs talking about how sad everyone is.

Instead, she joined Casting for Recovery, a Vermont support group for women with breast cancer that focuses on fly-fishing retreats.

The group was then organizing its first trip in North Carolina, on the North Mills River, and Williams decided to go along, even though she had never been fly-fishing before. The support from other cancer patients - as well as the peacefulness they all shared - turned out to be the kind of help she needed when she couldn’t dance, she said.

Six years later, she still volunteers with the group as a hospitality coordinator.

In May 2002, in the middle of her cancer fight and inspired by her fly-fishing adventure, she wrote a poem about her experience:

Some days it’s a shout

That I can’t let out

Some days it’s a whisper

That roams to scare her

We’ll journey though the stormy waters

We’ll learn what really matters

Reach out and hold my hand

Don’t let go until I say I can.

I’ll hold you in my heart

Though our paths take us apart

There’s a river that flows

With ebbs and riffles as it goes

Take my cares and fears

Leave me with peace

You can’t wear me down

The cancer, while an interruption, didn’t stop her from pursuing her dreams, including the couple’s dream of expanding their family. Since she recovered from the cancer, they have adopted two children - Anna, 6, and Martha, 4.

And her dancing goes on. Last year, Williams coordinated the largest group of kids that the theater has ever worked with - about 50 - for a production of The Wizard of Oz, Hall said.

“I love the way it makes me feel,” Williams said. “”It just makes me happy to dance.”

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