Though they aren’t quite swimming around in pools of gold coins, the finance team lurks behind the scenes of DM in the Norris Scholars Room with stacks of money, counting the night away as donations keep piling up. Like the dancers, they too are kept in suspense about the grand total.

“It gets counted and recounted and recounted again,” said Medill junior Jessica Brady, a second-year committee member. “We are constantly getting numbers all night, they constantly change, and we don’t actually know what the [final] number is until right before we actually reveal it to everyone else.”

The final total is expected to be in line with past years’ totals, if it doesn’t exceed them.

“All the participants have really stepped up and raised money like I’ve never seen before,” Brady said.

Pre-DM, committee members act as individual finance liaisons for dancers and pester them with e-mails. Part of the job is getting – and keeping – the dancers financially on track.

“You truly get to see the profits of your hard work when you see your dancers at check-in and they’re excited and then you sit in there and you count how much money everyone brought it,” Brady said. “It’s just an incredible feeling to be in that room.”

Committee members aren’t exclusively hermits, though.

“It’s not just about work,” Brady said. “You need to go have fun and dance with your friends and really experience what it is, not sit in a room and count money all night.”

And while Dance Marathon is all about altruism and loving the kids and dancing until you want to collapse, DM wouldn’t be getting anywhere if it weren’t for the money.

“Tomorrow when DM’s over, the success of DM is going to be measured by how much money we raise, and we get to see that, we get to help that process along,” Brady said.