“Toni!” Staffers at the Panera on Aloma Avenue greet Toni Dedik like an old friend when she walks in. They also know her phone number and her standing order: iced coffee and a cinnamon crunch bagel. “It’s so nice when I come in and they all holler out my name,” she says.
The warm welcome at Panera, where Toni starts her day, only begins to tell the story of the identity she has forged in 35 years as a volunteer in the Winter Park-Orlando arts and entertainment world, where she has become a ubiquitous Zelig-like figure uncannily present across myriad venues.
Vicki Landon, Orange County Arts & Cultural Affairs administrator, marvels at Toni’s omnipresence. “I’ve been working in the arts and entertainment community since 2007 and I cannot think of an event I attended or worked where I didn’t see Toni,” says Landon.
I showed a photo of Toni to Dean Johnson, the former Orlando Sentinel columnist known as “Commander Coconut” and a denizen of the local arts scene for decades. “I do recognize her and have even talked to her at events, but I don’t know her name,” says the Commander.
Toni’s fine with that.
Zelig is a 1983 movie directed by Woody Allen, who plays Zelig, an introverted cipher with a knack for mimicking strong personalities. The parallel is imperfect. Toni’s hardly a cipher and her personality is as bright as a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Yet the diminutive dynamo claims to be an introvert. Shaq claiming to be 5 feet tall is more believable.
Toni says her propensity for shyness goes back to the small town outside Pittsburgh where she and her twin sister grew up. “It was insular, kind of semi-rural—there weren’t many kids our age. I’m still an introvert. I don’t do well just going up and chatting up somebody.”
Like Zelig, Toni is more comfortable in the world not being herself, slipping on alternative identities. “The nice thing is that when I’m volunteering, I’m not me,” she says. “I’m the organization I’m representing. I’m them.”
There have been lots of them: Adult Literacy League; Altrusa; Cannonball Kids’ Cancer Foundation; Dress for Success; Enzian and its annual Florida Film Festival; Maitland Art Center; Orlando Museum of Art; Opera Orlando; Orlando Ballet; Orlando Fringe; Orlando Museum of Art; Steinway Society of Central Florida; United Arts of Central Florida; Winter Park Library.
Peg O’Keef, actor and legendary fixture in Central Florida theater, got to know Toni at Enzian. “What is it that is said of Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’ I think that captures Toni…fierce of heart, at least,” says O’Keef.
She recalls working alongside Toni at the Florida Film Festival when it was held in sauna-like conditions during June: “Toni, ever cool, would endure that heat with a smile. Perfectly coiffed and lipsticked, making the volunteer T-shirt look like Chanel, greeting the patrons. Her presence is as indelible as the Enzian blossom that names the joint.”
Toni’s twin, her only sibling, died in 2002 of breast cancer. Toni never married. “It was always the thing where whoever I wanted didn’t want me, and vice versa.”
After high school, Toni attended business school and moved to Atlanta, where she held accounting and secretarial jobs at American Motors and then Ford, coordinating delivery of cars to 160 dealerships. In 1989, she heard Ford was opening an Orlando office and applied.
“I always just had a dream to live in Orlando,” she says. Toni bought a house in Winter Park Pines. “My next act was to get a library card,” she says. “I fell in love with the library and its people.”
She had never volunteered but signed up to help at a library used book sale. A passion was born, but work limited Toni to occasional gigs with the library and service clubs. In 1998, she retired after Ford gave her an offer to stay that she could refuse.
Unleashed from 9 to 5, it didn’t take long for Toni to become ever-present in the nonprofit world—a Swiss Army Knife helper whose activities ranged from accounts payable clerk to fundraising letter chief to Fairy Godmother handing out wands to kids on Fairy Night at Leu Gardens.
“If anyone is worthy of being recognized, it’s Toni,” says David Whitfield, finance director of United Arts, when I called to ask for feedback. “What’s somewhat funny is that she’s in our offices today helping me with my filing!”
Toni’s favorite role is simply greeter, a job that she has raised to concierge level. “I like to say, ‘Have you been here before?’ If they say no, I like to give them a quick tutorial,” she says. “Here’s where the bathrooms are, here’s where the water fountains are, there’s a bar down that way. I just revel in the fact that I made someone comfortable coming into a strange environment.”
Even during the pandemic, Toni refused to put her pursuit of joy on hold: “Everybody was bragging that they never wore bras or put makeup on. There was no way I was going to stay home 24 hours a day. I got dressed and out there somewhere every day.”
At the opening of the new Winter Park Library & Events Center in 2021, Toni had the night off from greeting and was presented with a proclamation for years of Dedik-ation. “It was a big deal just to be invited and to get to bring a guest and not have to work an event,” she says. “Someone offered to have it enlarged and framed. I said, ‘No, that’s OK. It’s in my heart.’”
Toni doesn’t take selfies or collect autographs—even the time she met a hero, Fred Rogers, at Rollins College. You’ll find no celebrity photos or memorabilia in her home.
“That’s just not me,” she says.” My pleasure is in giving joy and knowing that people are happy to see me.”
Greg Dawson is a journalist and author. He has worked as a reporter, a television critic, a metro columnist and consumer columnist. His most recent book, with Susan Hood, is Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis (HarperCollins, 2022). Dawson is a contributing writer for Winter Park Magazine.