The Party, the New Resident and Striking Auto Workers

It’s been two years since I moved into my independent living apartment on the continuum care campus and we had a party to prove it. Our first anniversary party was a huge affair with fancy finger food, an ice sculpture, a champagne fountain, music and dancing---all paid for by the management. This past weekend we had our second anniversary party which was less upscale than the first and was mostly paid for by the residents but even better attended than the first. Management did paid for the musical entertainment and a bartender but the Resident Council organized the whole affair and decided that those of us who wanted to get involved could sign up for making a tray of finger food or help with setup and cleanup. Those of us who didn’t want to volunteer could pay ten bucks to help cover the cost of ingredients and paper goods. I do not cook or work well with others---at least here in Senior Land---so I gladly paid the fee.

We have a new resident who practically lives at the jigsaw puzzle table and she has reaffirmed that I don’t work well with others. She'll a pick up a piece, compare it with the photograph, then declare it belongs in the area where she lays it down. You end up with a table full of unconnected pieces that may or (may not) belong in the general area where she lays them down. That alone drives me crazy but she sends me over the edge by talking about each piece as she does it, wanting you to confirm her hawk-eyed brilliance. (Note the hint of sarcasm here.) The constant talking takes away any meditative value jigsaw puzzles usually gives me so I've had to quit my routine of working on the puzzle 15 minutes here or there while I'm waiting in the lobby for a class, lecture or dinner to start.

She used to be a labor negotiator working for the Big Three automakers and against the UAW union negotiators so she raises my hackles just for being part of that team. During the auto crisis of 2008 was one of the most stressful periods in life. We didn’t know if we’d still have a pension or health insurance---the latter her team wanted to take away from we retirees all together. As it ended up the UAW agreed to pay cuts plus a two-tier structure where new hires came in with a lower pay scale of $17 an hour and no pension rights like those hired in before 2007. GM did give the UAW a promise that when the auto companies got back on their feet again they’d do away with the two-tier system. Well, they got back on their feet, paid off their government bailout a head of time and never made good on that promise to workers. Oh, and the GM retirees union got a three-part lump sum to put in a trust to manage our own health care so the company could wash their hands of that whole ball of wax. It was a big sigh of relief when the third payment was made in 2011 or 12 and the medical trust became viable.

Fast forward today, the auto industry recovered enough to give their CEOs golden parachutes along with their $25 to $30 million dollars yearly paychecks. I haven’t been following the strike too closely but I do know that only Ford has offered to do away with the two-tier system along with offering a cost of living increase in pay. When GM’s CEO, Mary Barra, was asked if her $30 million yearly paycheck plus $14 million in stock grants was fair to workers she gave a non-answer of: “92% of it is based on the performance of the company.” Yet she doesn’t get how the two-tiered system creates a hostile workplace? I know it isn’t fair to look at our new resident and see the self-centered mindset of Mary Barra so I feel obligated to try not to judge Ms Negotiator too early. I will, however, say she’s also the talk of the line dancing group. She comes on like gang busters. And isn’t that exactly what she did for a living, try to break up gangs, so to speak, try to get them to bend her way or the highway? 

Okay, back to the party. In the planning stage there was the usual fight over what to wear with the men wanting to dress up and the women split on the issue. One guy in particular really cleaned up well. He had on a well-fitted black suit with a black turtleneck sweater---I’m guess cashmere---and he accessorized it with a $5 gold piece hanging on a long, gold chain. On his head he wore a gold colored beret. This guy usually wears t-shirts and shorts so it was quite a transformation. Most of the women wore what I’d call their grandmother-of-the-bride outfits but 3-4 ladies didn’t get the memo and wore slacks and a sweater. I wore a royal blue silk blouse that is knee-length and full that I’ve owned for 40 years and only wore once before---to an art showing of my work back when I was in college the second time around. I got a lot of complements but I felt like a circus tent.

The hours they set for parties around here amuse the heck out of me. I think I’m the only person here besides the security guard who is up past ten o'clock. This party started at 4:30 and ended around 8:00 and I got there around 4:40 which was a big mistake I won’t make again. By then everyone was there and had claimed their posses and clicks to sit with and I ended up sitting with non other than Ms Negotiator and our resident pastor. I like the pastor. A lot. She’s in my writing group and I figured the universe was playing a trick on me to throw the three of us together. Ms Negotiator looked fabulous in her magenta crepe dress. Thin as a weed and looked even more so next to me and my body twin, Ms Angel.

Ms Negotiator likes to talk and she got on the topic of how scared she is: "terrorists are coming in over the border, communists are trying to take over the country, food and water shortages coming soon." Wow! In any other setting I might have asked her if she's scared of me knowing full well the 'communists' she was talking about are those of us who care about the environment and homeless people. Did I already say, "Wow?" We were at a party listening to a great entertainer who was wearing a pair of shiny red, Dorthy-from-the-Wizard-of-Oz shoes I couldn’t take my eyes off and she was gyrating her cute little body around reminding me of what it was like to be young and have fun moving to music and Ms Negotiator was too scared to enjoy the moment! And in the back of my unfiltered thoughts I was glad about that. Does that makes me a bad person? ©

The Golden Bachelor, the CheerLeader and the Art Class

 

I’ve been so busy I hardly noticed that September turned into October. My first clue that it was happening is that I got a phone call from one of the guys living in my continuum care complex asking me how my dining dollars are holding up, and if I ran out would I like to have dinner with him and his wife. He’s in my writing group and I’m in book club with his wife. They always have extra dining dollars at the end of the month because she eats gluten free and this place cooks with too many things that makes her sick. She’s on the food committee and is responsible for getting a kale salad put on the menu and salt-less butter served with our bread. I'd vote 'Yuck' on both of those if they put them on a ballot. Salt-less butter has no flavor what so ever and the kale has a bitter taste I don’t like. Why can’t healthy food taste like our favorite flavors of ice cream? Life is so unfair! 

The Golden Bachelor

One of the reasons this week flew by was because the management threw several evening events at us which is not common if you’re not a card player: One was a cheese and crackers get-together by our fireplace which is new while playing Quibbler at night is only new to me. (The third night event was a Paint and Sip party, more about that later.) This was my third time playing Quibbler and I can honestly say it’s eating kale---good for my brain, but I don’t enjoy putting myself into situations that makes me feel stupid. One of my goals in playing, though, is to push myself outside of my comfort zone.

The side benefit of playing is you can’t sit next to someone for two hours playing a card game without picking up details about their interests and personal history. For example our resident Cheerleader who, they say, never misses Quibbler and is their ‘rules’ go-to-person didn’t show up this week because she wanted to watch the first episode of the Golden Bachelor. She’s been married three times and is one of only three people here who, gossips say, has tried dating since moving in. Two are guys who lost their wives and they didn’t waste any time shopping for a replacement companion…one with success though he only looked as far as the widow of one of his friends, and the other guy is still looking but gets teased because he’s only dating women from off our campus, found and vetted for him by his daughter. The Cheerleader dated a guy a couple of times who comes to our campus to give massages but that didn’t work out. She's got money. He doesn't, and she's ten years older than him, but I don't know if either of those facts was the reason she didn't continue dating the guy. She says he's "a nice person."

The Golden Bachelor, so named because the bachelor is 72 years old, is the first season of the Bachelor franchise for senior citizens. Since the parent franchise has been going for 27 seasons and this week's show was their 286 episode I’d say it’s about time. It's a popular series and I’ll admit to watching an episode here and there but I've haven’t felt compelled to follow an entire season. Yet.

We got finished with Quibbler early enough for me to catch the last half hour of the show and the Rose Ceremony. For those of you who don’t know how a Rose Ceremony works the bachelor spent two hours drooling over 22 women (in this season they are ages 60 to 75) and at the end of the evening he gave all but six women a rose. And those six are essentially voted off the island or to be more accurate, they are kicked out of the mansion where they all live together during the season’s filming. Each week the show ends with another Rose Ceremony until the bachelor is down to three women and at that point he gets overnight dates with each. The final Rose Ceremony ends in an engagement. Already I'm disappointed in this season because the Golden Bachelor boy kicked out the only woman who had short, white/gray hair and he opted to keep all the women who had dyed and bleached hair with lots of extensions. Only one other woman dared to leave a streak of gray hair in her otherwise black mane of hair. Well, two actually but I don’t know what to call a haircut that is showing the woman's gray roots standing straight up ending in an half inch of black hair on top and close-shaved sides and back. Both of these women are the token women of color in the cast and will probably get kicked out at the end of the 3rd or 4th show. I hate that a standard of beauty is perpetuated by shows like this that women can't be attractive without expensive and time-consuming hair treatments and isn't necessity all your own. Especially for older women. I thought there was a movement to accept gray hair in the beauty industry. And I’d bet money these candidates "looking for love again” kicked off their sky high heels the minute the cameras quit rolling.

One of the fan favorites of all the contestants, I read, put in her bio that she "loves to play ping pong, reading and body glitter." Body glitter? In your sixties? What will they think of next! Another woman loves to swim with the sharks. Other contestants listed as their 'fun fact' things like: Christmas enthusiast, makes hand-crafted greeting cards, enjoys 100 year old brandy, loves horseback riding, wants to have lunch with Kris Jenner and my personal favorite answer was the contestant who said she has three master degrees. She'll be kicked off the show early on because she's also the one who dared to leave two streaks of gray hair framing her face. Still, I had hoped that this senior season they'd place more value on brains and less on looks but I'm guessing the producers will stick to their not-so-secret formula that has kept the show in production for so many years.

Every season has a so-called bombshell like two women falling for each other or a former boyfriend shows up at the mansion and wants his woman back. I suspect one of the women from this season is transgender. If I'm right I hope The Cheerleader has set up a few viewing parties and a pool to see who is still standing at the end like she doesn't for fans of football and basketball. It would be fun to watch a few of my fellow residents react, knowing they think Trans people are a threat to society and all children everywhere.

Enough on that topic. Also this week was our ‘Paint and Sip’ evening which only costs $10 plus $5 for wine if we wanted a glass. I didn’t but those who did barely touched their glasses over the two hours of painting. One guy accidentally used his wine to clean his brush in so my hint to any who goes to a ‘Paint and Sip’ party is to only order red wine so you can tell if from the brush cleaning water. 

When the instructor first came in I was kind of insulted by the simplicity of the picture she wanted us to paint. By day she teaches kindergarten and she must have assumed we were like the people on campus who reside in the memory care building. She gave us little pools of the primary colors on a paper plate and I asked for some white so I could mix colors. I also teased the guy next to me that I was going to steal his brush because I didn’t like mine. So the instructor gave three more and loudly announced, “There’s always one in every class.” At the end, though, the consensus was that my painting turned out the best of the twelve. I had fun but the painting I came home with is nothing to write home about. (It's below.) And thank goodness it was done with the same paint that her kindergarten kids use because I managed to get white paint all over my favorite pair of jeans.

 Until Next Wednesday… ©

It's supposed to be the lake we live on but

 I didn't get the swans on it like everyone else did.

High Tea and the Mayor

It’s a rare occasion when I share a photo of myself online but the one below of me all dolled up and experiencing High Tea seems like a good time to do it. People on my continuum care campus are not used to seeing me put any effort into my clothing. (Jeans and a sweat or tee shirt are my uniform.) Heck, I even broke out the jewelry and I traded in my tennis shoes for some black dress shoes I’ve owned for two years and only wore once before. The self appointed mayor of our independent living building even paid me a complement while were waiting for our bus---only the third one I’ve gotten out of him in the nearly two years we’ve lived here. And one of those complements was for a poem I wrote that got me in a little trouble with the management. The third complement the Mayor gave me was when I walked a run-away at a purple fashion show for Alzheimer's Awareness. I wore a long, purple and turquoise  lounging dress of fake silk and he told me I “won the fashion show.”   

Mr. Mayor is an odd duck in many ways but in other ways he’s typical of most males born just before WWII whose ideas of the male/female roles are firmly fixed in his head. I met him the first month after we both moved in. I was in the cafe by myself and he came in and asked if he could join me. I said ‘yes’ and a scant few minutes later he got up and said he changed his mind and he moved to another table by himself. I found out later on that his wife had died not long before that and he was kind of a shy, corporate lawyer. His wife was a stay-at-home mom of five boys who always had a cocktail waiting for him when he got home from work and she laid his clothes out for him in the morning. She'd never even shaved her legs in front of him and they dressed for dinner at night. Fast forward to now, it didn’t take him long to get over his shyness and now he has what we all call his harem that he dines with him weekly at the so-called Mayor’s Table--seven women who are the cream of the crop, the head cheerleaders, the most bedazzled, the Royalty and Chosen Ones---I’ve used all these nicknames in my head and they often have cocktails beforehand in one of their apartments. His guest list changes slightly from time to time but I’ve never been invited to dine with the mayor so it's a good thing it's not on my Bucket List. In all fairness, the Harem mostly lives on the same floor which makes it easier for them to form friendships. I live on a hall with only six apartments and I rarely see anyone on my floor and I doubt I could pick two of them out of a lineup.

I do often sit at the community table with Mr. Mayor at lunch time and know how seriously he takes his job as the self-appointed mayor. He set up a residence council with by-laws and legal papers and a newsletter that he did ask me to be in charge of, which I turned down. I knew I had the experience to put one together but how he could possibility know that based on one poem I wrote and hung in the mail room is still beyond my comprehension. I’ve never told anyone here about the 24 page, by-monthly Readers Voice Newsletter I sold by subscription for ten years. I don’t even think my nieces knew about it. And Don---bless his heart---edited every word I wrote for spelling errors and in the process he learned a lot about romance books, the women who wrote them and read them. 

Anyway, back to the mayor. He’s kind of the center of every event. He makes speeches and advocates for residences on all kinds of things. For example, he got management to install dehumidifiers for those who wanted them attached to their furnaces and he wrangled a seat at the table when our CEO got promoted and the management was interviewing his replacement. He got them to agree to a matching fund to buy a baby grand for our lobby (but the majority of we residents voted the idea down). He might be a self-appointed mayor but he’s more than earned the title. 

Going to High Tea: that’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was in The Red Hat Society and I lost the opportunity to go with them. Back then we didn’t have a High Tea place in town so going was a day trip, and back then I couldn’t leave my husband alone for more than a scant two hours. My red hat sisters came back raving about how much fun it was to dress to the nines and be served exotic teas, fancy sandwiches and pastries on elegant china. 

A High Tea room opened up here in town this summer and the decor and table settings were rich and fancy with its exposed, vintage brick wall and red velvet davenports and gold trimmed china which is a good thing because the service was not great and the food was so over priced it could have ruined the experience if we had let it. (The photo of the menu is below.) By the time they added on the tax and the tip it was $49.00! per person. It looks like a lot of food for the $37 but everything you get for the $37 was two-bites and while it all tasted good, $49 plus $7 for the bus ride really put a nick in my budget. Or as one of my High Tea companions said, “I might as well have rolled up dollar bills and lite them on fire.” 

Still, the experience made me feel young again. Young enough to be having tea parties with my mom and later on with my nieces when they came along. My mom didn’t drink coffee or soda pops. I don’t even remember her drinking lemonade but I find it hard to believe that she’d have made it for us kids without pouring herself a glass or two. I also don’t remember her ever drinking ice tea but, again, I obviously didn’t pay enough attention back in those days to imprint a lasting memory of her liking ice tea or not. Her English ancestries would be proud that her appreciation for a good cup of hot tea never wavered. And that tea better be hot or she’d sent it back to where it came from for a do-over. Funny how some memories stick with you and others seem to float away like dandelions blowing in the wind. 

Until next Wednesday... ©