Old White Bands & Fans

Anyu used to complain about old people at the Senior Center. Anyu was my mother. She was in her eighties at the time. She preferred being around young people.

As I enter my full Social Security retirement year, I am beginning to get a deeper appreciation of what she meant. There is a time lag between one's age and one's self-image.

It began auspiciously enough on New Years Eve with dinner and a dance with live rock and lounge music. The lead singer and the band members were old and grey. They played just fine, with all the enthusiasm of youth, but in my memories of rock musicians, there is no association with regular looking old people. Shari and I left early, but that was primarily on account of our table being outside and it being a cold and rainy night. We do have winters in the Sonoran Desert, but it was also past my bedtime.

Then last Saturday night, Shari and I went to a dance place to hear and dance to traditional and modern Louisiana French music by a group named BeauSoleil. The venue was the El Casino Ballroom, a 1200 capacity institution south of downtown, in Latino community neighborhoods. We had never heard of the place, much less been there.

I had no idea there were so many people in Tucson. The parking lot was filling up when we arrived early and the food trucks were lined up outside. We showed proof of admission payment and earned our florescent orange, hospital-style wrist bands. We entered a vast open area surrounding a huge dance floor in front of a stage. In back was a broad, raised bar area.

Everyone was white, old and grey. I kept looking for younger people or some ethnic diversity. Nothing. People kept arriving and finding seats among arrangements of folding metal tables and chairs. They were more of the same. Many were eccentric old hippies with thinning long silver ponytails and colorful clothes on plumped and aged bodies. There were a couple of motorized wheelchairs. Most were, well, folks who looked like they were in retirement.

In short, everyone looked like me: grey haired, wrinkled old white people. It was a bit nightmarish.

Shari and I like to go to summer picnic concerts at the Tucson Racquet & Fitness Club. There we can enjoy bands playing various different rock genres. One was Christian rock. It was okay until we made out the lyrics. A small crowd sits on the grass field by the swimming pool. Yes, the band members are all old white people, which is a little jarring, but the venue and music attract lots of young families with children. What we enjoy most are the little munchkins dancing and scampering around.

The crowd at El Casino lacked youth. Shari spotted one Latino couple and there were a couple of young bartenders. Otherwise, it was all people our age or older. They seemed like regulars familiar with the venue. The band members who cranked out energetic Cajun music were older, white, balding, and pudgy, just like the crowd.

Actually, it was a heap of fun. The dance floor was delightfully crowded with couples and singles, some jitterbugging, others hopping, shaking, and writhing in various rock-appreciation styles practiced and perfected over decades. People with no sense of beat were happily and unabashedly moving on the dance floor with their partners, and old trippy-hippies skipped around the perimeter like fairies.

It's just that I'm not used to crowds of older, grey haired people playing and dancing in a rock music setting. They remind me too much of the jarring feelings I get when I look in a mirror. I have this out-dated mental holographic image of myself as a kid, chastened only by the occasional creaks and aches of aging joints and sagging jeans on a sagging butt and gut.