“I always thought Assisted Living was a few joints in your pocket.”---Chuck LeMasters
Growing up, I always liked the Italians. Maybe they were a little brassy but they never ran and hid from a problem, they played basketball like wild dogs and kept their grandparents living at home until they turned to ashes. Send Papa to an old folks home---what are you, some kind of barbarian? Of course, there was never a thought of tossing out Nonna. She’d cuss a blue streak, then pick you up and throw you across the room. Assisted Living wouldn’t have worked in those days when fraying grandparents were considered an asset rather than a nuisance. If you needed a little help, just call the Italo-American club and they’d send over a grande camereria with some wine and a vacuum cleaner. Problem solved.
Keren Wilson, PhD (gerontology) is the creator of the Assisted Living concept. She opened the first AL facility in Oregon in 1981. In earlier times, it was the responsibility of the family to care for aging relatives; if they were unable to do so, these people became wards of the county and they were shuffled through “old folks homes” or “poorhouses.” As the field of medicine improved and people began living longer, this became an onerous and expensive proposition for the counties. Adding to the problem, many more women began working outside the home in World War II, leaving fewer people at home to care for the elderly. This led to the creation of boarding homes for “seniors.”
Once Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, however, it meant the counties no longer had to shoulder the financial burden of elder care. The boarding homes were converted into “nursing homes” in order to grab off those free-flowing federal dollars. They were very sterile, unlike the warm and fuzzy boarding places of the past, and almost nobody liked them. When Keren Wilson showed up with her Assisted Living concept, health-providers were all ears.
Inspired by her own mother’s insights and experience living in a nursing home, Wilson wanted to create a place which would provide as much autonomy and independence as possible in a residential environment. This would include sovereignty over one’s own room temperature, eating and going to bed when the client chose, allowing the use of personal furniture and, in many cases, even accepting pets. The AL facility would provide all supportive care that was needed for help with housekeeping, cooking, dressing and medication management. What’s not to like?
Oh, and there were other “enhancements.”
Happy Days Are Here Again
In 2014, Forbes magazine noticed a new trend: more and more Assistant Living centers were applying for liquor licenses. They weren’t just thinking of the occasional champagne brunch as they told the kiddoes who might be footing the bill, they were providing ready access to liquor for people who no longer have to go to work and have plenty of time to bend an elbow. As Forbes writer Robert Laura pointed out, “Thousands of boomers are retiring every single day and they are not only likely to continue their drinking habits but to increase them as a result of boredom and a desire ‘to feel better.’” According to Laura, “It’s like one big, eternal happy hour in many of these places.”
Tell us about it. As neighbors to the raucous retirement mecca called The Villages, now spilling over into three Florida counties, we are well aware of elderly debauchery, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Blessed with a dangerous and unholy ratio of 10 women to every man (and the Beach Boys thought “two girls for every boy” was phenomenal), one Villages resident was quoted in a newspaper article as saying, “Turn your back for a minute and someone will try to steal your husband.” Then, of course, there are the regular reports of swinger parties, black-market Viagra sales and one recorded incident where a 68-year-old resident named Peggy Klemm was caught having sex in a public square with a man 19 years her junior. “You go, Peggy!” was the prevailing attitude and the incident was honored by a local bar which designed a Sex In the Square cocktail in Klemm’s honor.
In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Intelligencer discovered a man in his seventies who lived in an Assisted Living unit was bringing in prostitutes. He loudly protested his innocence until one day the AL staff discovered one of them hiding under his bed, In a Mississauga, Ontario Assisted Living facility, residents were warned their bingo games were in violation of local gambling laws and thereby illegal. Rather than going through proper channels to obtain the required licensing, they merrily kept on going in flagrant defiance of the law until the cops busted up their game. In Westlake, Ohio, residents irked at bothersome rules and regs, made their own tribute video to the Beastie Boys, “You Gotta Fight For Your Right To Party!”
No play, no pay, right guys?
Welcome To Assisted Nirvana
As time has passed, the Assisted Living industry has come to realize some seniors just don’t fit into facilities with traditional norms. Some guys want to bring their Harleys along, have a couple of drinks at the community strip joints or stage a chili cook-off. A Texas facility called Escapees Care provides a site where temporary residents can park their RVs, take advantage of nursing care, enjoy meals and participate in a wide range of activities from ballroom dancing to pickleball. Escapees pay for services on a month-to-month basis and can stay as long as they want.
There are Assisted Living communities for retired postal workers, for ex-military personnel and other groups. The North Hollywood Senior Artists Community is for writers, actors and others involved in movie-making, past or present. There are places for aging Jews, a couple for LGBT seniors, at least one for retired academicians. The time has come, the walrus said to speak of Assisted Living for fading hippies. We could call it Woodstock + 50 and have twice-weekly concert nights gleefully sponsored by the Medical Marijuana industry. Every facility would be complemented with an Alice’s Restaurant and a rooftop bar called Lucy’s In the Sky With Beverages. There would be arts-and crafts classes in joint-rolling, tie-dying and sandalmaking and community gardens where residents could contribute to cultivating tasty crops. At the end of the Woodstock 1/4-mile hiking trail would be the giant skinny-dipping pool and Frisbee course. It’s a natural. You’ll never want to leave. You’ll have fun, fun, fun til someone takes your skateboard away.
Love Hurts (A Fable)
“Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts. They were true as the blue, blue sky. Mostly.”---Johnny Cash
Johnny was an independent sort, a guitar-picker all his life, much of which was spent on small stages in dimly lit saloons. Occasionally, someone would place a fifty in the tip jar and he’d follow her home for a special performance. Frankie was a swan, a homecoming queen with an edge who always had her choice of beaus. She eschewed the logical choices and wound up with a rambler and a gambler a long way from home. Both of them, to their dismay and astonishment, wound up in the Belvedere Estates Manor, an Assisted Living facility just outside the city limits of Grand Junction, Colorado. They didn’t like it much.
In their mid-seventies, both of them still carried themselves well, had their wits about them and looked at least ten years younger. They met on Singles Night at the Belvedere Bistro when Johnny walked up and said, “Hi! I’m a rhinestone cowboy, riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo.” Frankie gave him the once-over, managed to look unimpressed and said, “I’m busted flat in Baton Rouge, waitin’ for a train.” She’d seen his kind before. Not interested.
Not one to give up easily, Johnny waited for show night at the Bistro, where residents and their friends could tell jokes, twirl batons or do the Irish jig. He smiled at Frankie in the fifth row and sang “If ever I would leave you, it wouldn’t be in summer” nor in Autumn or a wintry evening, nor Springtime. Didn’t work, but Frankie was amused.
A month later, Johnny tried again. Frankie was in the third row this time, which he took as a good sign. “Some day, when I'm awfully low…when the world is cold…I will feel a glow just thinking about you…and the way you look tonight.” Oh-oh. The man was bringing out the heavy artillery. Frankie hung around a little longer this time. Sometimes you know you’re being set up for the kill but you go along with the joke anyway. Why do we do that?
Frankie was sitting in the front row the following month, waiting for the coup d’etat, undoubtedly some gooey number a twanger like Johnny would feel a lady couldn’t resist. Instead, he veered to his left and pulled out Sinatra. “I get a kick every time I see you standing there before me…I get a kick though it’s clear to see you obviously do not adore me.”
Well. Who can resist a smiling cowboy with a guitar and a sense of humor? Frankie and Johnny became an item at the Belvedere Estates Manor, for better or for worse, the music man on his best behavior, the prom queen hopeful but guarded. How many times had she seen the ship of true love dashed on the rocks of hanky-panky by a man with a Stetson and a smooth line of malarkey?
Johnny took a one-night job three counties away to make a few needed dollars and bade Frankie to come along, but she had places to go, people to see. Far away from the Belvedere Bistro, couples laughed and danced to the music of Johnny’s band, and then it happened. In the front door walked a redhead, Johnny’s kryptonite. She sauntered down to the bandstand to watch him play, then he came to her table where the lights were low. What Frankie didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
The redhead jumped up and slapped him, she slapped him a time or two. She said, “I’m Frankie’s sister and I was checking up on you.” He was Frankie’s man, but he was doing her wrong. The sister grabbed Johnny’s earlobe. She pulled it up close to her sneer. She laid her Colt 45 on the table and Johnny got the idea. He was Frankie’s man, he wasn’t doing her wrong.
“Back at the Belvedere Manor, things are all peaches and cream.
Frankie and Johnny are sweethearts, sharin’ their singular dream.
Now and then Johnny sees a real looker come into a guitar-pickin’ dive.
He never pays them a bit of attention, thinkin’ back on that Colt 45.”
That’s all, folks….
