Ride Along: The Saratoga Senior Center
SLAH spends a full day among some of the Spa City's most experienced residents.
Ever since interviewing Lois Celeste, executive director of the Saratoga Senior Center, for our 2021 Capital Region Gives Back feature, I’ve been wishing the Senior Center wasn’t just for seniors. Ceramics? Trivia nights? Van trips? Book Club? I’m so in.
And so, naturally, I used Saratoga Living After Hours as an excuse to get myself in there, despite being a couple decades too young (the center is open to people 50 and older, who can join for just $25 a year). This past Thursday, I spent the entire day at the Senior Center, participating in any and every activity I could; Lois and her staff pretty much gave me free reign. Here’s how it went.
9:00am
I showed up to the Center at 9am, just so I could get my bearings before the 9:15am start of Japan and its Culture class. Unfortunately, Liam, the Skidmore student who teaches the class (and whom some of the seniors find cute) wasn’t in that day. Instead, Marketing and Outreach Coordinator Stacie Barnes gave me a tour of the space, which, it was clear to see, the Center has outgrown. (They’re currently waiting on a building permit to begin construction on a new Center next to the Saratoga YMCA.) “A lot of the members don’t want to say ‘senior center,’” Stacie tells me. “So they say ‘I’m going to my club.’”
9:50am
On the tour, Stacie had told me about Tarot card reader Mary Shimp, who comes in every Thursday to do individual readings. I immediately made an appointment with her at the front desk for 10am, and just before then, Mary was ready for me. Mary is a retired nurse and cancer survivor who has been reading cards for close to 40 years, and hosts her own radio show on Mondays from 2-3pm on 91.1FM. “The seniors tell me, ‘We just love to come and talk to you,’” she said. After finishing my reading (I’ll let you know if it was accurate in 2023), Mary had appointments for the next four hours, with a steady stream of seniors coming in to see into their future.
10:05am
After my reading I scooted over to the already-in-progress ukulele group meeting, where six women and two men, who had been playing ukulele for anywhere from four years to one week, were gathered around the table in the art room with their instruments and sheet music pulled up on iPads. (Typically, they don’t get their own room and have to play in the common area, because the Regional Food Bank is distributing food in the art room on Thursdays, but this week the food bank was rescheduled to Friday.) Someone would suggest a song—“City of New Orleans” or “Fill Me Up Buttercup” or “Tulsa Time”—and the group would discuss the chords needed to play the tune. Then they’d jump right in, with about half the group singing while they played. “It almost sounded like we knew what we were doing!” one player exclaimed after a particularly rousing rendition of “Blue Bayou.”
11:00am
I lost track of time listening to the ukuleles, and before I knew it, it was time for gentle yoga with Sheila. “What’s hurting?” the instructor asked the class of about nine people. “And we don’t have all day.” Someone from behind me called out: “You should say ‘what’s not hurting?’” After some seated stretches, Sheila brought us up into a tabletop position and eventually to our feet for some balance work. One such movement was the “twinkling star,” which requires you to raise one leg to the side, tilt slightly, outstretch your arms and wiggle your fingers. An older woman in the class jokingly referred to the pose as “falling star.”
12:00pm
On account of just having my wisdom teeth out the day before, I didn’t stick around for lunch, which is provided by the Office of the Aging at the Center every weekday. When I returned from eating sweet potatoes at the Saratoga Living office, I met up with some women in the common area, one of whom said she had to have her jaw broken to have her wisdom teeth extracted (which quickly made me stop complaining), one one named Carla, who was waiting to get her cards read for the first time. Another woman said she’d prefer not to know her future, to which Carla responded, “I don’t have much of a future left—it’s not like I’m 20.”
1:00pm
At 1pm, I skipped Silver Sneakers class to join Lois in a meeting with the senior support services team, which provides a range of services to seniors in Saratoga County including rides to and from appointments, jobs around the house, and connecting seniors to other service providers such as CAPTAIN and Rebuilding Together Saratoga, regardless of whether the senior is a member of the Center or not. The meeting’s main topic of discussion was the need for volunteers in the Community Connections program, which pairs a senior in need with a community member who can help them with small jobs and transportation.
1:45pm
The meeting let out in time for me to catch the tail end of the genealogy class, which is led by Ruth Ann. “I eat, sleep and drink people, genealogies and history,” she told me. When I arrived, the group was exploring the life of Saratogian and alleged potato chip inventor George Crum. “We all descended from Noah,” Ruth Ann said. “Or Africa,” a man in the class countered. “Doesn’t matter,” Ruth Ann said. “We’re all related.”
2:15pm
After Genealogy there was some downtime, as the daily pool league is apparently more active on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I helped the staff bring in some food donations from Hannaford, which they set out on shelves for seniors attending the afternoon’s program to take. In the common room, I overheard a man named Barry talking to his phone: “OK, Google: What is the phone number of the Saratoga Springs Public Library?” In the connected computer room, a man was looking at photos of jets on a desktop.
3:15pm
Around 3:15, people started showing up for the much-anticipated performance by The Forgettable Four barbershop quartet. In the common area, I found out that most of the attendees come to the Center just for special events like this one (live music and dinners are especially popular), or trips to places like The Wild Center or Norman Rockwell Museum. In the performance room, lines of chairs were set up, with a buffet-style dinner along the back wall. A woman named Sue, a graduate of Russell Sage, called herself out for being a rule-breaker and having dessert before dinner. Richard, who was sitting behind us, told me he moved to Saratoga about seven years ago to retire, because of all the restaurants, museums and the state park. Up at the front of the room I met Joanie and Angie, who knew each other from work at Maple Avenue Middle School but hadn’t seen each other in more than a decade. I asked them what had been on my mind all day—was the Senior Center the source of any hot romances? “I’ve been coming here for 15 years and haven’t fallen in love with anyone,” Joanie said. Angie, who had just joined the Center that month wasn’t sure either. “But if you see my name written in the men’s room, let me know,” she said. “And scratch it out.”
4:00pm
After everyone had gotten their dinner, The Forgettable Four took the stage (or, rather, the front of the room), and Barry, who was in the third row, grabbed the binoculars that were around his neck. The quartet, made up of members of Schenectady’s Electric City Chorus sang tunes like “Under the Boardwalk” and “What a Day for a Daydream” a capella, and mixed in some jokes, like this one: A woman wanted to celebrate her 90th birthday, so she went across the street to Jim’s Bar. She told the bartender she was celebrating 90 years, and that she’d like a double scotch with just two drops of water. He obliged, and the woman next to her said, “Wow, 90! Can I buy your next drink?” “Sure!” the woman said. “I’ll have a double scotch with two drops of water.” The man on the other side of her overheard, and also wanted to buy her a drink—a double scotch with two drops of water. Finally, the bartender couldn’t contain his curiosity: “I get wanting a double scotch, but why two drops of water?” The woman replied: “At my age, you know how to hold your liquor, but your water is something different!”
—Natalie
Quote of the Week
“Osteoporosis is trying to make me invisible!”
–Senior Center member Angie, who has had to have many of her bracelets made smaller in recent years
Toga on TV
Saratoga was in the national spotlight not once, but twice this week: On Thursday night, PBS series This Old House aired the first of at least two episodes about a Dutch colonial Saratoga home dating back to 1864, with scenes filmed at Saratoga Race Course. The next episode, “Saratoga Springs: New Vision” will feature demolition of the house, which has been in Saratoga’s Williamson family for seven generations, as well as a trip to Roosevelt Baths & Spa, where This Old House’s Richard Trethewey will investigate “nature’s underground plumbing system.”
Then, on Friday afternoon, Sweet Mimi’s Chef Jeannette Liebers took part in The Talk’s “Food Face-off” which pits two successful small-town chefs against one another. In this week’s edition, Jeannette squared off against Chef Karie Myers of Jigger’s Diner, which is located just outside Providence, RI, in a battle of sweet versus savory pancakes. In the end, Karie’s Johnny Cakes (cornmeal pancakes topped with a sausage patty, hollandaise sauce and avocado) beat out Jeannette’s salted bacon pancakes (served with homemade caramel sauce, bacon and salted caramel mascarpone cream), though The Talk cohost Jerry O’Connell said this was the most difficult Food Face-off to date. Cohost Natalie Morales put sampling the pancakes this way: “Have we died and gone to heaven?”
What We’re Reading
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
By Stephanie Land
On May 5, best-selling author Stephanie Land will give a talk at Universal Preservation Hall about her moving memoir, Maid, which, since being released in 2019, inspired a hit Netflix miniseries of the same name. At the event, which is being presented by Business for Good and Wellspring, Stephanie will talk about her experience dealing with relationship abuse and the stigma associated with domestic violence. SLAH nabbed a couple of tickets before the free event sold out, so we're getting ourselves up to speed by reading Stephanie's heart-wrenching memoir. Missed your chance for tickets to her talk? Click here to be added to the waitlist.
What We’re Watching
If ever there was an excuse to watch reruns of The X-Files on Amazon Prime, this is it: Today at 11am, The X-Files Preservation Collection will open its doors in Wilton for the very first time at a grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony with special guest Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files. Read all about the museum and how it came to be here.
This Week in Saratoga Living After Hours
On Monday, we returned to a Game Time favorite: Saratoga-themed word plexers.
On Tuesday, we recapped the Saratoga Lions Club’s Night at the Brewseum tasting event.
And on Wednesday, we gave paid subscribers a first look at Rhea, the new ramen restaurant by Seneca owners Mike and Shelley Spain that opened to the public this past Thursday.
