Awhile back I posted a note to Facebook about how delighted I was that Jerry Yester, formerly with 1960s rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, was playing the piano at a restaurant where we were dining in Eureka Springs…which is near where Jerry now lives.
“Wow what a has-been,” responded one of my Facebook buddies. A cruel remark from someone who really isn’t. It made me realize how easy it is to buy in to assumptions embedded everywhere in our culture.
The band you once played in isn’t at the top of the charts anymore. And now you play piano for a small, but equally delighted audience near your home in the beautiful Ozark Mountains. Is this life any less deserving of admiration? I think not.
The noted blues legend Henry Gray is in his eighties now and still tours. But when he’s not, he’s happy to play piano at the Piccadilly Cafeteria in Baton Rouge, where I often had lunch. He does so because it gives him a much pleasure as it did the patrons.
The audience was very much in on the joke and applauded riotously when Jeerk performed their encore dance routine using walkers.
When we made not one, but two visits to Branson during our stay here in southern Missouri, there were several comments about the place that all “the old people go to,” where the shows were “schmaltzy.”
And yes we did attend a magic show, where the final illusion had as its big reveal a giant mock-up of the stone tablets with the ten commandments (and where the magician invited the audience back on Sunday morning to hear him preach.)
But we also saw a very talented young Swedish rock band, (who happened to be astonishingly good tap-dancers as well.)
Dave pauses for a photo-op before heading in for his chicken fried steak dinner.
And yes, we did eat chicken-fried steak at the restaurant with the giant rooster out front. But we also dined at a mountaintop restaurant on the stunningly beautiful campus of College of the Ozarks, on campus-raised pork medallions served over polenta made from cornmeal ground in the campus gristmill, and garnished with vegetables grown in the campus greenhouses.
Student operated gristmill on the campus of College of the Ozarks.
And yes, there were a lot of old people there. Old people who despite the need to use a cane, or a walker or a wheelchair—were out having the time of their lives.
As we slowly evolve into a society that embraces equality for all, and as important as I believe the current struggle for marriage equality to be, I’m reminded that ageism remains deeply imbedded deep in our culture, and that we must be ever vigilant in our quest to end it as well.