But first, some quotes "On Aging" from Forbes magazine, March 3, 2014, Page 112, THOUGHTS column:
"Age isn't important until you run out of it." - Malcolm Forbes
"Gray hair is God's graffiti." - Bill Cosby
"Old age comes at a bad time." - Sue Banducci
"To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am." - Bernard Baruch
"To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent - that is to triumph over old age." - Thomas Bailey Aldrich
"Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth." - W. Somerset Maugham
Pickles by Brian Crane
Far right panel reads: "Uh Huh. I never tell gramma she's fat
even if she asks."
'Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me' Review: Star Captivates In New Documentary
| by JAKE COYLE
Posted: Updated:
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For a documentary subject as forceful as Elaine Stritch, filmmakers may need to turn to nature — a typhoon might do it — to find anything approximate. Even the camera must warily keep its distance in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me." She warns its operator when he gets too close: "I don't know whether this is a skin commercial, or what."
Stritch captivates just walking down the street: greeting fans, chastising cabs, swaying to the music of the sidewalk. "I wish I could f---ing drive," she says at the opening of the documentary. "Then I'd really be a menace."
The strong types usually seen in movies— caped men with powers, action heroes with six-packs — have nothing on this long-legged, 89-year-old New York broad. Stritch, who has long eschewed pants of any sort, has the kind of ferocious voice that old age can't quiet.
Chiemi Karasawa's "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me" is an irresistibly entertaining documentary that captures Stritch during what she unsentimentally calls "almost post-time." After seven decades performing in New York — on Broadway, in countless cabaret nights at the Cafe Carlyle — Stritch's enormous energy has been knocked by the increasing years, diabetes, and surgeries on her hip and eyes.
But "Shoot Me," made over the last few years, is a document not of Stritch's dwindling, but of her feisty persistence. As the film shows, she has trouble remembering lyrics and sometimes struggles to get out of bed. At home and during rehearsals, it chronicles her grand exit from New York, her home since she was 17, and her decision to retire back to Michigan.
Stritch is a paragon of old-fashioned show business: A brassy and blunt survivor of New York theater life. More than a decade ago, the New York Landmarks Conservancy named her a living landmark.
"I like the courage of age," she declares.
Karasawa shoots Stritch in intimate, unglamorous situations, most notably one night in a hospital bed with curlers in her hair, chastened by a health scare: "It's time for me," she says. "I can feel it everywhere."
A theatrical being down to her soul, Stritch is often a fascinating companion, throwing off such candid reflections, joining an elevator operator in song, or miming a limp to avoid a parking ticket in the Hamptons. But she is also, unquestionably, a handful.
Her needs are many, which her musical director Rob Bowman patiently tries to meet. She repeatedly criticizes the documentary's very own cameraman, ordering him to more aggressively shoot her unpacking a box of her cherished English muffins.
The question of how taxing it is to work with Stritch is unavoidable. D.A. Pennebaker's 1970 documentary on the cast recording of "Company" showed her sparring with Stephen Sondheim. In "Shoot Me," we glimpse a letter from Woody Allen before they shot the film "September," warning her of overly dramatic behavior and requesting that she "keep the questioning to a rock-bottom minimum." Tina Fey, who cast Stritch in a recurring role on her sitcom "30 Rock," says: "It's a bear. And it's always worth it."
Stritch is worth it not just because of her talent, but for her inspiring perseverance. She's a born entertainer, and a spirited remnant of a disappeared New York. She sings from "Follies":
"Good times and bum times, I've seen them all/ And, my dear, I'm still here."
"Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me," a Sundance Selects release, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America. Contains expletives. Running time: 82 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
___
Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jake_coyle
JOURNAL REPORTS
Estelle Parsons on Acting—and Aging
The Oscar Winner Is Back on Broadway in a New Role That's Primed to Start With a Bang
March 30, 2014 5:05 p.m. ET
Estelle Parsons: 'Now I'm interested in challenges. Like this woman.' Teresa Wood
A seemingly crazed 79-year-old woman named Alexandra arms herself with a Molotov cocktail, barricades herself in her apartment, and threatens to set all ablaze—unless her adult children allow her to remain living in her Brooklyn brownstone.
Journal Report
- Insights from The Experts
- Read more at WSJ.com/Encore
More in Encore: The New Retirement
That is how Cleveland-based playwright Eric Coble sets in motion "The Velocity of Autumn," which begins previews April 1 at the Booth Theater in New York. Starring Academy Award winner Estelle Parsons, age 86, the play—a candid study on growing up and growing old—had its debut last fall in Washington.
"There are a lot of coming-of-age stories, but there's not a lot about more extreme old age," Mr. Coble says. "It's a realistic drama of sorts [with a] theatrical character. But it seems to be touching people."
We asked Ms. Parsons and Mr. Coble to talk about the fears exposed in the play—and about their craft. Here are edited excerpts.
Freedom and Roots
WSJ: Why did you choose to explore this specific moment in a person's late 70s?
MR. COBLE: What was really interesting to me was the whole idea of freedom and roots at different points in one's life. That's a really different experience when one is in one's early 20s, obviously, than when one is in one's late 70s.
I was very intrigued with the idea of this woman who had always spent her life being free. Now she's in this Brooklyn brownstone. She's really committed to staying there. That is part of who she is. But now the world and her family and even her own body, to some degree, are telling her it's time to move on. It's time to let go. You can't be who you have spent all this time building up to being.
She is really violently opposed to that, and I thought that was a really interesting phenomenon to explore in later life.
MS. PARSONS: When you get old, you don't have anything to run to. When you're younger and you're free, you have places to go. When you accomplish everything with your life that you've been running to, then you don't want to run anymore. So that's where she is now.
WSJ: What was it about Alexandra's character that resonated with you?
MS. PARSONS: When I started to read it, the idea of this woman being willing to blow herself up is great. I read all these plays about old women of varying ages, up to 115, and I sometimes play them, but they usually aren't that dynamic.
She's really a theatrical entity. That's always exciting because we've been going through such a trough of naturalism in the theater that it's wonderful to have a character who is theatrical in that sense—not in a diva theatrical sense, but just a big person.
It's great to be able to expand that way, particularly when you're older and ready to expand.
WSJ: What are you learning now about the craft of acting?
MS. PARSONS: It always used to be, well, I'll take this part because I'll get seen and it will lead to better parts. And then, when I got the Academy Award I called up [director] Arthur Penn and I was sobbing. It was like that was the end of my life once I'd had that kind of recognition.
I said, "What do I do now, Arthur?" And he said, "You keep on doing what you're doing." And that just seemed to me an impossible thing. I didn't want to keep on doing what I was doing.
Now, rather than trying to move forward and get a role that's going to get me some recognition, I'm interested in challenges. Like this woman. I've also been working on a female "King Lear." I'm looking now for artistic challenges much more consciously because I hate to have a repeated performance.
WSJ: Mr. Coble, though you're in your mid-40s, you're drawn to telling stories about older characters. Was writing this character difficult for you?
MR. COBLE: I come at writing from an acting point of view. My first background was really as an actor. For me, it always comes down to: What does the character want? And to making that "want" as strong as possible.
In this case, this was a woman who wanted to stay in her own home. There were layers on top of that in terms of age and where she was in her life. But her desire to be independent and to make a stand against people who she felt were taking away her freedom, that's what I was tapping into.
Can 'Aging' Sell?
WSJ: You're about to start previews on Broadway. Is a story about aging commercial?
MS. PARSONS: Old people are a hot topic now because people are living so much longer, including myself, than they ever expected to. And what is that other phase of life going to be?
It used to be kind of a no-no [on Broadway], and then along came "Driving Miss Daisy." I went to that and thought: Who's going to go to that besides old people? And it turns out—and I think it's true with this play, too—that the people who are interested in a play about older people are the younger people who are wondering about older people. When I went to "Driving Miss Daisy," almost all the audience was young. They were really moved by it because they had grandparents.
It's a part of life that people don't know much about. But [the play] does open a conversation for people. They would come backstage and say, "Oh, I've really got to talk to my mother. I've really got to try to have a conversation about this."
WSJ: There's a great line in the play when Alexandra says to her son: "Do you have any idea what it's like to know the only thing you have left to offer is to stay out of the way?"
MS. PARSONS: Oh, yeah. That is so true and so devastating. You do have that realization. But whoever says that, you know?
A-HED
In China, Retirees Dancing in Public Raise a Ruckus
As More Groups Boogie in Public Places, Neighbors Can't Take Noise; 'Aids Digestion'
Updated March 26, 2014 10:41 p.m. ET
In China, the latest group threatened with being banned isn't a spiritual movement or a democracy party: It's older people dancing together in public.
WUHAN, China—Months after "Auntie" Su and a dozen or two retirees began squeezing into a small outdoor square every night to dance to music supplied by a brick-sized portable music player, residents of the tony Hankou Center Gardens apartment complex began to complain about the noise. When that didn't deter the dancers, they started to hurl abuse.
Auntie Su's dancers say they have been pelted with water, sand, coins and, once, feces. "One resident threatened me, saying, 'If you continue to dance, I'll throw a knife at you!" says the 79-year-old. "I said, 'I'll keep dancing even if you shoot at me with a gun!'"
In China, there is a new group stirring up controversy: middle-aged and retired city dwellers dancing together in parks and squares.
Residents in nearby buildings say the noise makes relaxing after work hard and, worse, disturbs their children's studies. Participants say the dancing keeps them active and healthy.
"Are we just supposed to sit around and wait for death?" says Ms. Su, who credits dancing with helping her recover from throat cancer surgery. Ms. Su, who other dancers call "Auntie," wanted to be identified only by her surname. "This is a national issue now," she says.
Efforts to regulate public dancing are under way in several cities to quell the outcry from apartment-dwellers, many of them first-time homeowners.
The southern city of Guangzhou has announced plans to designate "silent zones" in park areas abutting schools, hospitals and residential buildings, with fines as high as $160 for violators. In prosperous Hangzhou, residential committees have begun a systematic noise-monitoring program, using decibel meters, in areas where dancers congregate.
In the central city of Liuyang, dancing groups in one community were compelled by the local residential committee to sign on to a "public dancing communiqué" that limits dancing to after 7 a.m. or before 8:30 p.m.
'Auntie' Su
"Dancing in and of itself is nothing to criticize," the Communist Party-run Guangzhou Daily said in commentary in November. "But as soon as 'group dancing' becomes 'public nuisance dancing' that infringes on the right of others to relax, it's another matter."
Moves to control public dancing threaten a tradition that has wide appeal among members of the country's rapidly growing elderly population. According to a recent report by China Central Television, the state broadcaster, as many as 100 million people, mostly women in their 50s and 60s, now take part.
"It's not only good for physical health, but also spiritual and mental well-being," says Tang Keming, a self-educated public dancing choreographer who helped organize a 1,200-person group that danced during the torch relay for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. "It's not just about dance…We use dancing to promote ideas about caring for children and the elderly."
The dances take place in venues ranging from parks and public squares to parking lots. They take a variety of forms, from traditional folk dances involving silk fans and drumming to improvised routines set to patriotic songs, saccharine pop and sanitized rap.
Public dancing caught on in Chinese cities in the 1980s and '90s partly as a way to stay healthy after the state health-care system atrophied under market reforms, says Caroline Chen, an environmental planning expert at the University of California, Berkeley. She says the dancing also helps older Chinese recover a sense of Mao-era collectivism at a time when old neighborhoods have been razed and replaced with high-rise living.
The problem, according to Ms. Chen, is that public dancing, for all its benefits, conflicts with an increasing desire among many for a quieter, less chaotic urban lifestyle as public spaces are being squeezed by development. "The exuberance of this communal culture is being hushed and the modern idea of what a city should be is taking its place," she says.
In the town of Changping, dancers say they took to a basketball court after complaints from neighbors drove them out of an apartment complex. In August, a man enraged by the noise emerged from his house near the court with a shotgun that he fired into the air, and later set three Tibetan mastiffs on the crowd, according to dancers and state media reports.
"One group would leave and another would come," the man, surnamed Shi, told China Central Television in a jailhouse interview. "I have dogs, and they would bark incessantly. I couldn't sleep."
An official with the Changping District People's Court said the man was found guilty of illegal possession of firearms in November and sentenced to six months in jail. The court wouldn't provide the man's full name. Efforts to reach him through the court and a neighbor weren't successful.
The basketball court still bears instructions spray-painted on the concrete by the dancers—"step together, turn left."
A desire for peaceful modern living is what led many residents of Hankou Center Gardens to pay extra for units on the inside of the complex, which overlook a tree-lined square.
"This was supposed to be the quietest apartment," says Peng Ji, 40 years old, whose third-floor unit overlooks the square. He says his parents, who suffer stomach and nerve problems, moved out because they couldn't stand the nightly dance parties. He also says his 7-year-old daughter has trouble studying and that he can't leave his windows open in the summer.
Women dance at a park in Beijing. Public dancing is popular in China. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Dancers typically gather in the morning around 6 a.m. and in the evening after 7 p.m. for about an hour. Residents say they took their complaints to the apartment management office and asked that the dancers start earlier in the evening, to no avail.
"We like to dance after dinner. It aids digestion," says Ms. Su.
"We're trying to reach a consensus, but the old folks are stubborn," says Mr. Sun, the head of property management at Hankou Center Gardens, who declined to give his full name.
One recent evening, dancers had turned the radio down low, but the sound of the Tibetan love song they had chosen was still clearly audible inside a nearby second-story apartment, even with the windows closed.
"It's usually even louder than this," said the apartment's tenant, Ms. Wang, a middle-school art teacher who would only give her last name.
"At one point, they told me to wear ear plugs. I'm supposed to wear ear plugs inside my own house? Seriously?"
The dancing dilemma isn't likely to go away. By 2020, according to state media, people 60 years or older will make up roughly 16% of China's population at 240 million or so.
—Lilian Lin contributed to this article.
Write to Josh Chin at josh.chin@wsj.com
Apr 2, 2014
CULTURE
Fed-Up Chinese Residents Blast Dancing Grannies With $42,000 Sound System
- Local residents dance next to the Yangtze River in Badong, Hubei province.
- Reuters
Where verbal abuse, sand and buckets of human waste have failed, a warning message blasted over and over again through a $41,900 speaker system appears to have succeeded.
Aggrieved residents in the coastal Chinese city of Wenzhou declared victory this week after successfully routing packs of public dancers that had been gathering in a nearby park, according to state media reports.
As WSJ detailed last week, dancing in public — a form of exercise that boasts roughly 100 million adherents in China, most of them middle-aged and retired women — hasbecome a flashpoint in the country’s drive to urbanize.
Squeezed by development, China’s happy-footed seniors have been forced to take their dancing to parks, public squares, parking lots and other areas where sound from their portable sound-systems often carry over into the homes of nearby residents.
Some beleaguered residents have decided to fight noise with noise. At Wenzhou’s Xin Guoguang apartment complex this weekend, 600 residents launched a tit-for-tat “counterattack,” pooling 260,000 yuan to buy six professional-quality speakers. According to the Communist Party-run Hangzhou Daily, they set the speakers up on a fourth-floor balcony across from the park and used them to blast an ear-splitting message — “Please respect the noise pollution laws of the People’s Republic of China and immediately cease illegal activities!” — over and over again for hours at a time.
The newspaper quoted residents complaining that hundreds of dancers filled the park from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., broadcasting music and disturbing their children’s studies. They tried many times asking the dancers to turn down the volume, they said, to no avail.
The head of the local residents committee, a man surnamed Wu, told the Hangzhou Daily that noise from the dancers had also affected the value of apartments in the area. “Everyone knows how loud it is here,” he said.
On Monday, representatives of the local administrative, environmental protection, park management and other bureaus responded to the speaker protest by convening a “noise in public squares” coordinating committee, according to a report posted on the website of the official Xinhua news agency. The committee agreed to set up a working group that would patrol the park. The residents have since dismantled the speaker system.
A day later, district officials said groups would have to register to hold activities in the park. They also said they would display decibel levels on electronic screens in the park to help dancers monitor their own noise levels.
“Some people might think it’s a lot of money to spend, but compared to the invisible losses we’ve suffered, it’s nothing,” Mr. Wu told Hangzhou Daily.
The Wenzhou group isn’t the first to prevail over public dancers by taking extreme measures. In November, a Beijing man successfully chased away a local dancing group by firing a shotgun in the air and unleashing three Tibetan mastiffs. He was later sentenced to six months in jail, but a neighbor of his suggested to China Real Time the sacrifice may have been worth it. “I’m glad they’re gone,” he said.
Elsewhere, though, the battle continues to rage on. In one residential complex in the central city of Wuhan, irritated apartment owners have been unable to deter local dancers despite hurling insults, threats and — in a moment of desperation – feces.
– Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin
Follow @ChinaRealTime
JOURNAL REPORTS
Estelle Parsons on Acting—and Aging
The Oscar Winner Is Back on Broadway in a New Role That's Primed to Start With a Bang
A-HED
At University of Virginia, 70-Year-Old Undergrad Cheers Cavaliers in March Madness
At 70, Jerry Reid Cheers His Beloved Basketball Team and Looks to Graduation
Updated March 28, 2014 10:49 a.m. ET
Jerry Reid, right, is a fixture in the student section at basketball games. Dillon Harding/Virginia Athletics
Jerry Reid will graduate from the University of Virginia this spring with a résumé that would attract the attention of any potential employer.
Under extracurricular activities, Mr. Reid lists membership in a campus literary society, brotherhood in a fraternity and two intramural flag-football championships. His academic accomplishments include a thesis reinterpreting Stonewall Jackson's legacy. He counts rooting for Virginia's men's basketball team as his primary hobby.
Are you a March Madness basketball fanatic? Do you bow at the altar of the NCAA Mens Basketball Tournament? If the answer is no, Simon Constable explains why you should care.
Then there is his work experience: 45 years as a conveyor-belt salesman.
Mr. Reid is a senior who happens to be a senior citizen. "I'm having a major attack of senioritis," said the 70-year-old undergraduate.
In 2011, at age 66, Mr. Reid enrolled in Virginia's college of continuing studies, its equivalent of night school for adult students. Mr. Reid, who had never graduated from college, was still chasing his bachelor's degree. Now, as a septuagenarian, he's on track to walk the lawn in May as a college graduate.
But he seldom acts his age. Since enrolling in college, Mr. Reid has immersed himself in campus life, most visibly as a fixture in the student section at basketball games of the Cavaliers, who play Friday in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA men's tournament to continue their best season in years. Mr. Reid is the one in the orange wig and hard hat. "You can't miss Jerry," said Virginia Dean Billy Cannaday.
Jerry Reid in his rooting attire
Mr. Reid, who is older than not only 44-year-old Virginia basketball coach Tony Bennett but also his three predecessors, was previously a season-ticket holder to Cavaliers games. He just has a better seat these days. As a devout member of the "Hoo Crew," the student section alongside the court, Mr. Reid rarely misses a game. Last year, after one momentous win, he was part of a student mob that stormed the court in celebration.
Wearing his wig over white hair, plus strips of eye black underneath his thin-rimmed glasses, Mr. Reid arrives as early as four hours before tip-off to secure his spot in the student section. He prefers the area behind the visiting team's bench reserved for the "most dedicated members of Hoo Crew," said 21-year-old Virginia senior Christine Pajewski.
It is also prime real estate for heckling. Mr. Reid stays on his feet throughout games, powered by a pregame hot chocolate with extra whipped cream, cheering the Cavaliers while politely jeering the referees. Even his younger classmates are impressed by his endurance. "He's one of the most passionate fans there is," said Hoo Crew President Haider Arshad, 21.
Mr. Reid doesn't let the team's road trips stop him from dressing up. For away games, he sometimes takes his wife, Susan, to a local bar called The Virginian. As a superstition, he makes sure he brings extra wigs and spare headgear, including a sparkly fedora. "If I can't be at the game," he says, "I'm still repping."
Mr. Reid was a Virginia fan decades before he was a Virginia student. In the 1960s, even though he wasn't in college, Mr. Reid regularly made the hourlong drive from Richmond to Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia, to hang out with buddies at The Virginian. In his tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, Mr. Reid used to smoke a pipe and party with the Chi Phi fraternity, where he locked eyes in 1966 with the woman who would become his wife.
Once they married in 1969, Mr. Reid finally went to college, but he didn't last long. A "bearded and long-haired hippie," he says, Mr. Reid dropped out after two classes and instead began a career in industrial sales, along with sports writing and car racing, among other occupations.
On a business trip in 2009, Mr. Reid stopped by Virginia's campus, as he did whenever he was nearby. This time, Mr. Reid recalls, he sat alone in a garden and was overtaken by a magical feeling he can't quite describe. "At that moment," he says, "I had the resolve to get a degree from the University of Virginia."
Mr. Reid came home and told Mrs. Reid about his epiphany. "I didn't really see our lives going in that direction," she says. Yet she immediately supported his wild dream. Her only stipulations: She wouldn't live in a dormitory room, and he couldn't pledge a fraternity.
With her blessing, after a stint at local community college, he transferred to Virginia in 2011 and embraced his long-lost college experience, majoring in interdisciplinary studies. In addition to his Hoo Crew eminence, plus roles on intramural flag-football and softball teams, Mr. Reid was initiated into the Chi Phi fraternity without pledging. He and his wife live in a house about 15 minutes from campus.
He also joined the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, a club that once included Edgar Allan Poe and still meets every Friday night until the wee hours of the morning. "Jerry's there for nearly every meeting for nearly all the time," said Jefferson Society president McCulloch Cline.
While the students keep him young, Mr. Reid hasn't abandoned the oldies. Last week, on a night between Virginia's wins in the NCAA tournament, Mr. and Mrs. Reid attended a Jefferson Society black-tie bash and danced to the tunes of Doug Clark's Hot Nuts, a Motown band that jammed at Virginia parties in the 1960s and came recommended by Mr. Reid. He was the one who requested the band play "Shout," the song featured in the toga party in "Animal House."
"I don't think retirement was really for us," Mrs. Reid says.
After graduation, Mr. Reid said this week while puffing on a cigar, he plans to take some time to write a memoir. Then he might go back to school—again. Eventually, he has decided, he would like to work in student affairs at his alma mater. "I think I know what I want to be when I grow up," he said.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
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