When I was 8 years old, my second grade music teacher took our class on a school outing to sing for the residents of a senior center in our neighborhood. It was the kind of field trip meant to get us out of the classroom for a change of scenery and bring a little joy to the hearts of anonymous strangers, but I kind of resented being taken out of our usual milk-and-a-cafeteria-lunch routine and being made to look 70 years into the future at the milk and cafeteria lunches waiting for us there.
That might seem like a harsh judgment for a second-grader to make, but many of our elementary school projects and field trips seemed to stress the lesson that life is a creepy and morbid introduction to misfortune and death. Whether we were paying a visit to our local crematorium (fifth grade), prison (sixth) or being made to write out our last will and testament (seventh), an activity premised on the idea that my relatives would begin squabbling over my LEGOs five minutes after I was struck down walking my patrol route.
What now makes me uncomfortable when thinking about our recital at the senior home is how the residents felt about our visit. No concessions were made to the tastes or familiarities of the audience.
And while it might have been asking a bit much to try and teach a bunch of jittery 8-year-olds the tunes to Little Brown Jug"" or ""I Got Rhythm,"" we might have chosen better than the lightly scolding ""Under the Sea,"" which most of the residents would only have been familiar with if they had taken their great-grandchildren to a matinee.
When sung by a troop of fresh-faced grade schoolers to a crowd of octogenarians who don't know the ""Little Mermaid,"" the song's ""everything is hunky-dory right where you are"" lessons sound a bit too convenient:
""The seaweed is always greener / in somebody else's lake.""
[""You are free to wander within the gated courtyard
area between noon and 2 p.m. on weekdays.""]
""You dream about going up there ...""
[""Umm ... Heaven?""]
""...but that is a big mistake.""
[""God is dead.""]
""Under the sea! Under the sea!""
The thought that the highlight of my day, 60 years from now, might be a group of distracted children belting out a tune from the 26th straight-to-DVD ""Lion King"" sequel makes me fantasize about being ground up for snack food, a la ""Soylent Green."" Speaking with friends convinced me that more than a few people have similar fears.
When asked where they see themselves at 50, a significant number of people I know will respond, ""Dead."" Generally, these aren't hard-partying or self-destructive people, the kind you'd imagine succumbing to a heroin overdose or plunging to their deaths during a freefall climb. Their belief that chance will intervene and save them the indignity of old age, then, is a kind of incredibly gloomy optimism. Statistically speaking, maybe one or two can count on a freak act of nature or a mysterious disappearance, but unless there's an asteroid or an army of the undead coming our way, some of them might want to come up with a Plan B sometime in the next 30 years.
Disney sing-a-longs aside, I'm hoping that I'll still be enjoying myself 50 years from now. And I think my odds look okay. A quick perusal of a magazine rack might give one the idea that sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll are the exclusive domain of the young, but it's easy enough to find old people still enjoying these things, whether rock 'n' roll (The Rolling Stones), sex (Sue Johanson) or drugs (The Stones, again). Throw in Woody Allen's youthful neuroses, and there's no reason we can't all be living it up as dysfunctional, drug-addled sex addicts well into our 80s. Under the sea.
Reserve a spot at the shuffleboard table by e-mailing Matt at hunziker@wisc.edu.
