So many choices and so little time at the Preserve Potluck and Sundae Funday.
Ann Lange
Tom and Pam Frame hosted the Preserve Potluck and Sundae Funday on Aug. 17, at the SaddleBrooke One activity ice cream parlor. The lively and friendly crowd was food- and fun-bound, and they were eager to beat the heat with a treat from the frozen section. It was a real love-in food fest, with mounds and pounds of temptations just waiting to happen.
Knowing that activities chair, Bonnie Barazani, would use the intermission before the dessert fest for some kind of mind game, we had been loading up on whatever kind of liquid courage we had brought along to prepare for whatever brain-baffling, bollixing bunch of balderdash bunk she might have in mind this time.
The mild-altering experience turned out to be “Old Geezer-Teaser Trivia” that put to use every brain cell that we might have left from the ’60s to test our memory of that era. Our grandkids tease us that we are old cavepeople from the Stone Age, but someday, when they are older, and we are even older, we’ll explain that it was really the “Stoned Age” and how life has changed. Now we get gall-stoned and kidney-stoned, use our neti pot, joints inhibit us, doctors make us take drugs, we go to a different kind of rehab, we are not young hippies—we are old with new hippies, and the difference in hair—we’re not even going there.
Each of three teams was given an identical set of note cards containing a field day farrago of possible answers. Following a question, team members hashed it out as they weeded through the cards, and the first team to hold up the card with the correct answer scored a point.
Some questions blew our minds and brought back memories of the three August days at Woodstock fifty years ago. All the old burnt-out BrookeStock bongers remembered that the last song sung by Joan Baez at the 1969 music fest was “We Will Overcome,” but some of the questions put the faded flower children in their proper place when they mixed up some of our previous presidents, confused Lassie with Old Yeller, and hallucinated about other historical or hysterical events.
The winning team took in a whopping 11 points, and scorekeeper Fred Barazani had enough toes left over to tally the points of the other two teams, who played like dead heads and dope heads. Team Reefers were really digging their far-out score, team Ragweeds really took a hit, and team Roaches, well, they should just crawl back where they came from and try to be out-of-sight.The Old Stoners were really rockin’ it, banging out answers so fast and furious that Bonnie finally told the Old Tokers to pipe down and that they were even worse than her middle-school students. As an added insult, she announced she would just save the same questions and cards for next year since we probably wouldn’t remember any of it anyway.
We were proud that our enthusiasm can still get high, and besides, we were just practicing screaming for ice cream. Old Woody Geezers need a lot of soft food, so we changed the program from brain tease to brain freeze. Just a spoonful of hot fudge helps the ice cream go down, and choices were vanilla, chocolate, or cookies ‘n cream. It was a yumdinger evening of peace, love, and silky-smooth creamery-lisciousness, and we don’t mind saying, for the record, that we inhaled!
Thanks to Tom and Pam for organizing an evening that reminded us that food, fun, and friendship are our drugs of choice here at the Preserve and that laughter is magical and medicinal. New members of the commune, Clark and Connie Simonds, were introduced, and they quickly figured out the scoop—party life of the retired here is just like college, only you go to bed earlier. Daddy-O Fred, having finally scored after all these years, left early so that he could put his dog in bed by eight and to continue trying to be the person Paddy thinks he is. We give thanks for our over-abundant lives, and as we loosen our belts, we remember the many in our neighboring communities who continue to have to tighten theirs. Let us prove that our values are set in stone by making our charitable contributions this month as generous as the heaping dishes we shared this night.