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The Gazette, May 29, 1999
Never too old to have a good time
by An Dieu Pham
A room at Sun Youth headquarters on St-Urbain St. vibrates with the upbeat music of the Viennese waltz, the Samba, and even the electric slide. Kay Spears, soon to be 87, is out there on the dance floor.
She suffered a mild heart attack and pneumonia three weeks ago. She had to miss the last two classes, but today she’s back - albeit moving a bit more slowly.
“I’m getting old, you know,” says Spears while taking a short break.
Welcome to the line-dancing class on a Thursday afternoon at Sun Youth’s Seniors Club.
The class is a small one, with only 10 participants.
“It’s a bit tiring,” one member admits. Another tediously jots down the steps on paper, all the while dancing - because she has a visual memory, she says. As for Spears, she says it’s a bit hard to get back after missing two classes.
Line dancing is one of the Seniors Club’s daily activities at Sun Youth. On Wednesday, members can shuffle up some card games in the morning and then gather for a bingo game in the afternoon.
The bingo game is the biggest draw for club members, at times bringing together about 50 people. On Mondays, members can move to the ancient art of tai chi, while Tuesdays are for working fingers, needle and thread in the sewing workshop.
The Sun Youth Seniors Club, which has been around for 15 years, counts about 170 members. The only criteria for membership is to be 55 years young or older, says Mary Murphy, the club’s president since seven years. What makes the club a great place is that “it’s like a family,” she says.
Pauline Arcand, 65, adds that “everybody knows everybody around here.” Arcand says she has been taking the dance classes since October to occupy herself and to get some exercise.
The club funds all the activities itself through bi-annual bazaars, bingo games and other such events. Membership is $5 a year, and each activity has an additional small fee; line dancing, for example, costs $2 per session. The weekly Friday trips, which begin in May and run through summer to mid-November, usually have a $10-$20 charge per person. Sun Youth helps the club by providing rooms, offices, and phones.
Tom Stewart, the club’s director, in charge of coordinating the trips and activities, says the purpose of the Seniors Club is “to provide facilities for seniors to have social activities and social interactions. They come to meet friends and the trips are opportunities to get around because most live alone and haven’t had the chance to travel outside Montreal, he explains.
Back on the dance floor, 72-year-old Frances Desroches, a 10-year club member, says that she doesn’t participate in the club’s other daily activities. But she has never missed a Friday trip for the last eight years and has been looking forward to the Ottawa tulip festival trip earlier this month.
“I like it here,” she said. “We have lots of fun on the trips.” Desroches says that she tried the Tai Chi classes a while ago but “I thought it was too slow.” Dancing is more her speed.
Being an avid dancer who often goes dancing on weekends, Desroches explains that it was on one of those occasions that she became acquainted with Maurice Harvey and had asked him to come teach the line-dancing class at Sun Youth.
Harvey, who says he isn’t a professional dance instructor but has been dancing since the 1960s, leads the class through some 12 line dances, with partner Pierrette Lemieux.
“They learn fast!” Harvey says proudly of his dance students.
This is the last session of line dancing - at least, until September. Today all the students strut through all the dances they’ve learned during the last seven months. The 12 choreographed pieces unfold with almost no glitch, in near perfect unison. But what’s most apparent is that these dancers are having fun.
“I’m no dancer; I make a lot of mistakes,” Spears says modestly. “But I enjoy it. It’s fun. It’s a nice group of people.”
Spears and her friend and fellow dance-class student, Anna Schworm, whom she first met 10 years ago at this club, were planning to share a table at the bazaar in early May. Desroches and Murphy were going to be there as well.
Murphy and a few club members had been sorting through bags and bags of socks that had been donated to them. Their tedious task was to regroup the socks by colour, making three-pair packages to be sold at $1 each at the bazaar.
“We finally finished the job this morning,” Murphy said. Turning to a fellow club member, she added good-naturedly: “I can’t stand to see those socks anymore!”
Though much of the money they raise at events like the bazaars are used to fund their club activities, the Seniors Club has, in the past, made various donations to Sun Youth.
Some of the club’s contributions included buying the new water fountain in Sun Youth’s building, and pitching in $6,000 to replace the seats for two Sun Youth buses.
After the bazaar, there was the Ottawa trip to look forward to. The Mother’s and Father’s Day dinner event to prepare for. And probably more trips and activities after that. As Stewart says, in his seven years of work in the Seniors Club, “there’s never been a dull moment here.”
Sun Youth also holds a Seniors Day on the first Monday of every month, when seniors can pick up food baskets. Other services include a food-delivery program available for people who can’t leave their home and a medication program which helps seniors pay up to 50 per cent of their prescription drugs.
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