EngAGE Featured in New York Times Article

Basil Alexander at an EngAGE annual senior Olympics, a multi-generational event that allows seniors to participate in competitions in wellness and the arts.

Click here to read the wonderful article by Tina Rosenberg in today’s New York Times. Here’s a favorite personal story from the article about Burbank Senior Artists Colony resident Sally Connors, a former junior high science teacher who was expecting to have a boring retirement:

But she had a daughter in Burbank, and one day they drove by the colony. “Why don’t you live there, Mom?” her daughter said.

 

“I’m not an artist,” Connors replied.

“But you could be,” her daughter said.

That was five years ago. Since then, she has taken every single class EngAGE offers in the colony. She’s been in every theater performance. She had dreamed as a teenager of singing with a band — now she sang “Sentimental Journey” and “Blue Moon” with a band at a Fourth of July celebration. She wrote a two-minute screenplay, cast it, directed it, produced it and showed it as part of a film festival in the building. She’s part of the theater group working with their British counterparts, and mentors high school kids. She’s studied drawing and acrylic, watercolor and oil painting.

At 78, she does yoga twice a week and works out with a personal trainer. “I would be a lot older than I am right now if I hadn’t found this,” she said. “Definitely older mentally. I have a friend I don’t call anymore. For her everything is wrong  — I can’t do this because I’m too old. That would have been me.”