EngAGE’s improv teacher, Jo McLachlan, and Peggy Musetti and Catherine McLachlan, present a Senior TV commercial on YouTube. Senior TV brings you comedy sketches based on suggestions from residents of various senior communities, starring some first time actors, ages 60-90, having the time of their lives! Thanks to the Kenneth A. Picerne Foundation for funding Jo’s work with EngAGE.
E-mail subscribers: click on the title of the post to view the video on our blog. (2:09)
Please join us!
On March 20th, EngAGE Founder and Executive Director Tim Carpenter gave the Annual Malford Thewlis Lecture on Gerontology and Geriatrics at the Rhode Island Geriatric Education Center (RIGEC) at the University of Rhode Island. Click here to learn more about the lecture in which Tim discussed the cutting edge developments in programming toward senior health, creativity and civic engagement. Click here to watch “Transforming Community: The Art of Active Aging” online (1:18).
Mason Currey has written a book about the daily routines of writers, artists, and other creative people. What did he learn?
“One’s daily routine is a highly idiosyncratic collection of compromises, neuroses, and superstitions, built up through trial and error and subject to a variety of external conditions. That said, there are certain behaviors that cropped up over and over 
again in my research.”
He’s now writing a series of articles on Slate in which he shares some of his discoveries. Entry 1: How novelists, painters, philosophers, and filmmakers find time each day to do their work. Read more here.
“Narrated by Garrison Keillor, Let There Be Light tells the story of a great artist producing his last great work of art. . . . Six years in the making, the film follows grand master Rowan LeCompte who, at 84, is working on his last window for Washington National Cathedral. Rowan produced his first window for this building when he was sixteen.” Learn more about the film here and more about the artist here.
As a young man, Joe Blaustein, now 88, left the unsatisfying world of advertising to paint. He has been teaching art for over fifty years, currently through UCLA Extension. He is a co-founder of FIG (First Independent Gallery) at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, CA, where you can see his work in a group show through May 18th.
As a teacher, he has inspired many students, most notably Silvia Gallini, the director of “The Dog and the Duck,” a feature-length documentary being made about this talented and committed artist. Click here to see a trailer. [Hat tip to Susan Price for this story.]
“Worth Repeating” is a weekly feature on the EngAGE Blog that will bring you previous posts that we think are still timely, interesting, or just plain fun! From 5/6/12:
Two stories of mature college graduates:
CINCINNATI – “Clell Elliott knows what he’s talking about when he tells anyone wanting a college degree to never give up. The 89-year-old Ohio man will graduate Saturday [5/5] from a university in southern Ohio where he began as a freshman more than 50 years ago…He was the only one of a dozen siblings to attend high school, but his sharecropper father insisted he drop out as a sophomore in 1938 to work the 201-acre farm in Carter County where the family grew tobacco, corn and other crops…Elliot’s three children – ages 69, 62 and 59 – will be there to see their father graduate. ‘We’re very proud of him,’ said son Terry Elliott, also of Franklin Furnace. “It’s awesome to be 59 and preparing to attend your father’s college graduation.’” Read more here.
LISMORE, Australia — “An Australian who got into the Guinness World Records by getting a degree in law at 91 has done it again with a master’s at 97…Allan Stewart was to receive his degree in clinical science Friday [5/4] from Southern Cross University, The Australian reported. It is his fourth degree, achieved 72 years after he graduated from the University of Sydney with a degree in dentistry.” Read more here.
