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” It was named an official selection at ten film festivals and won several film awards, including the prestigious CINE Golden Eagle Award for Excellence, an award that once honored such first-time filmmakers as Ron Howard, Ken Burns, and Steven Spielberg. More important to Alidra, Democracy Matters, a nonpartisan student organization founded to counteract political apathy on college campuses, uses it to teach students about the importance of political engagement and campaign finance reform. “Granny D comes across exactly as she is—very down to earth, very serious, and an ordinary citizen who just said, I’ve had it and I want to do something about it. I can’t tell you how many students have told me they were brought to tears by the film,” said Joan Mandle, the group’s executive director.

After a period of traveling to showings of the film, Alidra moved to Portland in late 2008. At age sixty-seven, with little money left but a film to her name, she began learning a promising new therapeutic treatment for one of the most difficult psychological diagnoses, and she began to kick around ideas for a new film. But she has promised herself she won’t make another documentary alone.

While completing the work was sweet, perhaps no praise could be more satisfying than the one offered by Dennis Burke, who doubted Alidra so thoroughly when she began work on the documentary on Granny D. “Her film is the historical document on Doris. Alidra went to the kinds of lengths that a historian would to find the right clips. She could show it to any of Ken Burns’s people and they would take her seriously as a filmmaker. It’s a great film. I don’t know what her compulsion was to do it, but I’m glad she did. I think everyone should have a compulsion that drives them almost to bankruptcy or suicide, and they should all come out of it happily. That’s the story line of every great life.”

THOMAS DWYER

Mission Impossible

“I’m breaking loose from tradition

and laws of the tribe.”

Thomas Dwyer was finally embarking on a mission of his own when, after a long government career overseas in U.S. intelligence, he took up dance in his fifties. He gave himself the unexpected assignment one day when he saw his brother perform at a Washington, D.C., elementary school with an elder dance group known as the Dancers of the Third Age. “I had an awakening. I couldn’t believe how amazed these kids were to see seniors running around and dancing these dances, many of them abstract, onstage. The seniors had ability and vitality. I told myself, This is powerful stuff. It’s important to show kids that their grandparents aren’t just sitting in a rocking chair. I already had grandchildren of my own and I found myself thinking, I have to do this. Destiny is given to you, and you have to make a choice to take it or leave it.”

It is a matter for celebration as much as fascination and marvel that at seventy-six, almost a quarter of a century later, Thomas is still pursuing that destiny. Only now, he is encouraged by audiences who are moved by his performances as a principal member of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, an internationally recognized intergenerational dance company.

When he appears onstage audience attention often shifts palpably in his direction. Typically, his shoulders are pulled back, his spine oddly rigid, his silver-thatched head cocked as if he were sneaking a peek at the moon out of one eye. His face is sharply profiled, with its prominent nose, large flyaway ears, and squinting blue eyes. Where some see a resemblance to the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, others think of Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane. Either way, there is no confusing Thomas’s torso with that of a young Nureyev.

He extends lanky, marionette-like arms and moves his 127-pound frame on flamingo-thin legs. And it comes as something of a shock when he breaks from a pose of finger-to-lip concentration or of bemused distraction, and hurls himself to the floor, collides with another dancer, or bounds the stage in rapturously self-absorbed reverie. A whispering curiosity spreads