What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [59]
By the mid-1980s,Thomas was fed up with the way “politics” had intruded into the world of foreign intelligence and he wanted out. He retired, at age fifty-two, and settled west of Washington, D.C. He had worked overseas and on special assignments for so many years that his pension assured him and Doris a comfortable retirement. But he had scant idea of how he would fill his time.
First, he contemplated boatbuilding. Then he flirted with becoming a painter, for during his career abroad, he had haunted the great museums wherever he was stationed and came to profoundly admire the works of the Great Masters. He especially loves Vermeer and Picasso. He passionately wanted to understand how they achieved the effects of their art. And in retirement, he began taking art history and painting classes at Warrenton Community College.
Thomas was also fascinated with the criminal mind. He loved watching television shows such as The Forensic Files, which he still tunes into when he rises at 3 A.M. He became so intrigued that he took a course in private investigation, passed a state licensing exam, and—hoping to look for missing children—was on the verge of opening an investigations business with a friend when his brother Seymour invited him to see him dance at the elementary school.
By then, Liz Lerman had been blending community building and storytelling for nearly a decade, and winning serious recognition for it. The recipient of such honors as the American Choreographer Award and, in 2002, a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” Fellowship, she first worked with older dancers at the Roosevelt Hotel for Senior Citizens in Washington in the 1970s when she was choreographing a piece about her mother’s death from cancer and needed to find older dancers. When she brought the older dancers she trained together with her college students, she discovered that both benefited in unanticipated ways.
Not only did the seniors become more flexible, they became personal storytellers, and those who had been passive at the senior citizen facility became more active. The younger dancers performed better, grew as teachers, and developed a more profound understanding of the connection between life and dance. “I was driven to work with older people,” Lerman said, “in part because of my personal story, but in part because of what I perceived to be the limits of the dance world. What some people would have described as professional, I would have described as a veneer. And I wanted to get down under that.”
When Thomas first saw his older brother in the performance by the Dancers of the Third Age, the group was a mix of older nonprofessional dancers and dancers from Lerman’s professional company, the Dance Exchange. Dancers of the Third Age performed almost exclusively at schools, senior centers, and nursing homes.
Seymour was then sixty-two and had been retired for three years from the State Department where he had served as an expert on education in the Soviet Union. He had stumbled into Lerman’s company by accident after he signed up for a movement class taught by one of Lerman’s professional dancers, who invited him to a rehearsal one day. Lerman, with her trademark topknot, encountered him there and invited him to join her company when it went to New York in 1985 to perform Still Crossing, her dance about the immigrant experience, at a centennial celebration for the Statue of Liberty at Battery Park in lower Manhattan. “I didn’t do much. I was just moving in the background,” Seymour said. But the overall effect of the dance was memorable.
The New York Times reported that more than one observer was moved to tears by the performance in which ordinary folks—old, young, several