October 15, 2019 —
By Richard Zorza —
All of us at Collington have a lot of fun comparing the weird things that people say to us when they hear that we live in a retirement community. The more we love it, the scarier it seems to be to some people. My favorite questions (so far) are the following:
Do you have a curfew?
Do they let you have liquor in your room?
For the record, no to the curfew, and yes to liquor in our units, and the dining room (BYOB or to buy).
But what I liked most was the fellow resident whose answer to the questions is:
Well, a couple tried to get our last night, but the dogs got them before they got to the wire!
Which perhaps inevitably gave rise to the planning for the movie Collington the Great Escape.
Planned elements:
- Building a ramp so that we can drive our old carts up on it and over the (non-existent) wall.
- Digging a tunnel from the woodshop so the machines hide the noise
- Digging another tunnel from the auditorium so that the sounds to exercise also hide the noise.
- Putting the tunnel dirt in walkers, so we can quietly spread it around
- Using the boat to cross the lake in the middle of the night
- Using the Ham radio shack to send coded messages to the Gray Panthers. (We do have one of the US WWII decoders here!)
- Use of the actual staff scholarship fund to get staff to help.
- Use of the flower room (that puts flowers all over the place each week) to pass secret messages among residents (like the slave quilt maps)
I invite your suggestions for additional ideas, and for additional weird questions. (richard@zorza.net)
Also, watch this space for photos of the guard dog patrol in action.