#ashokafellow

So I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if some tall, strapping, good-looking guy like me handed that woman a college catalog and said, ‘this is what the rest of your life can look like.’” That’s what we modeled it after. The programs are college-level courses taught by professors. They operate on a semester basis. We use culminating events at the end of every semester to help people utilize skills in real-world ways. So our arts classes are not gluing popsicle sticks together, or sticking macaroni on paper. We teach oil painting, and life-drawing, and filmmaking, and digital photography. 

We also have changed the built environment, because once I started going into these places with this dream, what I realized is that the setting where all of this happens sucks. We started meeting with developers, and getting them to look at what these places should be. We started designing classroom spaces, and theatres, and media labs, and art studios, and gallery spaces, and gyms, and wellness centers. 

Our classes operate basically in strands, like wellness and art, with a focus on intergenerational programming, lifelong learning, and community-building.  

About 8 years ago, I had this idea for this place in Burbank. We had a piece of land that we were looking at, and I thought, “I really want to do something different.” So we created this idea called the Burbank Senior Artist Colony. It’s a 141-unit senior apartment community, where arts is the glue. 

I grew up near an artist colony in upstate New York, and used to watch James Baldwin and Pablo Picasso, and all these amazing artists walk in and out of there. I knew that they went there for a little while, and they got their minds reshaped and they worked on their art, and everything was raised up because they had this connectivity, this feeling of community with other artists. And I thought, “What if you created a place like that, but no one ever went home?” 

That became the concept. We put in a theatre and created all these spaces, and we thought if we build it, they will come. The community has now been open about eight years. When we first started doing it, the LA Times put it on the cover. My picture was there, and it was this genius idea about reshaping aging, and it’s going to be about the arts, and isn’t this amazing. So this woman calls me up in my office one day, named Suzanne Knode, who was 67-years-old at the time: that’s a very young age for our population. But she’d been in a traumatic accident, and was having trouble with pain killers and chronic pain and depression, and she was a total mess. She’d been a single mom, and put two kids through school, and had never done anything for herself.

She calls and says, “You know, I read this article about this place, and I’m not an artist. I’ve never been an artist, but I think I might be a writer, and I’ve got these stories I’d like to tell.” 

So I said, “Well move in.” She moves into this place, and her first order of business is to go to a creative writing class downstairs, and the assignment for the first class is to write something about conflict, which is fairly wide-ranging and God only knows what we’re going to get. 

She writes this screenplay, which for the filmmakers in the room, is insane: choosing filmmaking as your first order of writing is terrifying and not for the meek. So when I got the script, I thought, “I’d really like for this not to suck,” basically. 

I saw “Bandida” by Suzanne Knode and opened it up, and was just shocked. It was this funny, cool, touching, real story about this older woman who takes public senior transportation across town, is lowered on her walker with tennis balls on the front, saunters into this liquor store, dons a mask, pulls out a pistol, and starts to rob the place. In the course of the robbery, she becomes friends with the older Armenian gentleman behind the counter to the point where he lets her get away with the crime in the end. 

And so I thought, one, I can’t believe this woman has never written anything and wrote this as her first thing moving into this community. And then I did the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I thought, “You know, I’m going to start a production company and make this movie.” We started having casting calls in our communities and we hired this older director, and this woman who used to do Joanne Woodward’s hair, and an older make-up artist. Everybody was like 70, 80-years-old, so it was like this geezer production. We called it Last Gasp Productions, and the tagline on the poster read, “A pistol, a plan, and sensible shoes.” 

I loved what she was saying about dignity and respect, but one of the things that we chant over and over again is that I don’t actually believe you should respect your elders. I think your elders should actually still have to earn respect. There’s this thing about aging services—this idea of “deficit” and “problem”. Aging is not a deficit and it’s not a problem in the first place. 

So we make this movie, and the first thing that happens is that Suzanne enters the film into the Valley Film Festival, and wins the competition. The first time she sees the film is in the El Portal theatre in the NoHo arts district, before an audience of 350 people where she got a standing ovation and won the audience award: the first time she’d seen the film, weeping on stage in front of an audience. 

I also produce a radio show. We created a radio show called “Experience Talks”, about 8 years ago, which was picked up nationally a couple years ago. I’m in the “radio business” quote-unquote. I knew Ira Glass, so I called up Ira, and said, “You know, we’ve got this story that’s kind of “This American Life” that you might like.” 

I wanted it to be on the radio. I love the radio. So Ira says, “Oh man, we’re about to make this television show for Showtime.” 

So he flies out, and they film the first episode that they ever filmed for the television show to be about the making of Suzanne’s movie. Suzanne ends up on national television now, and is stopped in the grocery stores all the time to people saying, “Oh my God, I’ve got to know: did your film make it into the Sundance Film Festival?”

What we’re trying to do is to, one, change the way people actually age by being onsite, and changing their behavior and having them take their own responsibility for their own aging process and age in a more healthy and independent way. But then we’re also trying to change the way people think about this. So the large story is what I tell when I tend to speak in front of audiences: it’s large, but accessible. And again, this is a woman who never did anything for herself, dusted off her dreams in retirement, took a shot, took a risk, and hit it out of the park. 

And since, her health has turned around. There’s an at-risk school next to the artist colony where she started an intergenerational program, where we match fifteen older crazy artists with fifteen messed up teens next door who’ve been kicked out of the traditional education system for drugs and crime and all kinds of stuff, teetering on the edge of disaster. These are kids who could end up spending the rest of their lives in correctional facilities.  

It started it about six years ago, and we’ve graduated 98% of these kids from the program. Last year, we actually made 15 two-minute claymation videos with the kids and the seniors working together to tell their stories. 

So these are the ways that we’re trying to change not just the environment of what these retirement communities look like, but also in general the way that people think about it, while keeping it real. 

We have such a bizarre culture around aging and death, it’s unbelievable. I speak in front of large audiences all the time, and I’ll start my conversations with, “How many people in the audience would like to grow older?” And I average about 50%, and a third of them are looking around trying to figure out which one the lemming is: “I think I want to grow older?” 

You don’t want to grow older? You understand what the alternative to that is, right? We demonize aging so much that end of life doesn’t actually seem like such a bad idea. “Wait a minute, let me think about that…”

So that’s what we’re doing. We’ve got 32 sites in four counties in Southern California now serving almost 8,000 seniors. We’re going outside the area: we’re doing pilot projects in three cities—three expansion projects: the Research Triangle of North Carolina, Portland, OR, and Minneapolis, MN. Those were the first responders. I mentioned sideways in a Huffington Post interview a couple years ago that we were thinking about going out of state, so we got a lot of first responders that were exactly the right kind of cities to look out our model, because they’re all mid-size cities, university towns, places where I would like to travel to and retire frankly. Although I was in Minneapolis in January, and now I’m rethinking that one. 

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