The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End Senior Center—what the wags at the Marina and Bait call the Senile Center—is basically a pole building down by the Camano Cut and Curl, about a stone’s throw from the now defunct Tyee MegaStore. A pole building, for those unfamiliar with architectural stylings, is a metal sided structure constructed with beams instead of stud framing. Barns and shops are often built this way. So is our Senior Center. Cheap and stout enough.

The Center has a Board and it has a small staff—which is Jenny Hancock and various volunteers who man (well, okay, woman) the desk and phones. Jenny has the only room, other than the unisex toilet in back, that has its own door. This makes it perfect for the occasional dance and their annual fashion show, the flea market fundraiser and their gala auction, capital G, that brings in most of their yearly funding.

The auction used to be held at the close of the flea market, sort of an afterthought. Year after sorry year, the stragglers would bid on bad local art the artists couldn’t sell or give away on the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, plus the usual items from South End biznesses. A day of fishing Jesse’s Deep Sea Charters. Believe me, an hour would be plenty. Or a perm at the Cut and Curl. An hour of acupuncture down at Pins and Needle Therapy. Whoa, Nelly, you can imagine the bidding wars!

Just before they decided to throw in the towel on the auction, Jenny convinced the board to go Gala. Meaning, basically, play dress-up and serve wine and beer, charge an entry and serve coldcuts and cheese with crackers. The first year the Center made 5 times what they HAD been making. The second year they doubled that and on the third they served hard liquor. And made even more. Two Toke Tom is lobbying for medical marijuana sampling, but he’s not on the Board.

The Center is raising money now for a new building. The toxic mold is starting to be an issue and anyway we’re feeling growing pains, not so much from all the new immigrants as that demographically we’re inexorably moving into our senile years. If the auction keeps on improving, we might just make it. Believe me, 3 martinis and even the Bait Shop Boyz will bid a day’s wages for an hour with Janice, head dominatrix at the Pins and Needles.

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