The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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We don’t really have a Senior Center on the South End.  The Diner is sort of a substitute, but you need to at least buy a cup of coffee before you park in a booth or belly up to the counter for the daily gossip specials.  The vintage car guyz, the Flatheads, fill the joint Wednesday morning.  Tuesdays the Bible study crowd rolls in and most of the regulars roll out.  It’s not that they’re religious averse, but like Freddy the Freeloader sez, Sunday’s plenty.  Freddy gets his disability checks first of every month.  He’s a busted up stump jumper chain choker from the days when logging was man’s work all right but good luck living to be an old man.  If he had his druthers, the Diner would be church a-plenty.

The AA used to congregate on Fridays, but Brenda, the Diner’s owner since 1987, finally asked them to find another meeting place.  She was losing money on their endless coffee refills and the parking lot out front looked like Pittsburg in Carnegie’s day, the smoke from their unfiltered Camels hanging heavy on air inversions.  Plus, she and Big Larry, the grillman, had quit drinking years ago and the new AA members’ determined but usually hopeless drought between benders or DUI’s depressed them mightily.  Half of them ended up in Bible study anyway so AA didn’t complain very vocally, just moved it on up to the toxic mold blue Camano Center the County rents cheap and never cleans up.

Thursdays now the Zumba crowd pulls in after an hour of aerobics at the nearby South Grange, mostly post-Mom women desperately fighting the midriff bulges and Michelin Man thighs.  After a morning workout they replaced the calories lost with Brenda’s Blue Plate Specials, burger baskets with fries and slaw and fountain Coke they could get refills on for free, sort of a zero sum gain.  But without the guilt.  They earned every calorie!

We been thinking about maybe fundraising for a Senile Center.  Lot of work.  Lot of money.  Something ever happened to the Diner, maybe we’d motivate.  Meanwhile, the coffee’s cheap and the gossip’s free.  You ask me, we got the best of both worlds.  Without the Book of Revelations or the 12 step program.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/audio-making-money-the-old-fashioned-way1.mp3[/podcast]audio — making money the old fashioned way

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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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