What started off as an individual writing project turned into something much bigger thanks to the efforts of residents and staff members at The Fountains at Millbrook, a Watermark Retirement Communities senior living community in Millbrook, NY.
Inspired by morning conversations with her neighbors and her community’s Watermark University writer’s exchange program, led by instructor Lorraine Hartin-Gelardi, resident Marge Wardrop wrote up a suspenseful script for a radio play that eventually would be turned into a full production in front of a packed house at the community. But it all started with a blank page and a cup of coffee.
“The plot started out as a murder mystery, [but] we don’t want to be thought of as a bunch of murderers here, so we switched to a mystery,” Wardrop said. “We talked about this a lot over coffee in the morning. We decided that we didn’t want to make anybody either a victim or a villain. We are all nice here, so I decided it really was all misunderstanding, rumor and innuendo.”
Wardrop said the script did not take long to write — she completed it over the course of two mornings. The setting was The Fountains, and the characters all were based on fellow residents.
It was definitely not Wardrop’s first rodeo. She and her husband, Jim, founded and performed with the Reading, PA-based Spirit of the Airwaves Players for about 20 years, so seeing the final product come together brought back fond memories, minor technical difficulties aside.
“We didn’t have a lot of loud voices,” Wardrop said. “The people involved were soft-spoken, so we needed microphones. We rehearsed the choreography of moving between mics and having time to get there, sit down and get back to the mic in time, because we had four mics for 15 people. So it was a little bit of a dance routine as well as a play.”
For Hartin-Gelardi, seeing her students hone their craft as writers is one of her biggest joys. As with any skill, writing takes lots of practice and repetition, but the journey can start at any age.
“There is a gentleman in the class that I’ve known for 12 years, about as long as I’ve been doing this class. He had an art show when I was also a gallery operator at a local library, and the title of the show was ‘It’s Better to Create than Vegetate,’” Hartin-Gelardi said. “There are several people who come to this class who have had no writing experience, and I watched them develop into writers. It’s wonderful to offer someone an opportunity to develop a part of themselves that hasn’t been developed beforehand.”
For Wardrop, the most rewarding part of the experience was not the time spent writing, but the time she spent working on it with her cast and crew. Sometimes, the journey is just as meaningful as the final product.
“It’s been very gratifying and very flattering,” Wardrop said. “The thing that has meant the most to me in the whole process was everybody involved. Older people sometimes feel their life is over, that their days of being productive are over. The biggest thing we did was, we started it, we worked on it and we pulled it off. You can have your little goals [in private] and meet them, but here, you got a chance to show everybody what you did and everybody responded positively. I think that is extraordinary.”
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