by Dave Barry
Gary Locks dancing next to, but not with, line dancers.
The song ends. I head over and introduce myself to the man. He tells me he is Gary Locks and he’s a retired lieutenant colonel, United States Air Force. He has also worked in security and for the TSA. He’s extremely cheerful. He’s seventy-two and married.
“My wife is parking the car,” he says.
Locks says he moved to The Villages from Ohio ten months ago and he loves it. “This is Disney World for adults,” he says. (Residents of The Villages say this a lot.)
I ask him about his dancing. He says he dances every night. “Since I moved here, I dropped from 270 to 240 pounds.”
I ask about the karate moves. “I learned that in the military and security,” he says. “Also, Elvis did that. I have incorporated some of his moves.”
He says his dancing is popular with the ladies. “They find me, eventually,” he says. “I’ve had girls thirteen to ninety ask me to dance.”
I ask about his suspenders. “Women love them,” he says. “I’ve had them unhook ’em.”
I offer to buy him a drink, but he shakes his head.
“I’ve never had a beer or cigarette in my life,” he says. “But I’ve had plenty of guns pointed at me.”
His wife, Gayle, joins us. I remark on her husband’s dancing.
“I just let him go,” she says.
The band starts another song, and Gary Locks, dancing machine, suspendered stud of Spanish Springs, heads back out to resume his rocking retirement.
I get back in my car and drive back to Lake Sumter Landing to check out the nightlife there. En route, I listen to WVLG, the AM radio station owned and operated by The Family. They also operate a TV channel and publish a daily newspaper, The Villages Daily Sun, that’s fat with advertising, more prosperous-looking than many big-city newspapers. It carries a respectable amount of national and international news, but it’s heaviest on happenings in The Villages—news about clubs (there are seventeen million clubs), golf tournaments, health and fitness, real estate, homeowner associations, decorating, shopping and so on. (The day I arrive, there’s an article about a Chick-fil-A franchise celebrating its tenth anniversary in The Villages. “Coleslaw isn’t a very popular item on our menu nationally,” states the franchise owner, “but it is here.”)
The WVLG DJ plays “Runaway” by Del Shannon, followed by “Higher and Higher” by Jackie Wilson. I love both of those songs. I listened to them on AM car radios in the sixties. I roll down the windows and crank up the volume.
I get to Lake Sumter Landing and I immediately realize that it is the place to be, because it is swarming with golf carts. They’re parked everywhere, row after row of them.
Eventually, I find a spot for my rental car and walk to the Town Square, where tonight’s entertainment is the Paul Vesco Band. They’re funkier than the Caribbean Chillers; in fact, when I arrive, they’re singing, “Play that funky music white boy.” There are two large herds of line dancers here. They’re dedicated and focused, and the dances they’re doing are even more complex than the ones over in Spanish Springs. They keep it up for several more songs and then the singer announces that they’re going to do a slow tune for the couples out there. The band starts playing the Etta James version of “At Last (My Love Has Come Along).” This is a slow, sensuous, achingly soulful song, so naturally the line dancers . . . keep right on line dancing. Nothing can stop these people from executing their steps. The band could play the William Tell Overture, or the Wedding March, and they would line-dance to it. That’s how they roll, Villages-style.
Several couples also get up and slow-dance; one couple is dancing while holding their little white dog between them, its head sticking out from between their bellies. It looks ridiculous, but nobody seems to care.
Back where these people came from—Ohio or Minnesota or New York or wherever—they would never dance in public with their dog. In fact, none of these people, these aging Boomers, would be out dancing on a random Thursday night, or pretty much any other night. But here they can dance every night, and down a few reasonably priced cocktails if they feel like it, and ride home in their golf cart. They can go golfing the next day, whatever day it is, and then go dancing again the next night, and do this again and again, every day if they want, until they die, which could be any time because nobody’s getting any younger, so why not enjoy yourself while you’re still around?
I can totally see the appeal.
I watch the dancers for a while, then walk past the vast herd of golf carts en route to my car, which now seems like a totally Squaresville vehicle for me to be driving. I return to the hotel and stick my head into the bar/dining room area, where a few people are having dinner, but nothing else is happening. It occurs to me that I’ve been here for an entire day and have yet to see anybody having sex. Maybe tomorrow.
The next morning I have breakfast at the Panera’s in downtown Lake Sumter. It’s busy, every table filled. Breakfast is a social event here. There’s free Wi-Fi, but I’m the only person in the entire restaurant using a laptop computer. I see one person looking at her phone. Everybody else is either talking or reading a newspaper. It’s eerie, like suddenly we’re back in 2003.
After breakfast, I stroll around Lake Sumter a bit, listening to the sounds of WVLG playing from speakers mounted on the lampposts. I pass Starbucks, where a group of maybe a dozen crusty old farts—regulars, by the look of them—are having coffee at some outdoor tables, telling jokes and making loud, raucous fun of each other, which they’re comfortable doing here because this is their town.
I make my way to The Villages Sales and Information Center, which is in a new building pretending that it’s an old building that was once a grand hotel. I sign up to take the official one-hour trolley tour of The Villages. There are seventeen of us on the tour, including two British couples and two African-American women, whom I mention because The Villages is 98 percent white; less than 1 percent of the residents are African-American.
We board the trolley and meet our tour guide. Her name is Carol Lynn Olson and she moved here from Ohio. To say she likes The Villages is like saying Romeo liked Juliet. Carol loves The Villages, and although she has given many trolley tours before ours, her enthusiasm never wanes, even slightly, during the hour.
“This is not a sales tour,” she tells us, the understanding being that The Villages doesn’t need to sell itself because so many people want to live here. She says she won’t be showing us houses: “In The Villages, it’s not about the house. It’s about the lifestyle.”
She starts by telling us about the ready availability and high quality of medical care here—hospitals, doctors, emergency care. She says that the emergency response time in The Villages is under four minutes, versus ten minutes nationally, and that the heart-attack-survival rate here is over 40 percent, versus 10 percent nationally.
Moving on from survival to leisure, Carol shows us some of the community recreation centers and tells us that currently The Villages has seventy-eight swimming pools, some of which are adults-only. (“If you’re like me, you don’t always want to listen to somebody else’s grandchildren yell ‘Marco’ / ‘Polo’ for three hours.”) There are twelve country clubs, and golf courses out the wazoo. “One gentleman claims to have played 681 rounds of golf in one year,” notes Carol.
One of the people on the tour is a resident of The Villages, a tan, fit-looking guy named Bob, showing around a couple of his buddies visiting from North Dakota. Carol asks Bob to tell the rest of us about his life here. He says he loves it. He plays a lot of golf, he plays pickleball,28 he plays softball, he’s in a convertible club. “I’m just so busy,” he says.
Carol says that retirees who move here are actually doing their children a favor by removing the burden of worry: “The kids are happy that Mom’s not sitting home with nothing to do.” She stresses the convenience of being able to get around by
golf cart, of having everything she needs right here in The Villages, including big-name entertainment. Among the acts she has seen here are Tony Orlando, Lee Greenwood, Bobby Vinton and Lesley Gore.
“I don’t have to go anywhere,” she says.
As she talks, we’re driving past mile after mile of houses, all one-story, all the same style, all set close together on tidy lots, all colored some variation of beige or light gray. The houses are nice enough, but they blur together into one long beige-ish/gray-ish line, disappearing into the distance.
At one point, Carol touches, obliquely, on the rigid conformity of the architecture, the restrictions on landscaping and decorating. “You can make your home very unique and very personal,” she says. She sounds a little defensive.
Carol tells us a little about the history of The Villages. Her tone becomes reverent when she speaks of Founding Father Harold Schwartz: “He was a dreamer. He was a visionary.” She says that although Schwartz and his son have died, The Family is still in control: “The dream does go on.”
And you can be part of the dream; that’s the message. You don’t have to live in a hectic and disorganized and scary world that has little time for or interest in older people like you. You can come live in this safe orderly place and putt around on your custom golf cart and do pretty much whatever you want, and nobody will judge you, because this whole place is about you—not your kids, not future generations, not society in general: You. You’ve worked hard, you’ve sacrificed enough. Now it’s pickleball time, dammit.
That’s the message.
The tour ends. Carol, noting that she is being politically incorrect, wishes us a Merry Christmas. Some of the people on the tour go into the sales office to talk about houses. I head back out onto the pretend historic streets of Lake Sumter, where I encounter the two African-American women who were on the tour, and we get to chatting. They’re cousins. One of them, Ora Hardy, is a retired court reporter from the Chicago area; she’s sixty-six and looking for a warm place to settle down. She’s planning to rent a place in The Villages for a while to see how she likes it.
“I’m an older lady with a dog,” she says. “I want to be someplace where I can have a sense of safety, not have to worry about looking around.”
So she likes the security of The Villages. But she’s not sold yet. “I have real reservations about the lack of diversity.” She says there’s a “manufactured sweetness” about the way people treat her here, though she notes that this is “something that you’re used to when you’re sixty-six.”
I tell her that if she truly wants to experience the overpowering whiteness of The Villages, she needs to check out the line dancing. She and her cousin laugh. I wish her luck and we part company. I head back toward my hotel, crossing the Lake Sumter square, which is deserted. The WVLG lamppost speakers are playing “Cool Jerk.”
In the afternoon I drive over to Paddock Square, the newest of the Town Squares, which has a fake historic western motif. There are big doin’s here today: They’re lighting the Christmas tree and there’s a bunch of entertainment scheduled. The festivities start at 4, but at 2:30, when I arrive, the square and bleachers are already filling up. Soon, the whole place is full, and lines are forming at the beverage booths. This is the place to be at The Villages today.
At 4 sharp, the first act goes on. These are the Silver Rockettes, a group of ladies wearing Santa Claus capes and hats over their black-and-silver costumes. They march to the square in unison, with their hands on their hips in a certain way that has no doubt been perfected during rehearsals in a recreation center. It’s a truly wonderful look.
The Silver Rockettes get a nice hand from the crowd as they launch into their dance routine, “Here Comes Santa Claus,” the Elvis Presley version. Their choreography is patterned after the famous Radio City Music Hall Rockettes except that instead of high kicks and other fast-paced precision dance moves, the Silver Rockettes confine themselves to small, cautious steps, hand gestures and coordinated head nods. This results in the following discussion between two women near me:
FIRST WOMAN: Why aren’t they kicking?
SECOND WOMAN: Women of our age can’t kick very high.
FIRST WOMAN: Wanna bet? I’m eighty-six.
The Silver Rockettes finish “Here Comes Santa Claus” and remove their capes for their next number, “Let It Snow,” which they perform seated on a row of chairs. Here, in addition to the synchronized head nods and hand gestures, they are able to raise their feet in the air. This gets a nice hand from the crowd, but it does not impress my neighbor, the first woman, who says: “That was it? Sitting-down kicking?”
When the Silver Rockettes finish, they take a bow, don their Santa hats and capes and walk off with their hands on their hips in a certain practiced way.
Next up on the stage is Scooter the DJ, a regular in The Villages, with a good, wiseacre delivery, comical props and a stream of well-practiced jokes about subjects such as the dangers of dancing with a hip replacement. The crowd loves Scooter; he immediately gets people up and dancing. Pretty soon he has a huge crowd, including Santa and Mrs. Claus, out there doing—prepare to not be surprised—the Electric Slide.
As I’m watching this, I’m thinking two things:
This has to the whitest, squarest thing happening anywhere in America.
These people are really enjoying themselves.
The Electric Slide ends and Scooter gets the crowd doing—of course!—the “Y.M.C.A.” dance. The whole downtown area is now jammed; the lines are long at the beverage booths. Scooter announces the next act, which is the Gemstone Dancers, a group of gals in semi-western attire who perform country-style line dances.
I decide it’s time to mosey back to Lake Sumter, where I have dinner at a restaurant called City Fire. I eat at the bar and get into a conversation with the couple sitting next to me. The woman is named Debra Barran; she’s sixty-three and she loves The Villages. “On the one hand,” she says, “it’s a place where there’s a lot of older people. But the other side of the coin is, they appreciate older people.”
Her companion, who identifies himself only as Len and gives his age, unconvincingly, as thirty-nine, also loves The Villages. “This is the best place in the world,” he says. Debra nods.
I head back to my hotel. Tonight there’s dancing in the bar. A DJ named Pat Atkinson is playing excellent music, killer dance songs like Marcia Ball’s “A Fool in Love.”29 The crowd is about fifty-fifty men/women and many of them are very good dancers, obviously regulars here. At one point, they perform a line dance, but it actually looks pretty cool, for a line dance.
I drink a couple of beers and watch the crowd. I figure that if there really is a wild sex scene going on in The Villages, there should be some kind of hot pickup action happening at this bar. But all I see is dancing. Maybe they’re waiting for me to leave before they start having wild sex. I head for bed.
The next morning, I take one last stroll over to the Lake Sumter Square, where the Florida Lottery is holding a big daylong event consisting of various lottery promotions, including a chance to win a golf cart. There are a bunch of booths, a prize wheel, and tables stacked with T-shirts, water bottles and other cheap giveaway items. It’s only 9 and the event doesn’t start until 10, but already at least a hundred people have gathered. They’re sitting in plastic chairs, watching the lottery people set up. Over the lamppost speakers WVLG is playing “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” by the Swingin’ Medallions.
I check out of my hotel and head back to Miami, the disorderly, haphazard, weird, sensuous, sometimes dangerous, often insane and always unpredictable place where I live. I’m happy to get home. I like having a certain amount of disorder in my life, and I like living in a blue house. I couldn’t live in The Villages: To me, it feels too much like a giant line dance, everybody following the same steps.
But I’m not knocking the people who love The Villages. As
an aging Boomer, I’m not about to criticize people of my generation who want to spend whatever time they have left doing whatever they really want to do in the company of people who don’t view them as fossils. And if they really are having wild sex up there, I say more power to them. It’s good for people our age to have sex. It upsets the children.
GATORLAND
Today I’m visiting Gatorland, which proudly bills itself as “The Alligator Capital of the World,” as well as, more modestly, “Orlando’s Best Half Day Attraction.” This is the place to go if you want to observe alligators going about their normal daily alligator routine of not moving for hours on end. Also, if you have a problem alligator that has been a nuisance in your neighborhood, on your golf course, in your Jacuzzi, etc., Gatorland will take it off your hands. It is a haven for troubled alligators. It also has crocodiles, which are also motionless but can be distinguished from alligators by the biological fact that the sign on their pen says CROCODILES.
Gatorland is located on the Orange Blossom Trail, just up the road a piece30 from Tupperware world headquarters.31 It’s a family-owned business that has been around since 1949, way before Disney. It’s proud of its Old Florida heritage, and it has a laid-back, non-slick, this-ain’t-the-Magic-Kingdom, redneck-y vibe. For example, the gift shop sells flasks. Also, there are a lot of jokey signs like this:
When you enter Gatorland, the first wildlife you see is—Spoiler Alert—alligators. A buttload of alligators, dozens and dozens of them on wooden platforms surrounded by water. They are sprawled haphazardly, often on top of each other, as if they’re having a wild reptile orgy, except that they are not moving. Some of them look like they have not moved since the Reagan administration. It’s like the Department of Motor Vehicles, but with alligators.