good morning and welcome to positively beech street this is our third episode we are here at the lovely belmont senior center i'm one of your cohosts bart fellowmen and i'm rich berger are you my other cohost yes i think so okay i think so i was here last week so i yeah i know but there sure are a lot of comedians here today yeah well i figured i'd show up again because why not exactly exactly you never know what's gonna happen particularly in the senior center that's true oh that's true and our wonderful producer is jeffrey hansel there he is twiggling wiggling and all that good stuff and i want to make mention that we have plenty of notepaper because we forget a lot of things bart laughs and we have yellow note paper so we can even see it right there you go but you don't wear glasses like me so i i have glasses in my bag in the office i've never seen you with glasses i don't dare wear them because i'll lose them you know so i figure if if in case i need them i have them but i'd be better off not wearing them because then i'll have them for a long time so i'm sorry it was someone was taking someone was trying to steal your chair yeah they were trying to steal my chair i had to say we need that i thought there were about three hundred chairs behind me but well i didn't you know we have tons of chairs here we do but going back to glasses you can read something small print without your glasses well i have a lot of eye problems right now right i have a cataract in my right eye and oh you were going to tell me i got interrupt you yeah cause we're having that conversation you were going to tell me you to speak to we need that i'm sorry put chains we would speak to it what a lady with shine or who knew about the shine program or yes yes well what happened was i scheduled a cataract operation for this month first day of spring the 20th and then i it dawned on me that perhaps i would owe a lot of money on it i didn't know if i was fully covered by medicare so i found out that without supplemental i would owe some money so i went into an emergency session with myself i cancel the appointment i cancel the appointment and i rescheduled i'm going to reschedule in the interim between now and the rescheduling i'm going to get a bit of supplemental insurance to help me out so you spoke to that woman you had told me about yes i spoke to this shine person here alicia she's excellent she is she showed me knew all the rules oh my god she not only knew all the rules she showed them to be in a way sequentially step after step where it was very easy to to understand and if anybody has any need for a shine counselor concerning medicare i would i would recommend her highly was she able to tell you how much it would cost you out of your pocket i'm just curious no that the you know it's a kind of it's kind of complicated but what you need is you need a diagnosis code and a procedure code to find out excuse me but we have a special guest just oh pulled up and we need to pull over more chairs well we yes we're going to do it so anyway you know medicare's is so complicated it really is it is very complicated you never know what you're going to get hit with we're gonna move over a little like this i'm going to move this over here sure cause you want you gotta get close we gotta huddle oh we gotta huddle yeah well only because of the the way the vocals go oh and so i wonder what was used for decoration so did it actually work well welcome to the show i asked i have on my right dana leavitt who's the assistant director of the senior center and to her right is social work intern named deborah sarah goldberg sarah i liked deborah oh okay sarah goldberg i guess if dana and sarah combine maybe you get deborah why not only if wandering in the desert english is a living language it's very fluid so if you're given the go ahead yeah to do basically anything anything we want all right well i'm going to let sarah and that includes groucho imitations all kinds of good stuff and there you go yeah younger folks like you who still know groucho it's important yes i forget given my age someone who's like thirty forty years younger than me they're not going to know that reference you know all the time i say do you know what i'm talking about and they go i think my mother told me about that and i was like okay just get me two hard boiled eggs would be good yeah be glad you have a yellow pad that's that's the color of this episode oh yellow yup excellent all right well i'm going to let i will let sarah go first because sarah is a newbie at this so i am a newbie just doing a little plug for the new group i'm leading on mondays so this group is on right now it is an expressive arts group mondays one to two hundred pm artistic skill not required it's an open group for all levels of creative ability all you need is a desire to express yourself as madonna would say through art through art yes so it will be a guided group where people can come i will lead the structure of the group and we'll get to creating based on that and it's open to everyone you know you can participate you can observe but we definitely encourage you to come check it out mondays went one to two hundred pm i also wanted to let everyone know i'm here mondays and fridays feel free to come see me and ask about beech street's budding phone program i know a lot of you are interested right now in finding out how to get those smartphones and start signing up for shared driving opportunities such as lyft and uber and i am here to help with that oh wonderful that's great do you have do you have any art therapy background from your social work education i do i graduated from lesley university which specializes in expressive art therapies i have facilitated groups all around the boston area related to expressive art my specialties are bringing out the more kind of deeper messages that we hope to express in our daytoday lives that sometimes we just can't find the words for and i do that through imagery and therapeutic writing and have found it to be a very soothing and enjoyable way to facilitate different types of no the reason i ask i used to have a sisterinlaw who gone to art school and who did a lot of therapy work with her art she was a potter and so kind of an exciting medium because most people probably have never tried to create anything in pottery and when you have someone and when you have an elderly person and they indicated a willingness to get deeper and they start creating art it's like i observed some of her classes and it was like aha moments because it was like wow the emotional uplifting for some people they just got so into it they wanted to do pottery every day yes it was just well you know i would like to on the same the artistic realm i'm about with virtual reality here bringing the virtual reality to the senior center so i live in virtual reality so i i don't want to be so lonely anymore i'm going to try to help people come so i would like to extend to you the offer of collaborating your your projects and ours maybe we could have a coevent of some sort i think that would be a wonderful idea figure that out yeah yeah i think there's so many wonderful sensory experiences whether it's pottery or virtual reality and i think it stimulates us all to go deeper yeah yeah a virtual reality for me it's the explosion into the human imagination yes and i think that everybody likes to go there we're all kids at heart and then i think everybody likes to go there sigmund freud rides again sigmund i mean you know if you think of you know there's lots of things he did that were great and things people don't agree with but think of the massive cultural influence he's had on human life since he was in indiana doing inventing psychoanalysis well and you know talking about imagination and that kind of mind thing i think plato had some sort of if i'm recalling correctly i think it was plato he had some sort of world that he imagined where there were primitive shapes ideal primitive eternal shapes and i've seen some of these yup i love it in virtual reality were you around when plato was alive you have to tell you the truth i came a little bit later i was going to say it was your but i knew his son and his daughter right you're uncle your uncle was hanging out with him i heard in the desert you know wandering together so you know we do nothing but tell the truth here yeah i know you guys do there's historical truths you know you got to that introduction by the way of the show the podcast it's brilliant oh what jane created oh my god hilarious i mean so good i'm gonna have to check it out you'll have to check it out it's great she even chose the music yeah it's great the music is great too it's so good so so the theme there was kind of a yellow yellowy green so we're trying to keep that going keep that going yeah i support that we were going to paint the office tuscan okra it will be nice but i don't think that's going to oh my god keep it exciting so i have a question and it's to both of you sure so one of the things rich and i would like to accomplish is find them a medium or a way to get people here to share some memories some origin type stuff family situational maybe with even some pictures i think it's a wonderful way if they're comfortable enough that an older person where i live in newton is a senior building and there's a new social work intern actually who i have not met but they post things they they they have more things going on in the day i mean i get exhausted just reading the list of things that are planned but this fellow luke is doing a memory project and i haven't spoken to but i can imagine what it is and it makes you know it makes a whole lot of sense people who were either shy or whoever past memories but would want to share and there are some who it might be too painful to share but it's hard to i'm trying to find a mechanism or medium to approach that subject yeah we i was literally having this conversation last night when i was talking with nava we were talking about someone and their life their story and then it sort of i had said well if there was a way that we could do it and i know my grandparents we still have the receipt when they got married at the waldorf astoria in new york it's such a cool piece of history that would evoke a story and would be able to share and so yeah i mean i would one hundred support that if people had something that they wanted to bring to tell their story that would invoke that yeah it's trying to figure out and maybe we should rich and i should sit with you or both of you whatever depending on schedules how to think of what the methodology is to approach people because saying it was one thing right but doing but doing is another i mean you talk about you gotta think of your parents i'm in my apartment i have a picture of my parents at the copacabana in new york with little beer bottles and champagne things on the table that's awesome and it has to be let's see they were married in thirty nine and this was before they were married so probably about thirty seven you know wow and i always remember they were married in thirty nine because that's when gone with the wind was first aired oh i love that so they're married on the 31st and my mother made it through the marriage because my brother was born on january 1st january 1st right three years later any way so give me a memory that you have from your past from my childhood well from your past it could be childhood it could be it could be stories you were told by your family well one thing that comes to mind is after i graduate i had i had an english teacher in high school and one day i came home from a college break i was to visit my folks and i went to the store for some reason and i actually saw this teacher carrying a bag of ope carrying a bag of groceries and i almost fell over i mean i didn't even realize that she ate i didn't think she ate i mean i kind of realized something important about teachers you know they do eat and they do have a life and they carry groceries they exist they're people too have children and families yeah so it was a revelation it's funny how you look back and you you know you kind of as you get older more experienced your vision increases i think i embellish that a little bit but the heart of it was there i was very shocked to see her in another context so i hear you i hear you we're gonna so what's going on here anything new anything different lots of oh gosh lots of stuff i know lots of things who can keep up with you guys the first thing is i want to put a plug in for the beach party ause that's going to be a lot of fun so we're having an indoor beach party i was going to say because we're on beech street and because the winter months are long there's going to be no sand there's no requirement to wear a bathing suit or flip flops or you know no but if but are you doing pina coladas or cuba libres i mean if you have a tommy bahama or you have we're going to do like a fun punch in a nonalcoholic obviously the spirited gourmet is donating a tray of passed hors d'oeuvres so we'll have those hotdogs i'm gonna get ice cream like what you remember as a child eating on the beach hoodsies hoodsies yeah i'm going to get the strawberry shortcake bars fudgcicles i wish they sell they sold the two ball screwball you know the ice cream that had the two gumballs at the bottom that was the most fun part but i don't think they sell those by the bulk so we'll get you never know oh my god you look like you would go to nantasket beach did you ever go to nantasket beach i did but i was first dragged to revere beach because my mother grew up in a place called beachmont which is in between revere and belmont and overlooking revere beach okay okay and i hated revere beach yeah and i would tell my mother i'm incredibly fair and i burn i'm not going and she said you're six years old i can't leave you at home but i would say why not i'll play you know so i didn't start going to nantasket until i was like fourteen or fifteen you know that type of thing yeah no those are the memories of the ice cream when i would get the ice and when is this beach party march 19th from four hundred and thirty to six hundred and thirty and we're going to have a steel drum player toby tobas so he'll do caribbean reggae latin oh excellent idea i love that man and we're going to play corn hole i'm telling people if they have beach toy beach games you know paddle ball or whatnot it'll just be a lot of fun so that's coming up i'm gonna bring big inner tube yeah i'm gonna wear it yeah yup do it do it that'll be a lot of fun are there gonna be any children or you know or is it you know a beach day you could have children grandparents you could have you know any number of things yeah i'm encouraging i mean we cater to people fifty five and older first you know they're the priority but i don't see why not but i think we'd probably stick it stick to adults only well we can probably find a fifty five year old kid you're right we could we could a lot of them i think we could find one yeah but that'll be a lot of fun i'm excited for that one and then we've got a lot of great music programs the sarah gardner trio is coming she brings her dad he plays the piano that'll be a lot of fun the brill the music from the brill building they were here last friday and it was quite a jam oh they were great yeah it was a lot of fun hopefully we'll have them come back cause we were talking about not necessarily a prom but like a throwback thursday party so we'll have ice cream floats do like dowop and stuff like that ice cream floats so we're working on that party at some point yeah when's the last time you had a root beer float a year ago at a cabin last night yesterday so we're working on that we're having a great program today to talk about affordable housing which is important for people to hear in case you have to move or downsize so the metro west program they're going to come and talk about housing and then what else do i have going i think i have a lot of stuff going we're having a barry pell is coming to talk about climate change there were two islands i couldn't give you the names of them because they're hard to pronounce but basically what is climate change doing to impact these small islands and the people who are still living on these islands so that'll be a really important conversation the other thing i really want to plug is the social bullying program that we have coming robin is a woman from jewish family and children's services who's coming to talk about social bullying among older adults and it's present you know whether it's in housing whether it's here at the center whether it's at an assisted living in a nursing home i mean you can bullying doesn't go away so that'll be a really important program that we talk about too so lots of good stuff happening and i want to see everybody we're going to the service dog graduation this weekend so that'll be a lot of fun that's on sunday we'll watch the dogs from golden opportunities for independence we'll watch them graduate so now they're fully completed with their service training and now they're ready to be service dogs for their owners and go out in the world i think we just can't wait to see you guys at the center yeah all right all laugh thank you so much thanks guys thank you very much thank you pleasure but we need to sit sometime get into methodology and pictures pictures are important everyone has them yes i think i have a few myself that's good i'm surprised at how little i have family pictures probably it's a reflection of how much your parents probably collected no my cousin one of my cousins has a she's kind of like the family repository stuff photos and genealogy it's such a strange thing i have a lot of pictures cause i have a brother who you know i'm the one so i'm the repository and that was that way with stamp collections too which cause we were a big stamp collector family cause my grandfather was in the steamship business and he would get letters from all over the world constantly for business my father became a stamp collector anyway but with pictures so i used to go over them with my mother who's this you know it was mainly with my mother's family and now i have all this stuff and occasionally i'll look at em because my daughter wants she's always looking for missing relatives she thinks why aren't why don't i have more relatives around here well julia most of them are dead but you know it's true but you know people can't remember who these people are and i and i have the memory but i was never given the full memory that's why i was coming up with this thing pictures shouldn't be kept in albums in my mind people should have them out like i want to make for my kids a couple of collages i used to date a woman that did collages with all these pictures and be framed like a picture so you can point and look and see rather than having it on a bookshelf in an album that you never take out yeah well you know that pictures are perhaps you know the most popular thing to record memories but in this day and age we're starting to get to the point where we have other technologies clears throat you know like video i mean video has been around for a long time but a lot of people with their portable devices will record some sort of an event and that will become part of the pictorial history right excuse me i always have a question you know i'm not very technical but i see these people with their phones their iphones their smartphones taking like zillions a lot of pictures and i was with my son and a friend that came over and they were talking about their storage capacity and they had like one thousand five hundred pictures on there and i go what are you doing with them i mean if you got to look in a little can you print them out and you show me what you know and it's like oh they're just there it's like the repository is in their hand yeah and also you know i found i'd take photos with my phone too and i found that at various times i think to myself i didn't even see what i photographed i mean there's some like i'm seeing this microphone and if i really pay attention i can look at its detail and really see it but if i say oh that's a wonderful microphone you know i'm like this and i i put it away or walk away my camera saw more about that microphone than i did you know well so my question would be in that how often do you think after the day after you took those pictures of the microphone would you go into your phone and start scanning the pictures would you remember or it just sits there and say oh look at that microphone again a month later or i do i do go back yeah i do i the thing that i'm finding frustrating is finding how you know you think oh i took that picture but how far back was it and my phone is not sophisticated enough so that i can say you know such and such a month and you know and they will retrieve it for me i think some cell phones have the capacity when you get that many photographs and you can't remember where they are or when you took them but yeah where they're located on the see it's like the to my mind it's the it's a device it's an assembly of order put around or organization put around the pictures but it's like i wanted to do a cookbook and the reason i bring this up is because it's a similar concept and people said well everyone's done cookbooks why do you want to do a cookbook says i can't remember where all these because a lot of recipes can lead you to think if you're a cook to get to experimentation or another recipe in other words it influence you in what you know cause i always i'll take a recipe and i'll change it to my format and i'll add things so it becomes my recipe in effect not someone else's template but but the point is i wanted i thought there would be a way to develop collecting recipes that you could have a cookbook that someone could develop an algorithm or whatever so that you don't want to be stuck going through five hundred pages of recipes but you wanted to say well if you have in your house if you had olive oil anchovies garlic and like three other ingredients show me what things you can do with that you know something i can give you a suggestion i'm a big search guy right i think of something i go right on the internet and i get a little phrase or a couple of keywords and i follow it i would go to google put in some you know first do recipe software and see what comes up there might be some people might have invented an app or a program that does a lot with recipes and maybe some of the things you want and correlations between ingredients right you know i mean explore yeah it's i'm sure you'll find something that's interesting maybe you know my son says dad i don't need a bunch of cookbooks and he's he cooks also so he says i just look if i want to cook something i look it up on google or wherever i said wait a minute what are you asking google to tell you you're giving input questions so what if you don't know part of what you want to tell google well you see yeah i would say start out general you know like recipes software and then you know some findings will come up and then you can you know go to a website take a look at what it means to the producer of that piece of software to be labeled recipe software maybe it's how to better organize your recipes maybe it has it has all these maybe there was a way of searching for those three ingredients what could you make with this you know you never know i know but i've tried a little of that and i don't think it exists what i'm trying to do but i don't know it just seems like well maybe some time you and i can sit down and an inventive way to help people who want to cook without necessarily having a recipe but you have ingredients right you and i are having a tough time i'm having the same thing it's the dry heat air here that's why i'm drinking orange juice today does it affect your skin see it affects my skin the dry i don't know do i look kind of i hope i don't look yellow that's not a good sign no no no when you look yellow that's not being transferred i don't think there's any transfer to yellow but you know it's a i'm in it for the vitamin c and i love orange i love the color orange and this bottle is really cool it's a very nice bottle i'm not plugging simply orange i'm just plugging it i get it i am a real shopper of food i mean i know what different markets have i know what the price just because i got it from my mother but like i started buying orange juice again a few months ago i stopped i like orange juice but it was too fattening and i'm on a diet i don't want all the calories and now they're doing fifty less calories two brands which is significant cause it's less sugar it what they're cutting out you still get the orange taste and so same prices as the regular orange juice so now i'll have orange juice you know i personally have had the opposite problem in my life now that i'm older and you know i'm getting a little more sedentary i'm keeping my weight i was very very active being a carpenter early on and being a kid you're run around but anyway i had just the opposite problem i couldn't keep enough weight on yes during college i was so thin in the middle of my college years that i went on a crash diet the crash diet was two meals of pancakes or waffles with butter and syrup and anything else that i could put on top of it to give me caloric intake and then a bag of malted milk balls there must have been like six thousand calories in that bag i ate every single malted milk ball and i didn't gain an ounce i didn't gain an ounce yeah it's your system no it was my system and also i smoked for a long time when i gave up smoking boom oh really yeah so that did cause fifteen pounds fifteen pounds all at once i lost seven of them but i kept the seven i still have those seven pounds from thirty years ago like a bank account right yup it happens it happens when you get old did you get any interest on that it's compounded it's compounded and it hasn't gone up to eight pounds at all at thanksgiving i was with my son i was with my ex wife you know we have to share the children and all this blah blah blah and she always nice figure blah blah blah but someone's said something and i said well i've been on a diet and i've started to lose i've lost seven pounds it was after two weeks at the time and i want to continue this and go to more plant based stuff blah blah blah it's my diet i wouldn't need to explain it to her and she says she came over to me my exwife and said you want to give me some of what you got at first i didn't know what she was talking about she was talking about weight she can't she has lost weight and she can't gain weight she likes to eat but when she gets unhappy or depressed whatever she says give me ten pounds of yours i said here it's free it's a bargain take it somebody should work on that technology yeah well i believe if i could sell her ten pounds i do it in a minute yeah but i would go i would buy you know an eighth ninth 10th pound i would really go i'd go for maybe like up to twelve pounds i tell people i've always aspired to be heavy and they're like what you've always aspired to be heavy because you're always thin nobody understands that i think there there is a problem i mean the you know the bulimia and people being thin right they think they're not thin enough i mean that's a problem in a different way cause the person wants to get lighter and lighter and lighter i wanted to get heavier and heavier and heavier you're starting at the point where you have less pounds right just going in one direction or the other exactly well i tell you a funny story i went to graduate school in england i think you know and so i'm over there and i don't have a lot of money i had a i remember very specifically and i should have just complained to my parents but i didn't so i was always looking for to eat the money to eat you know it really was tight so i had three a day for food now this was way back when but still you couldn't get a lot i did okay generally if i had gotten four a day for food it would've changed my life it's that close so i traveled all over europe i was very excited i had a great year in europe and i got my degree and the war was raging and all this craziness was going on and i come home and i fly into new york cause that was there were a whole bunch of students returning and it was a set flight so my parents came down from boston to new york and picked me up and it was like eight in the morning so they had stayed over and i'll never forget i'm on a second floor and i could spot my parents way across on the first floor of the floor below and my mother i see her looking at me and she almost fainted as only a mother could yeah because i had forgotten how thin i became in england because there were no sandwiches i'm a hamburger guy you know there were no they just so my whole diet change yeah constrained by money and so i didn't realize i weighed like one hundred and sixty nine or one hundred and seventy which is thin for me and she could notice you know mother's eyes notice things yeah yeah we stopped on the way they got breakfast and i had a couple of cheeseburgers at ten in the morning in southern connecticut you know oh my god because i want i just wanted the taste more than anything it was just it was strange it was strange how thin i got and then not realizing it because i was still eating it was just i wasn't eating the carbs that i had in the american diet i would eat scrambled eggs for lunch at school it was subsidized it would be forty cents you know you get a big plate of scrambled eggs with chips fries you know so when you if you change where you live and you change your food intake it becomes it seriously can change your body yeah i have pictures of me and my apartment in london and my roommate was from montreal and his girlfriend was over from montreal and i had my arm around him he was taking the picture and it's like my ribs were sticking out crazy absolutely crazy but anyway it's just it's harder when you're older but i am losing so it's yeah it has to be like a year and a half parcel you know i'm at a point now where i think i have a good weight i don't feel thin i don't feel heavy right you don't want to be anemic or no no or anything like that but i think unless you have anything else important that you can think of maybe we should wrap it up let me check my notes here cause budget is i don't think so budget is pulled up and they may be moving us out if we sit here budget oh my god you know you never know somebody called budget on us get the table get those guys out of there get those tables well on behalf of positively beech street i'm bart fellowman rich berger and we're going to wrap up our third episode and we thank you for your attention and listening thank you very much and we'll see you in the future