In sunset years, let them entertain you

Martin Schwartz did not think of becoming an entertainer for the elderly, others like himself, until after he’d had a heart attack and bypass surgery, gotten a pacemaker installed in his chest and had a shunt put in his head, that to relieve the pressure on his brain. When it looked like he would need kidney dialysis as well, his daughters said it was time to give up his townhouse in Connecticut and move into, as they say, “a residence.”

At the one here, $4,100 a month got him a two-bedroom unit with views of the Hudson River, most of his meals and a calendar full of activities such as bridge lessons and bingo. But what piqued Schwartz’s interest were the speakers and performers brought into the 310-unit Hyatt Classic Residence: Each Monday a perky actress gave a “lecture concert” with a Broadway theme; on Tuesdays, a former City College political scientist spoke on current events, like the war in Iraq; other days a woman read from “Chicken Soup for the Golden Soul,” those “Heartwarming Stories for People 60 and Over.”

Schwartz, who is 85, listened from the audience to the lot of them, these modern-day vaudevillians of the senior circuit, then went to the assistant manager of the home, MaryAnn Ramos, and told her, “I can do that.”

She believed him. From the moment he arrived in 2003, the retired business professor had been one of the residence’s natural characters, an impish man with a shaved head, goatee and endless supplies of bow ties -- and hobbies. Schwartz filled the walls of his unit with his collections of Currier & Ives prints, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs memorabilia and cases full of antique silver grape shears. But when Ramos put him on the calendar, he picked another hobby as his topic: his collection of McGuffey Readers, the 1800s schoolhouse primers that molded millions of American children.

After 50 people showed up, and applauded at the end, Schwartz proposed another program, on playwright Maxwell Anderson. “And I told him, ‘If you have any other ideas ... ,’ ” recalled Ramos, the home’s young scheduler, who assumed that Schwartz’s goal was merely to give such talks occasionally in their high-rise residence just north of New York City. She was wrong about that.

Schwartz aimed to join the senior circuit, to become one of the troopers meeting the call to entertain the 1 million Americans in 32,000 licensed “assisted living” facilities and the 1.5 million in nursing homes and the millions more close to his age who still were trying to make it on the outside but spent afternoons at community centers. And the numbers were growing. This was the future.

Martin Schwartz decided to ask Kim Breden what he needed to do to get on the circuit.

The impresario

She is the singer who strides in each Monday at 11 a.m. with a smile for everyone and sets her boombox atop a piano in the Yonkers Room or Wintergarden Room, the main lobby lounge at the Hyatt residence. Sometimes she plays scratchy tapes of the original Broadway performers. Other times she sings herself while giving mini-history lessons in loud clear tones that make it easier for her audience to learn, say, how Florenz Ziegfeld’s fondness for his leading ladies put “angry husbands” at his door.

The Ziegfeld Follies were the subject of four programs this fall. On one Monday, 60 residents filled the lounge, a few with personal aides. Most everyone wore a sweater, except Breden, who was in a pink jacket and floral blouse. When one woman shuffled in late, Breden welcomed her by name, then took her elbow to guide her to a seat. Heading back to the piano, she touched a second woman’s shoulder, then she invited everyone to sing along to a melody of another time, “Bicycle Built for Two,” and sing they all did, “Daisy, Daisy, / Give me your answer do....”

Breden, who is half their age, in her early 40s, hardly expected this to be her career, of course.

She was raised here in suburban Westchester County, the daughter of an electrician and a nurse, but one grandmother had been a singer during the Depression, and she inherited the bug. She got master’s degrees in voice and music therapy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, performed in that area and elsewhere and spent a few years in Germany, where she was cast in a Broadway-scale production of “Phantom of the Opera,” in a “swing part ... on any night playing one of nine people.”

But it was a familiar scenario when Breden tried her luck along the real Broadway: jobs temping and waitressing while she came to grips with the reality that “there are 500 blond sopranos waiting for the same role.” Envisioning a future playing the “second fire hydrant from the left in the chorus ... I said, ‘Enough is enough.’ ”

In 1999, she formed Be Mused Productions and offered programs for schools such as sing-alongs and “Life Size Pop-Up StoryBooks.” But Breden said she missed performing for “mature audiences,” especially ones who might “love this music I love,” the old-fashioned musicals, like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s.

The Hyatt was the first senior residence to give her a try, in the summer of 2003. But she did not understand the extent of this market until last January, when she assembled a list of other private facilities that might want impressive programming to help in the competition to attract new residents and have budgets to pay a performer $100 or $150.

“I sent out 40 letters. Cold letters,” she said. “Twenty-two sites called me back within a week. Seventeen booked a program immediately.”

A year later, Breden offers 28 different lecture-concerts -- four on the Gershwins, four on Disney musicals and so on -- and stages more elaborate “mini-musicals,” using several other performers, for special occasions.

Someone occasionally reminds her, “Kim, this isn’t like being on Broadway,” as if she were a star reduced to doing dinner theater. She’s not that, though, just as she’s not one of the young wannabes who use such gigs to learn to work an audience.

Breden has come close to wondering What am I doing here? when she finds herself before an “extremely low-functioning” audience, perhaps 15 people in wheelchairs who appear to be asleep, “lost in their space of growing older.” And then ...

“All of a sudden, a woman in the corner starts singing,” she says. “Or someone will grab my hand and they’ll say, ‘My husband and I were at the opening of that 65 years ago.’ ”

That happens also in a place like the Hyatt, where most residents are in better shape, in independent or assisted living, “free-range seniors,” she calls them. With them, the challenge is to reinforce the life they’ve lived -- their memories -- without suggesting that it’s finished.

During her Ziegfeld Follies program, when Breden comes to comedy star Fanny Brice, she asks, “Who knows what role she played on radio?” Several voices call out, “Baby Snooks!”

“Ding, ding,” Breden says, “20 points.”

It was soon after she became a regular here that she noticed how one new resident always raised his hand when she asked a question and told her things she didn’t know, such as how opera singer Ezio Pinza came to be cast as the dashing French planter in “South Pacific” -- Pinza had unfilled dates, so his agent approached Rodgers and Hammerstein, asking if they had any suitable roles on the horizon. Breden began incorporating that into her lecture and returned the favor when the newcomer asked to borrow a book on Broadway history.

The next thing Martin Schwartz asked to borrow was her mailing list, the one she used to get jobs.

The professor

He was born in a cold-water tenement on Manhattan’s East Side, near the shop where his father rolled cigars. His older brother made it from New York public schools to Harvard Law and argued before the Supreme Court. But Schwartz came of age in the Depression and stayed closer to home, at City College, where he studied economics and was president of the Dramatics Society. He did a little amateur theater afterward, until World War II, when the Army sent him to the South Pacific.

After that, there was no time for play acting: He started a business importing greeting cards, had two daughters, met Harry Truman at a convention, moved to the ‘burbs, got a doctorate and became chairman of the business department at Rockland Community College. The school also used his toastmaster’s personality for outreach to the community, which is how he became an expert on Maxwell Anderson -- he organized Rockland County’s celebration of the centennial of the playwright’s birth, talking actress Helen Hayes into serving as honorary chairwoman. Schwartz stayed on at the college until he was 80, when he took an “early retirement” deal.

By then, he had lost his wife to cancer and was having those health problems of his own. He had the heart attack on a Scandinavian cruise and had to be lowered over the side to an emergency craft. That’s when his daughters thought he shouldn’t drive anymore and suggested he undergo screening at a local clinic before renewing his license. He passed and kept his car.

The point was, circumstances might put him in a home -- but he didn’t have to stay put.

About the same time he got the mailing list from Breden, he asked an old friend to make him a brochure. Decades ago, artist Joe Caroff created the 007 logo used in the James Bond films. Now he put his own caricature of the un-Bond-like Schwartz on the cover of a flier, with the motto “When this man speaks ... people listen!” The inside listed three programs -- on the McGuffey Readers, Anderson and on George M. Cohan, “The Man Who Owned Broadway.”

That’s how Schwartz wound up one lunch hour recently carrying his notes and props -- old books and blowup charts -- into the Reformed Church of Bronxville. The Senior Citizens of Bronxville signed him up sight unseen for its weekly program of “scholarly fun.” The group had recently heard from an expert on Grand Central Terminal’s cast iron eagles, a singer who dresses like composer Stephen Foster and a Realtor who discussed how to sell a condo.

Schwartz places his notes on a podium set up under a raised basketball hoop in the church gym. Of the audience of 55, only two are men. The women have immaculate beauty parlor hair.

Schwartz has written on a blackboard “William H. McGuffey 1800-1873; First Reader, 1836; 1836-1920, 22 million sold” and he begins by passing around several of the vintage volumes, saying, “Be careful with them.”

He is almost a year into his “second career” and has settled into a relaxed schedule of about one lecture a month. He hoped to get $150 a pop but found the market price was $100. When one group said it could afford only $50, he asked if they’d pay him $150 anyway -- and let him give back $100 as a contribution.

His hour on the old texts tells the story of two publishing partners in Cincinnati who wanted to create “an eclectic first reader” and turned for help to a local group known as “The Intellectuals.” McGuffey was a professor of ancient languages in a day when teachers wandered from farm to farm to sign up students. The first words in his first book were “the dog/the dog ran.”

At one point, Schwartz wanders from the podium, and it’s hard to hear him. “Use the microphone!” someone says, and he resumes the tale of a time when there were no qualms about teaching moral values such as how boys must be stalwart and not cry when they fall, for “if you cry, the other boys will call you a baby.” That gets a laugh, and he goes on to how these were the books that taught America about the Golden Rule, Mary’s lamb and George Washington and the cherry tree.

Then he goofs. He wants to end with a rare funny fable from the readers in which a man learns all sorts of bad news: His dog is dead, the horses too, the house burned down, his mother is gone. But just as the story of the “poor gentleman” is about to reach its climax, he can’t find the page with the conclusion. He wanders behind the blackboard in a vain search. “Oh, well,” he shrugs, and the ladies groan -- then applaud anyway.

During a Q&A;, someone asks how he became a collector.

“It’s something to do,” he says, and he throws in a plug, “Incidentally, I give several different lectures.” He describes the one on George M. Cohan, singing a few bars of “Give My Regards to Broadway” before they adjourn for tea and cookies.

The fans

Several days later, Kim Breden does another program at the Hyatt, and Schwartz invites her to stay for lunch.

As they take seats in the dining room, another residents tells the singer that he is going to serenade his wife with one of the songs she had featured that day: “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You.”

Breden carries a note from another couple. After her performance, Murray Lawner, 89, came up to the piano and handed it to her, saying, “After you read this, throw it away.” She replied, “No, it’s my treasure.”

The week before, Lawner, who once defused bombs for the federal government, hadn’t felt well enough to make the show. Breden had gone up to the apartment to sing for him and his wife, Martha, who is 88. It was their 68th anniversary.

Their card has butterflies on the cover and says, “We both continue to feel so touched and blessed to have you.” At lunch, Breden says she’s become such a fixture at these places that residents sometimes give messages to pass to their relatives in other homes. She’s singing at a holiday tea at the one where Schwartz’s 92-year-old brother lives.

Schwartz says he visits once a month but that it’s difficult because his brother doesn’t remember much. He’ll ask, “How are Mom and Pop doing?” Or he’ll learn that some more friends have died and ask, “How is it that you and I are still alive?”

As a woman shuffles by, Breden takes her hand and asks, “How are you, Ethel?”

“You know the names of more people here than I do,” Schwartz says, “and I live here.”

That’s the essence of her act, though -- it’s all about them, the old people. Schwartz is the first to say that his new sideline is about him, “a search for relevance,” one of his daughters calls it. So what? The audiences seem to like them. He says he’s just gotten a call from a Bronxville group -- they want him back to do his Cohan program. And he’s developing several new ones on “Giants of Broadway.”

They try to imagine what sort of entertainment people like them will be offering in these places decades in the future, when the baby boomers are here -- or perhaps Breden herself. “Probably the Beatles and Elvis shows,” she says with a laugh, before she grows uncharacteristically quiet, then somber.

“No one will be doing musical theater,” she says. “I wonder who is going to keep my memories alive.”