If you picked up this copy of Prime at our third annual Prime Life Senior Expo at Springfield’s MGM Casino on Sept. 8, thank you! I hope I got a moment to speak with you as you came through the entrance. As always, the registration table was my post for the event, and I love connecting with readers.
I also hope you found the information at the Expo valuable and useful. We try to bring together the best local experts in finance, health, living arrangements, travel and more to make it easy for you to find the information you need. And I hope you got to catch one of the Cameo Club’s two shows. These talented ladies, all former contestants (and past queens) of the Ms Massachusetts Senior America pageant, never disappoint!
If you didn’t get the chance to join us at the Expo, this issue is your virtual trip through the Aria Ballroom. You’ll find ads from nearly every exhibitor within this issue. If you visit any of them, please let them know you saw their information in Prime.
It’s a legendary September at the Big E
When did you learn how to twist? I remember my babysitter, Pamela Hunde, teaching me how to twist in my parent’s living room when I was about five years old. It was the latest dance craze, and the teen babysitters in my neighborhood were caught up in the frenzy. We twisted up a storm, Pamela, my other babysitter, Marilyn, and I.
Since then I’ve twisted at high school dances, on cruise ships and even in my own kitchen when Alexa played some oldies from the 1960s. And I’m betting I’m not alone.
That’s why I was so excited to interview the man himself, the legend, THE Chubby Checker about his two days of shows at this year’s Big E.
He’d just returned to his East Coast home from a three-day gig in Las Vegas, putting on what his press agent Shelly Field explained were “100-minute shows” to packed crowds.
Checker loved to talk about performing, about teaching the world to “dance apart to the beat” - which is what the twist did in 1961, and how his 2 minutes and 42 seconds on American Bandstand not only changed dancing forever, it helped catapult Dick Clark to fame.
He also told me that his high school friends, who knew him as Ernie Evans, had no idea that he was Chubby Checker until they saw him on American Bandstand that fateful August.
The man who taught us to do the twist, the fly and the pony - which hip hop slowed down and turned into the bop - Checker said, will be twistin’ again on the Court of Honor Stage Sept. 16 and 17 at 2 p.m.
While we’re reminiscing, do you recall the first time you heard “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter?” How about “Henry the Eighth?” I bet you were in the car, maybe with you mom and dad, or in your room listening to your favorite station on your new transistor radio.
In 1965 and ‘66, those songs and more by Herman and Herman’s Hermits were “played hundreds of times a day” on radio stations around the world, according to Peter Noone, who took on the persona of Herman for the British Invasion band at the age of 15.
Noone will be bringing those songs and more from his days with Herman’s Hermits – along with tunes he sang and produced with Debbie Boone, David Bowie,and other artists from the 1970sand ‘80s – to the Court of Honor Stage at the Big E as well.
The man who’ was voted the “Sexiest Artist of the Year” by VH1 in the 1990s will be welcoming his loyal fans – he Noonatics – and everyone else to his concerts at 2 p.m. on Sept. 23 and 24.
Whatever you do this September, I hope you make the most of the month. And as always, thanks for reading,
Debbie Gardner
dgardner@thereminder.com
