A group of residents from a Memory Care unit are on a Saturday night outing at a dock bar on the Sassafras River. The Activities Director drove them there in a small, white bus. He’s a man who fashions himself after Elvis with dark, slicked back hair and sideburns. A black linen suit clings to him on this hot, sticky night in July; despite the setting sun, he wears dark glasses.
They are sitting on the deck overlooking the river, but they are facing the music: a man with long red hair cut in a mullet seated on a stool with a small computer on his lap, controlling the karaoke feed, and an Indian woman with long dark hair singing into a mike, her right hand moving as if she were trying to locate the notes in the air. The Memory Care residents don’t mind that she is off-key; they applaud after each song. And the teenagers that are there, at separate tables from their parents, don’t care as long as the mullet man keeps loading their favorite dance songs. They pump their fists in the air to the line “Don’t ever look back,” on “Teenage Dream,” and point to each other, smiling conspiratorially on “Dancing Queen.” Several of the Memory Care residents join them on that one, “You are a dancing queen, young and free, only seventeen.”
Across the river, several rescue boats flash blue emergency lights and shine flood lights on the water around a cluster of party boats. A man overboard perhaps, someone drunk who lost his balance, or maybe a heart attack in the water. Later, we will find out that it was a young girl who fell off the bow of a boat when the captain accelerated too fast. Her body found washed up on a beach the next day. Only eleven.
Elvis is filming the whole outing on his phone. He has a lady on his arm, a resident they call Vanna White for her big smile. He takes her to a table to pet a small white dog that is with a middle-aged couple dressed in white matching boating attire. The dog graciously lets Vanna pet him, tail wagging, and she flashes him her big smile. Elvis films the encounter and then focuses back on the dancers. They are dancing to “Boogie-oogie-oogie” now, the Memory Care residents merging with the teens in a communal shaking of the hips.
The flashing lights across the water are not a part of Elvis’s video. He can barely see the lights at all with his dark glasses on. And when he edits the video for a promotional piece the next day, it will be as if they had never been there at all.
