Bucks Grand Dancers still stepping out
The fountain of youth flows freely here. The Milwaukee Bucks Grand Dancers are hard at work in this secondfloor studio of the Elite Sports Club-River Glen on Good Hope Road, practicing their next dance routine but looking 10, 20 years younger than they really are.
With the music jumping and the bass pumping, this dance team — where everyone is at least 55 years old — is getting down on the dance floor.
With some of them flipping their white and gray hair back to “My Friends (We Get Turnt Up)” by Mr. Hotspot, the dancers are mostly unaware of who the rapper artist is, or what he is even saying, and it clearly doesn’t matter as they grin ear to ear.
They are practicing their 90-second, 180-step routine over and over again to get it just right for the next Bucks game on Wednesday, workin’ it right down to the sexy hip swivels we’re used to seeing from the Milwaukee Bucks dance team a few generations their junior.
“Well … we try!” said 70-year-old Peggy Harvey. “Of course our uniforms are from here (she points to her collarbone) down to here (points to knees) so it’s not like we’re the young girls who don’t have much on. If we do a lot of shaking with our hips, we have the jerseys to cover everything.
“We always laugh when the young girls are shaking, we’re like: oh look at that, all their body parts quit moving! We do a thing and we get the arm flaps. …We keep telling the girls: This is your future!
“But I hope it looks like we’re having fun because we really are.”
Doctors have asked some of them what they’ve been doing, because their health has improved. Their diabetes is managed with a good diet and dancing, which is way more fun than exercise. Health never wore a happier face.
Watching them brings to mind a great line from
I Love Lucy: Just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there’s no fire in the furnace. You may not appreciate “aging well” until you start to see the lines in the mirror and feel the aches yourself, but everyone can appreciate the sheer joy on the faces of all 21 dancers.
Harvey has been with the Bucks Grand Dancers since they formed 11 years ago and like everyone else, she’s auditioned every year to keep her spot on the team. The Grand Dancers perform at home games about once a month, or eight times a season, but they also perform other places such as nursing homes.
Under the direction of former Detroit Pistons dancer Tricia Crawford, this isn’t polka at Polish Fest (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The music and the moves are modern.
“We really push the envelope,” said Crawford. “We give them harder choreography and maybe pull them out of their comfort zone a little bit. They want to get it. They surprise me sometimes. I always think I’m going to have to change something and make it simpler and then next week they’ve got it together.”
The challenge is both physical and mental — and beneficial to their health.
“It is hard work, because Tricia raises the bar every time we do a new routine,” said Harvey, who said the team practices 3-5 hours a week at Elite, and again on Sundays at her house. “I don’t like to exercise, so this is it for me.”
“The big benefit is my memory,” said Jerry Friday, 74. “You have to memorize the choreography. That takes a lot of work and a lot of practice. I find that my memory has improved.”
Friday grew up dancing to Elvis, Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis. His mother taught him the basic box step so he could go to his first sock hop at Rufus King High School (Class of 1963), but the really cute girl he danced with later complained that he “counted the whole time.”
But he kept dancing, sometimes the only guy at Jazzercise, or Zumba, and he got good enough to convince his wife Angie to try out with him for the Bucks Grand Dancers 11 years ago. They arrived as a couple and found an extended family. When Angie was hospitalized last year and missed a game, the dance team wore red hearts for her, and when she passed away, Jerry had his Bucks Grand Dancer family to turn to.
“There’s a tremendous amount of love that’s on the team,” said Friday. “It’s like a family. And it’s so diverse. Who would ever think all these people coming together? It’s so loving.”
“We’re in it together,” said Harvey.
Shirley Browne, at age 76, is the “oldest” member on the team, and her story reminds us how far we’ve come.
There was no girls basketball team to join at North Division High School in Milwaukee in 1955, so she joined a semipro women’s team at age 14 sponsored by Real Refrigeration that practiced at Riverside University High School. “I loved the game,” she said.
Then she had a family — seven kids — and a job for 40 years, where she had perfect attendance for 20, before she discovered Bucks Grand Dancers.
“This really fits all of my hobbies,” said Browne. “I love sports, I used to play basketball and I love dancing. To have those things together, for my favorite team, this is heaven to me.
“And when my mother says, this is too much, you need to rest, I say, this is my social life! They are like family to me. And it’s fun exercise.”
This team is so close they go to the Italian Community Center on “oldies” night.”
I used to think the only good thing about turning 55 would be the senior discounts. How foolish. This is what life at 55 and up could be — supportive and sassy, fun and fabulous — and who wouldn’t look forward to that?
“We are young at heart,” said Harvey, “and young in mind.”
Lori Nickel writes about health and fitness for the average person in her weekly Chin Up column. Check out the Bucks Grand Dancers video online. Email her at lnickel@journalsentinel.com and follow her on Twitter at @LoriNickel and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ ChinUpLoriNickel.