The Beauty of Doing Nothing Together. “What you’re doing hardly matters. What matters is inviting someone into the ordinary parts of your life instead of waiting for an occasion that feels worthy of an invitation.”
It’s 1941. The world’s at war and the band’s on fire. Join us at Rick’s Cafe for an unforgettable live event. A Night In Casablanca is an immersive production combining elements of iconic cinema, unforgettable music, and the spectacle of a full jazz orchestra playing Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and more.
Starring jazz legend Richelle ‘Bootsie’ Booth and featuring the sultry tones of Breanne Jayn, A Night In Casablanca is a night to remember.
- Recreates the atmosphere of 1941 at "Rick's Cafe" with big screen projections from the classic movie Casablanca.
- Features classic big-band and swing arrangements by legends like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman.
- Showcases performances starring jazz artist Richelle "Bootsie" Booth and vocalist Breanne Jayn.
- Setlists include iconic era-defining numbers ranging from Moonlight Serenade and In the Mood to String of Pearls and American Patrol.
Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World
Dispatch Faith: A Better Way to Think About Old Age, by Wesley Liu (Penn):
Jen Wilkin’s Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World approaches aging through a Christian lens, arguing that [the] obsession with extending life’s “prime” has never been merely cosmetic. Rather, it’s also based on the belief that we can prolong the years in which we are strongest, healthiest, most productive, and notably, least dependent on anyone else. This is what Wilkin asserts that our culture gets most wrong: We have mistaken independence for dignity, productivity for worth, and youth for the ideal expression of human life.
The result is not simply that Americans fear getting older. We fear becoming people who need other people.
Wilkin’s central insight is that dependence is not a tragic interruption of human flourishing but one of its defining characteristics. From our first breath until our last, we exist because others care for us. The aging process simply exposes a reality that has always been true. As Wilkin writes, growing older means learning to “unlearn the original sin of self-reliance as the aging process gradually, even faithfully, reteaches us dependence.”
Most books about aging focus on how to stave off its physical effects making peace with wrinkles or preparing financially for retirement. Wilkin instead asks what old age is for—and her answer is one of the book’s greatest strengths.
We begin life completely dependent on others. Childhood gradually gives way to increasing freedom and responsibility. Early adulthood is often defined by caring for children, while later adulthood increasingly becomes a season of caring for aging parents before we ourselves return to dependence. Life ends much as it began: receiving care rather than giving it.
This vision exposes a blind spot in modern American culture. We increasingly imagine adulthood, particularly the decades of peak health, productivity, and independence, as the norm toward which every other stage of life points. Children cannot wait to be treated like adults, while adults spend enormous effort trying to appear younger. Somewhere in the early middle decades of life, between youth and retirement, our culture quietly decides that life has reached its ideal form, and every birthday afterward becomes evidence of decline.
Wilkin suggests a far more hopeful paradigm, one in which each season of life prepares us for the next. Infancy teaches us how to receive care. Adulthood teaches us how to give it. Old age teaches us to receive it once again, not as humiliation, but as the final lesson in humility and trust. In that sense, growing old is not life falling apart. It is life reaching its culmination. …
