Here were two senior citizens simply trying to keep the romance alive. One of my favorite songs, this jolted me with mixed emotions. I looked up to see Tony the First and the tiny blonde dancing groin-to-groin (and also cheek to cheek) to “I Only Have Eyes For You” by The Flamingos. It was something like a Kylie Jenner gloss stick and she was something like a bubbly Avon saleswoman. Somewhere in between gagging on my inedible hamburger and waiting for a good song to take my grandmother up to dance, I ended up buying a lip-stain from her. Left handed people prefer vanilla ice cream,” said a really nice platinum-haired lady sitting at my table. “I haven’t proven it yet but I’ve been studying it since college. It’s impossible to say no to a Carmela Soprano-Fran Dresher-hybrid peddling makeup. Okay, he didn’t actually kiss his hand, but let’s just say the TV credits had definitely gone to this man’s head.Ī notification had still not arrived to confirm that the person I thought I was interested in was interested in me, so I continued to half-way immerse myself in this experience and learned something else.

He sat swirling his red wine in a gold pinky ring as Nicky came over and kissed his hand. Soon I made eye contact with another man named Tony the Second, who has actually had small roles in shows like The Sopranos and Board Walk Empire and once threatened to break my dad’s neck for driving a tick above speed limit at a community we rented in when I was a kid. His date, who I learned he had been engaged to for 25 years, was a tiny blonde woman in her early 70s, wearing the tightest black spandex American Apparel-esque pleather dress I’ve ever seen outside of college bars.

Tony the First wore a black button up with gold speckled Fred Flintstone-like spots and ordered two whiskey sours to bring back to his table that was serendipitously seated next to my table of 12. There, I began my night of meeting multiple men named Tony. Overwhelmed by new stimuli, I headed straight to the bar for a Hendricks and club soda with two limes to take it all in. A totally fair childhood aspiration, albeit one that has unfortunately persisted over time. I imagine, as young kids playing on the street in Brooklyn, they fantasized about possessing the biggest baseball bat on the block and some day bedding as many women as Frank Sinatra - the quintessence of New York masculinity. But the band members and patrons who lionize Tony Soprano, they were the ones who really caught my eye. There are also those who are less Jew-mobster and more “Deadhead,” in addition to straight up local revelers. The live music scene in Boca brings out a slice of Semitic life that I’ve never seen before: aspiring capos who’ve all had a bar mitzvah and their female counterparts. The “band,” if you want to call four men who warble along to hits of the ‘50s and ‘60s in matching red sports coats and black undershirts, brand themselves as “street corner harmonizers.” They are local celebrities who run the Boca nightlife circuit with an act that is akin to karaoke for a mixture of leather jacket-wearing baby boomers and their parents. Handing out tootsie rolls and lazing on lawn chairs gabbing at her bungalow colony, she befriended the parents of Nicholas years ago, who now sings in a band called Nicky and the Paradons. Ninety-two years old and happy-as-a-clam with a sports bar chicken parmesan and zero alcoholic beverages, she leads a close comparison to Lucille Ball. So after spending too much of my day anticipating a dopamine-inducing text from a particular male human, I now focused on my grandmother, Hattie. It’s painful in the numbest of ways to watch your favorite family members labor through the melancholy of senescence.

Every opportunity to exist mindfully in a dysfunctional family outing has become prime opportunity for material. Now, at age 27, with an increasingly refined palette and tamer nightlife expectations, I had no issue surveying the scene at the senior nightlife hot spot.

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