Her face flushed red, Silvia O?Connor gulped a sip of soda before skipping back to the dance floor, joining her friends in the electric slide.
Almost 80, the Britain native was having a blast at her first prom.
“I went to high school during the war, so I didn?t get a prom!” she said. “This is my first and it?s great.”
O?Connor was among some 90 people packed into the Baltimore County Overlea-Fullerton Senior Center on Thursday night in Linover for the first-ever “senior prom,” where recent high school graduates taught seniors the electric slide and chicken dance, and seniors taught the kids to jitterbug and do the cab driver, a wall line dance.
The collision of an obvious generation gap ? Buck Meisel in jeans and a flannel twirled a redhead in a jean skirt and flip-flops ? was just what event organizer Katie Dix envisioned.
Active in student government association at Towson High, she wanted to get involved in community politics before she heads to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in the fall to study government.
She attended a February meeting of the Linover Improvement Association, just when leaders were discussing ways to re-energize the aging community.
Last year, they said, the association was in jeopardy of falling apart.
“We need to get people involved, and it?s hard,” said President Bud Herb. “People say they don?t have the time.”
But somewhere in the back, Dix stood up and introduced herself.
“We were like, where did you come from?” Herb said. “You don?t get kids that come along like that too often.”
Dix organized the senior prom and says she has other ways to get the community?s seniors and youth together, like an Olympics, senior health fair and blood drive. She said she wanted to break stereotypes.
“Not only do the kids stereotype the old people, [thinking] that they can?t do anything on their own, but we?re stereotyped too, as lazy troublemakers,” Dix said. “We can learn about each other.”
At the prom, young boys clumsily waltzed with women old enough to be their grandmothers, and one man lifted his canes to twist. Herb and activist Carroll Pupa surveyed the scenes from the buffet, hoping the kids will also learn to lobby county government for community needs, like a new sewer system and schools.
“These seniors are the community infrastructure ? they kept us alive,” Herb said. “But we?re planting seeds here, and I think we?re going to grow.”
