Humans may one day live to be 200
The promise of extreme longevity can make you wish you were dead
Since 2016, I have been sharing a video with my broadcast students featuring a live television interview with a lovely woman named Flossie Dickey. Flossie died about nine months after the news report which aired on her 110th birthday. Her longevity earned her the distinction of Washington state’s oldest resident of record. In the end she became something of a folk hero and one of the internet’s best loved characters.
While my focus in the classroom is the reporter’s execution of this interview (and I DO mean execution), invariably it is Flossie herself, not the reporter, who seems to garner all of the students’ attention.
Without fail, my students almost immediately rise to defend the somewhat disagreeable subject. Why? Not completely because of the awkward and seemingly insensitive television reporter and her clueless colleagues, “back at the studio”, screeching and chuckling on the live feed. The teenagers come to her defense because they understand her: Flossie has had enough.
Flossie doesn’t want to be on television. She doesn’t want to have a birthday party. She doesn’t want much of anything. Flossie is done.
The video has been spoofed by SNL, aired on the Tonight Show, covered by news outlets the world over, and immortalized in a perfectly grating glottal fry scream-song called “Flossie Dickey Bounce”.
Every year, my students become overwhelmed at the sight of 110 years, 279 days of life, and all of the limitations of centenarian existence, personified by Flossie who is sitting in a wheelchair, repeatedly trying and failing to lift an oversized Good Day Spokane coffee mug to her lips. And it makes them sad.
Perhaps this diminutive force touches something in teens the rest of us have momentarily forgotten: Flossie has senioritis.
“I am tired,” Flossie says, loud and clear. She is not amused. She is not gracious. She is not “one…
