Florida retirement home hires men to dance with female residents

If you’re a man, and aged 65 or above, there might be a new way for you to become very popular. As reported in the Guardian newspaper, one Florida assisted living community has hired men to move into their residence to help offset the uneven numbers of female compared to male residents.

Edgewater Pointe Estates, located in Boca Raton, has a female to male ratio of nearly 3:1, has hired local men, ranging from college-age students to older gentlemen, to come to the retirement community for social events such as dances and meals, as well as to simply be seen.

And it sounds like the female residents are happy with the arrangement.

“At home, I dance with a broom,” 90-something year-old Edgewater resident Victoria Schabel was quoted as saying. But as she danced with 72 year-old Nick Zaharias, she said “this is better.”

Some retirement homes have ratios even more skewed than Edgewater; the Guardian reports that at the Los Angeles Jewish Home, 90 per cent of residents are women. And for some men, statistics like that are reason enough to move into a retirement community.

“I had to live to be 86 years old before I got odds like that,” Ellis Simon, a Los Angeles Jewish Home resident, told the news source.