They were all sitting half dead in their wheelchairs, mostly paralyzed and just existing, they didn’t live. They watched some television, but if you had asked them what they had watched, they probably would not have been able to tell you.

We brought in a young woman who was a dancer and we told her to play beautiful, old-fashioned music. She brought in Tchaikovsky records and so on and started to dance among these old people, all in their wheelchairs which had been set in a circle.

In no time the old people started to move. One old man stared at his hand and said, “Oh, my God, I haven’t moved this hand in ten years.” And the 104-year-old, in a thick German accent, said, “That reminds me of when I danced for the Tsar of Russia.”

from “The Listener,” 1983