Laguna Woods Village is a retirement community an hour or so south of LA. There are shops, community centres and a large outdoor pool where, one hot afternoon, 80-year-old Nancy King stands with her toes hooked over the edge and – expert, fish-like – dives in without raising a splash. She jackknifes in the water, points one leg in the air and, doing a neat somersault, emerges, blinking, into the white California light.
Synchronised swimming is generally the preserve of lithe 20-year-olds, much mocked for its promotion to an Olympic sport but requiring more agility, strength and lung capacity than more obviously robust endeavours. To say the Laguna Woods team (oldest member: 96) is an anomaly is an understatement. It has been running for 46 years, has up to 25 members at a time and every year stages an annual 90-minute show, the Aqua-Follies. "It's the same as the Olympic sport," says Valerie Andrews Link, the coach and, at 57, baby of the team. "But we're 40 pounds heavier, 40 years older, 40 miles an hour slower." Sitting alongside King by the pool, she laughs uproariously.
Radical plans for retirement tend to involve travel or downsizing, not the reverse combined spin with half twist. When Margot Bouer, 76, retired from her career as a psychiatric nurse, she and her husband moved to Laguna Woods from Chicago. She had always been athletic; a teenage tennis champion and competitive swimmer. She had also been suffering from MS since a diagnosis in her late 40s. While her husband, a retired lawyer, bought a golf cart and got involved in the politics of the retirement community, she cast around for a new life for herself.
"I thought I'd be a tennis star, and a golf star. But I missed the ball. I fell on the tennis court. Then I went and saw the group perform and said, 'That's for me!'" The water goes some way towards neutralising the effects of the MS and she can't, of course, fall in the pool. As for physical limitations brought on by age, Bouer, who is exactly the kind of person you would hope to find if you moved into a retirement community, bats her hand in the air. "All the stunts are very easy. Oh, please."
We are in the garden a few blocks from the pool, where Bouer and her husband, who suffers from dementia, live. She has been an Aquadette for 19 years, the longest-serving member of the group. It's as much about the community as the swimming. The Aquadettes aren't all best friends, but they are a close and supportive network for each other, at what can be a difficult transitional life stage.
Or as Andrews Link puts it, "The intention of the Aquadettes is that you don't need to be lonely. You need to be in a place that's social, that challenges you physically and also mentally, because it challenges us to memorise the numbers. We're like a family. These women are wonderful."
Nancy King took up synchronised swimming when she was 77. She had worked all her adult life, raised four children and on retiring didn't suffer an identity loss or sudden crash in ambition. She volunteered to teach knitting and crochet classes for a charity for the blind. One day she went to the pool to meet the Aquadettes. "I knew how to swim. Then they asked me to do a somersault. I said, 'I haven't done a somersault probably since I was six.'"
How'd it work out?
"It worked out fine, believe it or not! So I thought maybe I could do the rest. I loved it, I was like a two-year-old."
Men aren't allowed to join, although they frequently ask. But, says King, you can't put them in long gloves and they'd complain about headdresses; really they are no fun to design costumes for. (An annual sewing bee is held to furnish the Aquadettes' wardrobe.) She blinks incredulously. "What do you put on a fella? I mean, really, what do you put on 'em?"
Instead, husbands are permitted to help backstage, with lighting or filming, and are referred to within Laguna Woods as the Aquadudes.
The costume changes are the hardest thing, going from a wet suit to a dry one, and the swimmers wear tights under their suits to aid the process. No one who joins has any training in the sport and the team tries, as far as possible, to operate a no-yelling policy when someone messes up.
"We have one [lady] who gets into a little difficulty," says King. "But we don't holler at her. She does the best she can. She will never be the most synchronised. But she loves it."
"I always say," says Andrews Link, "this is Laguna Woods, not Hollywood."
Little Mermaid-like, there is a stark and moving contrast between the freedom of movement team members have in the water as opposed to on land. The show this year was the first time Bouer used her walker to get to the poolside. Before, she would go in on someone's arm. "I do remember one man saying in intermission, 'I wonder why they let that handicapped person in?' There are always mean people. I don't care. If I do well, then I'm happy. If I can't do it, then it's one more thing I can't do."
The Aquadettes have featured in adverts and on breakfast TV in the US, and Bouer has attracted some attention for her use of medical marijuana, which helps her with the side-effects of MS. "I just carry a tiny pipe in the car. A couple of cigarettes. I grew my own plants. But I use it only for nausea."
In fact, the biggest controversy in the team is the mandatory all-black swimming costumes, which hide nothing. When King was first handed one for a public performance, she balked.
"Then I thought, 'Who cares?'"
"The ladies are all sizes," says Andrews Link. "But they're very confident."
"It doesn't seem to matter any more," says King.
"I was completely blase," says Bouer. "I took for granted my physical skills, but I've never been a beauty. I never thought about it. I've never really learned to do make-up. What can you do with all these wrinkles?" She smiles. "I'm 76 – but as far as I'm concerned I could be 56."
A team member might stop swimming, but no one really retires. You become an Aquadette emeritus and do the costumes or cheerlead. Without the team, says King, she'd be a couch potato and spend far too much time in front of a computer. When her 23-year-old grandson came to see the show one year, "he couldn't believe what old Grandma was up to".
Bouer observes with the critical eye of the former nurse the dependency on pharmacopoeia of some of those around her; she is of a generation, she remarks, that does what the doctor says without asking. "Their lives are scheduled around appointments. I don't dare ask, 'Have you thought about how you would like to die?'" What she gets from the team is solidarity; other vital, intelligent women who do not fit into this mould, united in a common goal.
In May the team starts night swimming, to get used to the cooler water, and training in earnest for the summer show. They work out routines on dry land – "deckwork" – then transfer them to the pool. Andrews Link and King get up to show me some moves; they are graceful, in perfect time with each other; suddenly, effortlessly ageless.
Bouer, meanwhile, points her motorised wheelchair in the direction of the foyer. The team is on a hiatus right now. "What's next?" she says.
