With huge headphones propped over her white hair, Polish DJ and activist Wirginia Szmyt, 85, grooves alongside a drag queen on a float at the Warsaw Pride parade.
DJ Wika, as she is known, is a young-at-heart great-grandmother determined to break down stereotypes.
“Old age is not a disease,” she said, each wrist adorned with a stack of bracelets as colorful as her personality.
Photo: AFP
“This does not mean you have to be a plant and look out the window,” she said.
Through her performances, Wika shows her staunch support for seniors and advocates for gender equality, LGBTQ rights and a more open-minded and accepting Poland.
“I am for unity, for equality, for love, for tolerance, for openness,” she said ahead of her Pride performance in June. “All this allows a person to live joyfully.”
Photo: AFP
After retiring from a career in youth rehabilitation at a correctional facility, Wika began organizing events for senior citizens, designed to “help them adjust to the 21st century.”
What began as a series of educational events, including meetings with faith leaders and politicians, went on to include parties, music, trips to the seaside and celebrations.
“In our country there was no tradition of offering something to elderly people,” she said. “The senior was simply the person who took care of the family.”
Her seniors’ parades, modeled after LGBTQ Pride parades, began in 2013, with the very first one drawing 14,000 participants in Poland’s capital.
“I thought to myself that since there is such a perception of senior citizens — that they are bothersome, just getting in the way, old — then we should make a parade, to show how beautiful they are,” Wika said.
Every year since, similar seniors’ parades have been held in several Polish cities, and DJ Wika’s 26-year-long career in music continues to flourish.
“If we want to fight for our rights, we have to show up,” she said.
DJ Wika has performed at Pride parades, women’s rights festivals and celebrations in cities such as Nice, Frankfurt and Helsinki, but one of her regular gigs is a dance night for seniors at Warsaw’s Mlociny shopping mall.
It is here, amid music that ranges from Latin hits to Eurovision contenders and her country’s own 1980s “disco polo,” that Wika’s vibrant audience comes together for a night of dancing and fun.
“Music fills me with life,” said Wika, adding that her goal is “to bring people together.”
She has built up a loyal following.
Maria Michalak, a nurse in her 60s, made an hour-long metro commute across Warsaw with her husband to attend the Mlociny mall dance.
“Compared to other such events for seniors, this is the best,” she said. “Maybe they should happen even more often.”
Andrzej Jan Kuspik, a 73-year-old pensioner, attends DJ Wika’s sets every month that he can.
“She does this for us,” he said, adding that he was so thankful that he bought Wika flowers for International Women’s Day.
Although her gigs mean regular travel across Poland and abroad, Wika does not plan on stopping anytime soon.
“Every one of us has an inner child,” she said. “If this child wakes up then we can feel younger.”
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
RSS