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.”
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung (袁國勇) has done battle with some of the world’s worst threats, including the SARS virus he helped isolate and identify, and he has a warning. Another pandemic is inevitable and could exact damage far worse than COVID-19 pandemic, said the soft-spoken scientist sometimes thought of as Hong Kong’s answer to former US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci. “Both the public and [world] leaders must admit that another pandemic will come, and probably sooner than you anticipate,” he said at the city’s Queen Mary Hospital, where he works and teaches. “Why I make such a horrifying prediction
A high-ranking North Korean diplomat stationed in Cuba defected to South Korea in November last year — just months before Seoul and Havana established diplomatic ties, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said yesterday. North Korean diplomat Ri Il-kyu had been responsible for political affairs at Pyongyang’s embassy in Cuba since 2019, tasked specifically “with obstructing the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Cuba,” South Korea’s Chosun Daily reported. Ri defected to South Korea with his wife and children in early November, making him the highest-ranking North Korean diplomat known to have defected since then-North Korean deputy ambassador to the
INDICTED: US prosecutors said Sue Mi Terry accepted fancy handbags, luxury dinners and thousands of dollars in payments from South Korean intelligence A former CIA employee and senior official at the US National Security Council has been charged with allegedly serving as a secret agent for the South Korean National Intelligence Service, the US Department of Justice said. Sue Mi Terry accepted luxury goods, including fancy handbags, and expensive dinners at sushi restaurants in exchange for advocating South Korean government positions during media appearances, sharing nonpublic information with intelligence officers and facilitating access for South Korean officials to US government officials, an indictment filed in federal court in Manhattan, New York, says. She also admitted to the FBI that she served as a source