Virginia Beach retirement community seniors perform ‘Ice Cream and Cake’ at ODU basketball game
NORFOLK — Annie Alberi sauntered slowly onto the basketball court using a walker.
The crowd, announced at more than 6,000, had little to cheer for Wednesday night during the Old Dominion men’s blowout loss to rival James Madison at Chartway Arena.
But late in the second half, Alberi flung aside her walker (she didn’t need it in the first place) and, with her fellow residents from the Atlantic Shores Retirement Community in Virginia Beach, brought the house down.
After nearly a month of practice, about a dozen fast-moving residents and some Atlantic Shores employees showed off their moves during ODU’s traditional “Ice Cream and Cake” dance.
The Buckwheat Boys’ dizzying ditty has become a tradition at ODU football and basketball games since about 2005, when the school’s dance team brought it back from a cheerleading camp at Rutgers University. These days, ODU cheerleaders lead the hand-raising, feet-sliding dance to the catchy (some might say annoying) song: the lyrics in the one-minute version at ODU include 46 mentions of “Ice Cream and Cake.”
Beth Bagley’s dance classes at Atlantic Shores generally feature some up-tempo music. Bagley, 74, and known to some of her fellow residents as “the teenager,” mixes her favorite songs from the 1970s and ’80s with current hits.
“It’s not all Frank Sinatra,” said Bagley, a dance and exercise instructor at the community. “It’s good beat music that they have to dance to.”
But over the past three weeks, Bagley and her classes “had to shift their gears up a bit,” she said.
Bagley and many of her dancers had never heard of “Ice Cream and Cake” before ODU invited Atlantic Shores — an ODU Athletics sponsor — to bring some residents to a game.
“I didn’t know a thing — zero, zilch, about ‘Ice Cream and Cake,’ never seen it performed,” said Bagley, who moved to Atlantic Shores from Memphis two years ago. “I’m a closet cheerleader from way back when, so I said yes, we’d love to.”
On Wednesday night, Monarchs fans mostly sat on their hands during a 78-62 loss — the team’s eighth setback in nine games. But with less than four minutes to play, Bagley and her fellow residents — wearing matching white shirts and ranging in age from their mid-60s to 80s — got a rousing ovation after the song ended with its signature tagline: “Eat it!”
“The most difficult part of it was the speed — it’s a lot faster than they were used to,” Bagley said. “A lot of things we dance to are not as up-tempo.”
