WE’RE ALL GONNA BE OLD ONE DAY, unless something drastic happens in the meantime. Might as well start preparing. And I don’t just mean buyin’ into no-load mutual funds or wearin’ earplugs at loud concerts or even buildin’ up the ol’ calcium intake. I mean psychologically preparing oneself to really enjoy the golden years.

Old age doesn’t have to mean sitting around with your large-print Reader’s Digest and right-wing talk radio, forever complaining about Those Kids These Days. No, millions of oldsters are out there having the time of their lives. Two high-profile documentaries at the recently-concluded Seattle International Film Festival showed widely different aspects of this.

Bingo: The Documentary, from local filmmaker John Jeffcoat, showed a more conventional side of senior shenanigans. Shot across America, Britain, and Ireland, and on a Caribbean cruise ship, it’s an hour of 50ish to 90ish ladies and gents having fun while keeping track of dozens of cards and losing small amounts of money (plus one 30ish recovering druggie who hangs out at his mom’s favorite bingo hall as a cheap, clean-and-sober way to pass the hours).

There’s also scenes from Seattle’s own Gay Bingo and an NYC nightclub with bingo nights for young clubbers. The latter’s one of the shortest scenes in the film, but it might be one of the most vital. These young adults who enthusiastically embrace an old folks’ game are asserting their membership in the continuum of life. They’re proudly eschewing the way-obsolete fallacy of generational superiority.

The Lifestyle, from David Schisgall, is just as light and frolicky about a less-common mature-folks’ scene, group-sex party houses. While swinging (or bingo, for that matter) isn’t just an oldster’s sport by any means, the filmmaker chose to emphasize groups your parents’ or grandparents’ ages, in places like Palm Springs and Orange County, CA and (yes!) Littleton, CO, talking about their fun times a-spouse-swappin’.

Besides the talk, we also get guided tours of the orgy rooms in subdivision basements, a topless fetish-fashion show at a big swingers’ convention, and a few brief scenes of naked former-hardbodies doing what women and men have been doing since before you were born. (Some young-adult audience members at the SIFF screening cringed at these shots, despite the director’s in-person pleading for them not to.)

Besides cringing, a viewer could take this all several ways. You could re-evaluate the sexual repression of your own birth family by seeing the film’s subjects as golden-years advocates of sexual liberation. You could cheer that the hypocrisy of Reagan Country is being challenged from within, however discreetly. Or you could simply dismiss it all as the actions of bourgeois hedonists who, like many other Americans, appear to be embracing the idea of sex as a leisure-time sport, no more or less personal than bingo, in order to avoid the more troublesome, reality-questioning aspects of real intimacy. (More about that latter idea in this space next week.)

But I prefer to think of it as a sign of hope, that as we all get older we’ll still get to assert the right to get it on with our fellow humans’ bodies–liver spots, upper-arm flab, and all.

I also have to admit, though, that the bingo players sure seemed to be having a lot more fun than the swingers.

Tomorrow: Why Seattle loves being the fictional headquarters of Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers sequel.