The halftime performance by Rihanna was one of the highlights of this year’s Super Bowl. First live concert
in five years by the platinum-selling ‘Umbrella’ singer was thrilling and even served as a surprise pregnancy announcement.
The performance, which was the second-most watched Super Bowl halftime show in history, sparked
innumerable parodies and tributes, but the most widely shared one to Rihanna came from a senior living facility.
An amazing recreation of Rihanna’s performance is performed by a group of senior women at the Arcadia
Senior Living facility in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in a TikTok video that has amassed over 32.2 million views:
The senior ladies brag that their halftime performance is superior to Rihanna’s. A large number of viewers concurred, calling the popular video ‘wonderful’ and the ‘greatest thing ever.
Do we have to live there until we are seniors? There was one commenter. ‘This is the finest thing I’ve seen today,’ another wrote.
After just two or three practice runs, resident and video participant Ora Rampenthal claims it was shot in one take: According to her, we simply have inherent skill, she told the Bowling Green Daily News.
The video eventually got to Rihanna after receiving millions of views… and in the kindest way the megastar reached out to them.
Arcadia Senior Living said on Facebook that they were given a bouquet of lovely flowers and a message from Rihanna and Roc Nation that read, ‘You Ladies Dancing Was Incredible.’
The acknowledgement from such a big star moved everyone at the senior facility. They wrote, ‘Rihanna has delivered the moment we’ve been waiting for.’
The center’s director of community relations, Paige Oakes, said BuzzFeed News, ‘We were just in shock.
‘We’ve been waiting for Rihanna to respond for the entire time, not really expecting it to ever happen because we know she’s busy and we didn’t really know if she saw it or not,’ the statement reads.
Oakes told HuffPost, ‘We were very happy to learn that Rihanna watched the video and saw our lovely girls having a good time and dancing to her music.’
The seniors also received a bouquet of roses from rap icon Jay-Z in addition to flowers from Rihanna.
According to Oakes, she never imagined the video would become so popular. While many people in
younger generations dream of going viral on TikTok, many elderly have no idea what the app even existed.
We had to explain TikTok to the other half of the group because, as Oakes told HuffPost, ‘I would say
half were aware of it. We merely wanted to provide the residents with something interesting and novel.’
The now-famous seniors, she continued, were ‘enjoying all the fame and attention.’ Three of the
seniors dance to Dannyice’s “Look At Me Now” in a subsequent video, boasting their then-26 million views.
The video has resonated, according to Maitlin Nuckols, director of life engagement at the facility, since it portrays senior adults in a good and enjoyable way.
Everyone enjoys seeing the elder generation having fun and being carefree, according to Nuckols, who spoke to Buzzfeed News.
‘You typically think of the elderly in this way, but I feel like this video just kind of portrays an another aspect of them,’ the viewer said.
Rampenthal reportedly told the Bowling Green Daily News that it was entertaining to see himself on television.
Who would have imagined two weeks ago that we’d be on TV and be contacted by all the different news media? Simply receiving roses from Jay-Z has changed everything.