By Debbie Gardner
dgardner@thereminder.com
Retirement is a blank slate, offering freedom from schedules, obligations and the pressures to meet expectations and deadlines.
It also means the absence of a familiar structure to the day, and for many individuals, purpose.
What to do with the freedom of a retirement lifestyle, and how to use that time, is an individual choice, of course.
But there are many alternatives to golf and the senior center.
In a quest to see how local retirees are choosing to use their newfound free time, Prime spoke to four individuals who have chosen very different approaches.
Below are their stories.
The Entrepreneurs
They met through an app called Nextdoor and then connected through the campaign of a political hopeful in Springfield. Working together on campaign materials at a coffee shop in Gasoline Alley, 67-year-old Nancy Domenichelli and 64-year-old Diana Langle, both of Springfield, Massachusetts, seemed to hit it off almost immediately, and a friendship ensued.
Then they discovered they both enjoyed smoking cannabis.
That connection brought the friendship to a new level.
It also led to the idea for a product.
Langle explained she is a traditional tobacco smoker as well as a cannabis user, but has always used a special, disposable filter to help capture the tar from the cigarettes she smoked. However, she couldn't do the same with the preroll she and Domenichelli enjoyed.
One day when they were smoking together, Domenichelli said Langle “reached for her [cigarette] filter and I reached for a joint [and] we looked at each other …. Why doesn’t [the filter] fit on a joint?”
In that moment, the idea for their product, TarTubes, was born.
“We knew that there was four times the tar in cannabis than there was in commercial cigarettes,” Langle said. So, the pair tried to make the cigarette filter holder fit the very tapered end of a preroll joint.
“We started stuffing paper, like tissue, even cardboard,” into the filter holder, trying to make the existing apparatus adapt to the pre-rolls, said Domenichelli. “Then Diana’s husband, Allan, found a plug from a transmission in his workshop,” and drilled a hole in it that was the “perfect size” to accommodate a one-gram pre-roll and connect it to a cigarette filter.
“That was the first TarTubes,” Domenichelli said.
The pair, Langle said, “decided we need this [filter] and so do other people.”
Domenichelli, who was nearing retirement from the transcription business she had founded and helmed for 30 years, saw the potential in TarTubes almost immediately. She knew the pair needed to get a prototype and then samples made quickly.
“If we want it, other smokers will want it as well,” she stated.
The pair decided to try and launch a product based on their concept.
As her transcription business, Modern Day Scribe, had worked heavily with research projects over the years, Domenichelli was familiar with the resources academia had to offer. She and Langle approached a mechanical engineering professor, Dan Hamel, at Western New England University, for help creating a prototype.
Domenichelli said Hamel, who is the lab supervisor for mechanical engineering, drafted blueprints for the TarTubes design and executed the first sample using a 3-D printer.
But a working sample – even when it comes with all the blueprints necessary to scale up production – isn’t enough to launch a business.
“Everyone has been so helpful,” Domenichelli said. “We had an angel investor who also spent four hours with us and showed us the best approach” to launching our product.
The pair also got input from “many other people along the way, who asked questions … and gave advice, like for the design of the insert,” Langle added.
Domenichelli and Langle are now working with a local 3-D printer, Josh Taylor, to scale up production and prepare to launch the product shortly in the wholesale market to area dispensaries, and have also pivoted to retail sailes, launching that arm of the business on a limited basis on their website, TarTubes.com.
Domenichelli is the president and CEO of the business, now officially called TarTubes LLC, with Langle as inventor and CTO.
“It’s a whirlwind, but this is our mode,” said Domenichelli, who added that the pair, who only came up with the concept in February, get together to work on the business every day. They’ve also bench-tested the product themselves, and gotten feedback from cannabis users who are friends. The TarTubes package includes one reusable TarTubes adapter and 28 disposable filters.
The pair even took their fledgling product to the New England Flower Expo in June to gauge attendee’s receptiveness to the prototype samples they shared. Domenichelli said the reaction was very positive, spurring the women to push to release their product as soon as possible.
“To reduce tar intake [for cannabis users] nationwide, that’s what keeps us going every day,” Langle said.
The Volunteer
Longmeadow native Lorie Dixon had always worked in social services. A member of the protective services arm of Greater Springfield Senior Services, she even pushed back her retirement date to help her employer weather the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic’s shutdowns.
Finally retiring in March of 2022 at age 66, Dixon said she “didn’t have a plan when I retired. The one thing I wanted to do was learn to play pickleball, a very cliché retirement thing.”
But she also knew pickleball wasn’t going to be enough. So, she set her sights on finding a new purpose.
With her background in social service work, she anticipated moving into something similar in the elderly sector as a volunteer, even signing up to train as a Serving Health Insurance Needs of Elders, or SHINE, volunteer.
But she wasn’t able to attend four of the training sessions, forcing Dixon to rethink her plans.
Then an opportunity presented itself, right in her church’s newsletter.
Her church, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church of Longmeadow, was looking for a new coordinator for a mission the church was operating called Lydia’s Closet.
The concept behind Lydia’s Closet was to provide clothing for children being cared for in the foster family system, and area families struggling to provide clothing for their children.
The mission is supported by donations and the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts through a grant from their mission called Human to Human, which, according to the mission’s website, supports “outreach programs that provide direct service to community members facing economic, social support, and service challenges.”
“I saw it, I mulled it over and thought, ‘that’s a good thing to do; I know a little about the child welfare system from my previous work’,” said Dixon.
When she and her husband, entrepreneur and former Bay Path University Professor Jeff Greim, had first moved to Western Mass, from New York City, Dixon worked for a time as a volunteer community representative for the foster care program. Over the years she’d also served as the regional chair for the Fresh Air Fund, bringing inner city children to the area in the summer, and the A Better Chance Program, which brought three boys from New York City to attend school at Longmeadow High School.
With that knowledge in her tool kit, Dixon applied for the opening at Lydia’s Closet.
“The pastor at the time was happy to have me,” she said.
By the time Dixon joined Lydia’s Closet, this church mission, which initially started with a focus on helping foster families, had already expanded, recognizing “there was a real need for free children’s clothing for families in the area,” she said. Lydia’s closet also collects and distributes car seats that are still in date, pack and plays and strollers to families in need.
And though Dixon said the mission had amassed the clothing, it wasn’t very efficient at helping families find what they needed.
“When I took over, I’m super-organized… in the summer I got high school kids to help and we went through the bags [of donations], we organized the space, organized the storage room and created bins of clothing [by sizes] for summer, for winter,” Dixon said.
Soon she and her high schoolers had the small room that served as a shop, and the storage room with bin-lined shelves, organized so families – and the volunteers who operate the shop three days a week – Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays – could find what they needed fairly quickly.
But getting the shop ready for clients wasn’t the only area where Lydia’s Closet mission needed Dixon’s expertise. It also needed clients to know the service existed.
Dixon said she started doing outreach to agencies like the Department of Children and Families, Wayfinders, the New North Citizens Council and the Springfield school system, letting these organizations know what Lydia’s Closet had to offer.
“I lucked out,” Dixon said. “A social worker I knew in foster care was having a block party for DCF, she said, ‘come by with a table’.”
That led to meetings with other DCF officials, an invite to a meeting and networking with others in the foster care system, all of which raised the awareness of what Lydia’s Closet had to offer.
But Dixon said making potential clients aware of Lydia’s Closet was still only part of the equation. Securing a stead – and is –equally important.
Connections with organizations such as the Jewish Community Center preschool, the Longmeadow Library, a group called More than Moms and the Key Club at Longmeadow High School – which made Lydia’s Closet the beneficiary of their latest winter carnival – all help keep the shelves and bins filled.
“More than Moms does a clothing swap every fall and spring, and they give any surplus to Lydia’s Closet when they’re done,” Dixon said. Fellow churches have also hosted drives for the mission, Dixon said.
She also said she sometimes uses the modest stipend she receives as director to purchase clothing – especially infant and toddler sizes, as “they wear out so quickly”– when supplies of these or other sizes get low.
Another “real issue,” according to Dixon, is the mission’s location, as St. Andrew’s is located on Longmeadow Street, and public transportation into the town “is horrible.”
For clients who don’t own a car and can’t get a ride to Lydia’s Closet when the mission is open, Dixon said the mission will sometimes deliver the clothing to families in need. Dixon, who lives nearby, will also meet with families outside the mission’s normal operating hours, making appointments to help serve families in need.
“We have people from Chicopee, from West Springfield, from Westfield, from Belchertown, from the hill towns” who are looking for clothing, Dixon said. “There aren’t a lot of free kids’ clothing available.”
Lydia’s closet is open most weeks on Tuesday mornings, typically from 10 a.m. to noon, Wednesday afternoons from 1:30-3:30 p.m. and from 11 a.m. to noon on Sundays, though Dixon encourages clients to call or text 413-237-1581 before venturing to the church during weekday hours to ensure that the volunteer staff will be on-site. She said it’s best to make an appointment for weekday visits, as staff are not always available.
Dixon, now 69, said she’s always looking for “people to help shoppers” during Lydia’s Closet’s open hours, and to help with sorting donations. Individuals interested in volunteering can leave a message with the church office at 567-5901, and Dixon will contact them directly.
Individuals interested in donating clothing to Lydia’s closet – children’s clothing and adult sizes suitable for teen wear – can leave donations in a bin in the parking lot of the church, which is located at 335 Longmeadow St., Longmeadow, Massachusetts.
The Passion Project
Ed Fitzgerald made his initial foray into the world of improv in 2021 at age 74, signing up for a class with Eric Boucher and the Phantom Sheep Players at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Springfield.
It was a far cry from the work he’d been doing in his semi-retirement, employing his background in technology and marketing to help businesses navigate their digital presence with websites and marketing plans.
And it wasn’t even something on his to-do list. But he admitted to being the kind of person to try things outside his usual comfort zone when given the opportunity.
“I had never had any real interest in Improv per se prior to the class being offered,” Fitzgerald explained. “It was offered at a time and location that was convenient. So, I figured I’d give it a try.”
Fitzgerald remarked that he had considered doing some acting at a point in his younger years but didn’t have the courage to pursue it back then.
That first improv class was an eclectic mix of students, Fitzgerald said, one so young a parent had to drop the student off for class. Fitzgerald said he was the oldest.
But something about the mix of exercises and role playing “really caught on” with Fitzgerald, and when the opportunity opened up to take a second class with instructor Eric Boucher and Phantom Sheep, he signed up.
Sometime later, a chance encounter on a plane flight made him aware that there was another place in Western Massachusetts offering improv classes – the Happier Valley Comedy Club in Hadley, MA. – and Fitzgerald signed up for more improv training there.
It wasn’t long after that that Fitzgerald found himself turning his improv experience into a foray into the acting he’d forsaken years before.
He auditioned for a part in an educational film being produced by UMass Medical School. He also tried out for a role in the Suffield Players’ “New Faces” production for that year.
Fitzgerald said he spoke with Boucher shortly after those first acting forays and “told him the wonderful impact” taking the classes in improv had had on his life.
“It opened me up to do so many other things,” Fitzgerald said. “It gave me the confidence to do things… like the auditions… Three years ago, I would never [have] imagined doing these types of things.”
Now in 2025, the 78-year-old Fitzgerald has just completed the Level 3 Improv training at Happier Valley and is “looking forward to Number Four.”
Asked if he would recommend taking an improv class, Fitzgerald said “Yes” immediately.
“I would recommend at least testing the waters,” he said. “Especially for someone like me, who is older, you get to act silly and do things in class usually people my age don’t do.”
And that, Fitzgerald shared, is freeing.
“I always felt I had to come across as perfect in my communication with people, and that just goes out the window with improv.”
He said the improv – and acting experiences – have helped him to “have the ability to take risks and overcome a fear of failure, of being judged.”
“One of the games really stuck with me,” Fitzgerald said. “You’re in a circle and you have to turn to the person next to you and say something, and if you screw up, everyone would cheer and you got moved up to first place. You got rewarded for messing up.”
That improv training has helped him cover when a fellow actor missed a line in a play he was in and even offered a way to lighten the mood while waiting in line at a grocery checkout from time to time.
“In the past I wouldn’t have done that, but now I look for the opportunity,” he said.
And his acting work has grown. He had a part in Suffield Players’ “New Faces” again this past August, a role in the East Longmeadow Senior Center players’ production of “Back Story” in April and is now working on a part for the groups’ production of “Charlotte’s Web” in spring 2026.
He’s also performed up at the Lava Center in Greenfield, doing a staged reading, directing a piece for them that involved working with a playwright who was in New Zealand, and is now considering writing an original play of his own to submit to next year’s 15-minute play festival.
Improv, Fitzgerald said, “gave him the courage” to rediscover a hidden passion.
To find more information about the Phantom Sheep Players and its improv classes visit facebook.com/phntmsheep/
To learn more about Happier Valley comedy and their classes visit happiervalley.com/
Don’t know where to start?
In the April issue of Prime, which focused on planning for retirement, life coach Tiffany Green offered this advice, which she said she shares with people who are beginning to plan their retirement:
“I start by asking ‘What did you enjoy doing when you had the time to do it?’ because so many people say ‘Well, I haven’t thought about what I love to do for so long’ because all their time is tied up with their occupation, with elder care, even caring for children. So, thinking about reconnecting to old passions is a beautiful way to think about those [new] communities and what it looks like to build them,” Greene shared.
The [overall] idea is getting out there, Greene said. It’s also a confidence builder to be successful at new things. But even more to fail at new things.
“I always, always encourage people to be brave enough to fail at something new. It sounds really funny, but if you failed at something new, you know the victory in that is that you had the courage to try,” Green said.
For a complete look at retirement planning, including all of Greene’s advice, check out the April 2025 feature at primeontheweb.com/featurestory/the-big-r.