My cousin, Liza sent me this video and I just can't help but share it. There are so many fun lines in it that I keep replaying them in my head — and here I am fretting about $150-a-night parking, while these ladies ran a whole social life on ten dollars a week. Priorities, right?

I grew up in north central Florida, on summers spent down at Daytona Beach Shores and in the wilds of Ponce Inlet — a coast of hard-packed sand you could drive a car on, sea oats bending in the wind, and the old lighthouse standing watch over the jetties. That was my Florida: suntanned, unglamorous, and free. Miami might as well have been another country. For me, this film is tales of yore — a postcard from a Florida I only ever heard about secondhand until I finally saw Miami Beach with my own eyes in 1987. And I loved it. Loved it the way you love a place that seems to be running on a different clock than the world you came up in.

What strikes me watching this 1969 BBC piece now is how much of it I actually remember, even from that later vantage point. The pastel high-rises. The pools set against the water. The old ladies in bathing suits who had, by then, been holding court on those beaches for decades. When I first went, you could still rent a room down there for fifteen dollars a night. Fifteen dollars. Try saying that out loud on Ocean Drive today and watch the valet laugh you off the block - parking is $150 a night! LOL

Because that is the real shock of this documentary — not the widows themselves, but the version of Miami Beach they lived in. Trevor Philpott found a place where a woman on eight pounds a week of state money could still lead "a subsidized social life," sleeping and eating and dancing the twenty-five-cent dances along the sand. A place where the poor and the fabulously rich shared the same coastline, separated only by which bridge you crossed. That Miami Beach is gone. The efficiencies and the shabby South Beach apartments got scraped and rebuilt into something glossier and far more expensive, and the merry widows got priced clean out of the neighborhood they invented.

And here's the part that makes me smile: this may well have been the finest days of American socialism — the American version, anyway. Nobody down there would ever have called it that, of course. But look at what was quietly holding the whole scene up. Social Security checks arriving like clockwork. A woman on eight pounds a week of state money not just surviving but dancing, eating out, keeping a roof over her head and a little dignity besides. A society that had decided, more or less by accident, that its widows shouldn't have to end their days cold and hungry. Strip away the poodles and the plastic flowers of the Sunset Islands, and underneath the working-class end of that beach was one of the most humane experiments this country ever ran — a modest, sun-soaked welfare state that let ordinary women grow old with their heads up. We just don't like to say the word out loud.

There's a tenderness in the film that I think is easy to miss under the period attitudes and the ungentlemanly narration. These were women who had outlived their husbands and refused to be pitied for it — organizing phone chains so no one died alone and unnoticed, taking cruises with French stewards, keeping social calendars booked solid from December to Easter. "If they have to be widows," Philpott says, "I'd much rather they were merry than sad." Watching it from where I sit now, having loved that beach in its faded, affordable, in-between years, I feel the same about the place itself. I'd rather remember it merry.

So here it is — the merry widows of Miami, spending their own money in their own way, in a Miami Beach you could still afford. Good luck to them, and good luck to that fifteen-dollar room. Neither one is ever coming back.

“This programme contains attitudes of its time and offensive, including racist, language.”