It was no surprise that a San Francisco audience for the play “A Round Heeled Woman” appeared to be mostly women of a certain age. Women old enough to remember when women didn’t talk about their sex lives. Old enough to remember when women were thought to give it up after oh, age 50 or so. And old enough to appreciate the difference between then and now.

We were also old enough to remember Sharon Gless as the clever, smart-talking, sometimes grumpy cop Christine Cagney in Cagney and Lacey. And now here she was on stage playing Jane Juska, the 66-year-old English teacher from Berkeley who went looking for sex in a personal ad in the New York Review of Books. It read: “Before I turn 67 –next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” Anthony Trollope being her favorite writer.

Juska wrote a best-seller sharing her results - she got over 60 replies from men as young as her son and older than her ex-husband and hooked up with a few. Some were cads, some near-creepy, some quite interesting who did, indeed, want to talk first.

The play, which premiered at Z Space theater in San Francisco in January, was adapted from her book of the same name. Early reviews of the play were not real positive and it closed in early February. But it had sell-out crowds and I hope it tours because there is definitely an audience ripe for the message that not only can the earth move at any age. But, more important, if you’re missing something in your life, stop waiting for it to knock on your door. Go get it.

I met Juska several years ago when she did an author reading at the Sonoma County Book Festival. There, too, her audience was Boomer women and beyond, who roundly cheered Juska’s bravado. One woman told Juska she as much envied her lively conversations with men as she did her orgasms.

Her book came out in 2003, before the cougar phenom. Before online dating became a routine way of meeting a life partner. And before nightly Viagra ads showed older couples chasing each other down the beach.

About that same time “Something’s Gotta Give” put Diane Keaton under the covers with Jack Nicholson and Hollywood started warming up to mature sex. Last year “It’s Complicated,” touted as a middle aged sex comedy, provided 60-year-old Meryl Streep with two lovers.

Ads for “The Last Station,” a movie based on the last year of Leo Tolstoy’s life show Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren romping in bed. More evidence that sex is not just for the young and nubile.

Sharon Gless was plenty nubile in her role as a passionate, vulnerable, complex woman and the audience gave her a standing ovation. As to what’s happened since then to the real Jane Juska, the woman sitting next to me had an answer. Juska, she’d read, had settled down happily with one man. But he’s married.

That was a surprise because in the play she vows to never go out with a married man or a Republican. Well, at least we can assume he knows his Trollope.

Photo of Sharon Gless in “A Round-Heeled Woman.”

My granddaughter and I followed a small parade of three-year-old girls into the community center. A man walking past asked, “What’s with all the pink tights?”
Basketball practice, I said with a grin.

Nope, it was a class called play ballet, more about jumping around than grand jete. Will there be boys, my granddaughter had asked. Hopefully, I said, though I anticipated the all girly-girl crowd. It did, however, give me an opportunity to advance my feminist agenda and talk about how both men and women make wonderful ballet dancers.

Lately the granddaughter has been dividing her world into what boys do and what girls do. Boys play dinosaur, girls play dress-up, she recently explained. I could have gotten into a big philosophical discussion on that one because I happen to know that little boys do play dress up. Did she not recall that one of her best friends, a three-year-old boy, dressed up as a dancing construction worker for Halloween, wearing both a tutu and a tool belt?

But I didn’t want to burst her pink bubble on this day. She kept saying, “this is so exciting,” as she pushed her feet into magic slippers the color of seashells and joined the others in a gallop around the room.

For the last few weeks the granddaughter’s go-to-color has been pink.

I know the thrill. When I was a little girl I took ballet class. I dropped out because I was afraid of the teacher who carried a big ruler, but I was in it long enough to twirl and bow on a stage in something pink covered with sequins.

Many mothers of my generation, in an attempt to eradicate restrictive gender stereotypes, continued to offer our little girls ballet but also added soccer. We dressed them in overalls and gave them tool kits and said it was fine to get messy. It’s surprising to now be a grandmother and see how some stereotypes defy eradication.

For the last few weeks the granddaughter’s go-to-color has been pink. When she was born her mother encouraged a rainbow of fashion choices and asked well-wishers to please cool it on the pink. The three-year-old has a varied wardrobe, but now that she’s dressing herself she often looks like a cupcake in sneakers.

Still and all, she knows how to throw a ball, not like a girl or a boy, but like a kid from a family of ball-throwers. She pounds nails and makes things at a kids workshop put on by the neighborhood building supply store. She plays with dolls and she knows what to do with a soccer ball and a wiffle ball. She has a play kitchen for creating play menus. And a softball glove — a pink one. She also has a new baby brother whom I’m thinking might be a great addition to the play ballet troupe in another three years.

Parents and grandparents were asked to wait outside until the last five minutes of dance class. We got to watch the teacher invite each girl to choose a long, billowy scarf for the final fling around the room.

The first little girl said pink. The second little girl said pink. My ballerina thought for a moment and said orange. I gave her a private power salute.

Asked by a reporter how she felt about being in this stage of life at age 60 Meryl Streep said in Vanity Fair magazine that she was flipping “grateful to be alive.” Actually she used a word more adamant than “flipping” and more in the character of Jane, her randy character in “It’s Complicated” than her iron-faced nun in “Doubt.”

You could say that if you were the Marvelous Meryl you’d be grateful for what you have, too. Continued amazing career, nice family, no worries about the mortgage, great skin.

In the interview she goes on to explain, “I have so many friends who are sick or gone, and I’m here. Are you kidding? No complaints.”

I mentioned Meryl’s comments to a friend when we met for an end-of-year drink. For her 2009 was more memorably bad than good. She was beat up in a brutal sexual attack that occurred one morning when she was working alone in her office.

She said she fought and punched and bit her attacker because she knew how awful her grandson would feel if anything bad happened to her. She has a couple of scabs on her face but she still laughs like no one else and says that she’s determined to not let the assault get in the way of her freedom. She wears a whistle around her neck and has given them to some of her colleagues, but she continues to walk where she pleases, night and day. And on New Year’s Eve she would party like always, banging pots and pans in the street and drinking champagne.

Then we talked about our usual things, books and movies and mutual pals and I toasted her fierce spirit and convincing scream and we drank to being alive.

Over Christmas we got a unique holiday greeting from a designer friend whose teenage son had some scary surgery at the end of the year to correct scoliosis. The card shows two different X-ray images and is as startling as Frida Kahlo’s painting of her torso sliced in half. The first picture is the young man’s spine yanked to the left and pushed to the right. To further the image there’s a photo of a tangled spaghetti pile of Christmas tree lights. Also pictured is the good news X-ray of a spine notched with pins and staples, but straight. Next to it is a photo of a simple single string of holiday lights. The card’s message reads: “Gratitude, 2009.”

There are probably endless reasons to be flipping grateful even in our world of wars and lost jobs and foreclosed houses and uncertain health insurance and dread of the next guy getting on a plane who knows how to work his bomb. You could spend all your time thinking only about the bad stuff. But I believe in taking inspiration from wherever it comes and the other night on Masterpiece Theatre a dying woman told her young friend that worry is a waste of time.

For more reassurance I suggest a trip to a planetarium like the amazing exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. Sit in the dark and fly through space and you might take comfort that the sky really isn’t falling, although it does seem to burn up a lot with all those dying stars and new ones coming along. By comparison human beings are very tiny and somewhat insignificant. But we’re still here and for that we can be grateful.

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol, Ca. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com