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.”

Dear reader: I don’t know where you are in this retirement experience – enjoying it, dreading it, denying you’re in it, can’t wait for it? But if you’re like me you definitely find it puzzling. Which is what I’ll be writing about from time to time under this post My So-Called Retirement. I hope you weigh in because as always, when it comes to change and challenge, we need each other.

The word retirement definitely has image problems. Google “retirement” or look it up in the dictionary and you’ll see a basic definition: withdrawal from one’s position or occupation.

It follows, then, that to be retired is to be withdrawn, in retreat, backed off, removed. On the outside. Synonyms for retire include: to stop, adjourn and to dispose of, as in, “She retired her white zip-up boots.” Then there is “retire” referring to a type of behavior - meaning overly modest, often linked by the adjective “shy,” as in, “He yearned for the days of shy, retiring women.”

Look, too, at what the media does with the word. In a story about Harrison Ford’s movie career still going strong at age 67 the headline read: “Ford says he’s not retiring, still feels useful on set.” So what does that say about being retired? That you are no longer useful?

So far, my favorite alternative is “jubilada,” the Spanish word for retired.

Other synonyms for retirement include: ending, termination, seclusion, hibernation, rustication, solitude, obscurity. When connected with a graphic image, there is often a picture of a hammock suspended between palm trees.

The hammock is a nice time-out image, but do you want to spend the rest of your life in one? Feeling terminated, rusticated and obscure? Of course, that might seem perfectly glorious to people. But for me and I suspect for many the word retired and its stereotypes don’t fit.

And so we make efforts to tweak the R-word. Martha, a minister emeritus, tells people she is on a “re-adventure.” When I asked on Facebook for alternative words for retired, I got suggestions like: rewired, released, renewed, rejuvenated, revised, remodeled, recycled. There’s also recalculated, like what your GPS does when sensing a detour.

If you look for books on retirement you’ll recognize attempts to gloss up the image by referring to retirement as “the third age,” or “the encore years.”

So far my favorite alternative is jubilada, the Spanish word for retired. It sounds like well, …jubilant. Euphoric, elated, giddy with freedom.

And some people are.

My very smart sister-in-law retired last year from teaching elementary and middle school and is delighted to be done. She took her car to get serviced and sat next to a woman with a fat stack of papers she was grading. “I don’t miss that,” she said.

I met a woman who used to be with the FBI and adores retirement. The image, the word, all of it. She spent her working years being refined, she said. “But now I get to be outrageous.”

But then I asked a friend, who retired to Mexico how she was enjoying her new freedom.
“I spent all my life thinking only about wanting free time. I must have thought I had a million things to accomplish. Now I’m not sure what they were.”

But yes, she does prefer to call herself “jubilada” rather than retired.

DEAR READER,
I don’t know where you are in this retirement experience – enjoying it, dreading it, denying you’re in it, can’t wait for it? But if you’re like me you definitely find it puzzling. Which is what I’ll be writing about from time to time in My So-Called Retirement. I hope you weigh in because as always, when it comes to change and challenge, we need each other’s help.

I used to sympathize with my friends who didn’t work but stayed home and raised kids and who dreaded the “What do you do?” question at parties. Their answer “I’m a mom,” would get them little but a polite smile from others who would then turn to scan the crowd for someone more interesting.

I could argue on behalf of those women that anyone who didn’t respect the hard job of being a mother wasn’t worth talking to. I, too, was a mother, and I was on their side.

But I was on the other side, too. I didn’t have to avoid the question at parties. I, in fact, looked forward to it. I had a better answer. And did that make me feel a little bit superior? Sure.

“I’m a newspaper reporter,” I said and later, down the road, I could add the even sexier, “I’m a columnist.” That usually got their attention. If a person recognized my name they might try to be flattering and mention something I’d written. Or they might become a little antagonistic, like the guy who said he liked my writing except for when I sounded like a feminist. Sometimes a person would use me as their chance to rant about the media. But they never just turned away.

I was advised by a friend to never answer “retired” when asked what I did.

When I first left my regular newspaper job more than a year ago, I was advised by a friend to never answer “retired” when asked what I did. “Tell them you do something,” she said. “It makes you seem young.”

That’s part of it, isn’t it? To say you’re retired creates an image attached to an age (old), a lifestyle (sedentary) and value (past). People envy retired people their time, but not their standing.

My generation of women (the Boomer vanguard) was the first to swarm into the workplace in a big way. We were educated women, trained for careers that came with a business card and status. Then, after 30 or 40 years of it, we stopped doing it. Maybe we had no choice because someone said it’s time to go. Or maybe, like for me, we chose to go. The newspaper business was in a downward dive when I left. It had stopped being fun, and to tell you the truth I wanted to exit before someone decided to take away my column and force me to write cops and robbers or spend weekends covering some NASCAR race.

When people ask me what I do now, I say “writer.” And if they say, “I thought you retired,” I start explaining that just because I no longer go into a newsroom every day and just because I get a pension doesn’t mean I’m actually retired. At least not in the classic sense. I’m doing it my way and I’ll tell them more once I figure it out.

People envy retired people their time, but not their standing.

I was at the beach with my dog and spotted a woman I had once interviewed for the paper. She had been a college instructor and I asked her how it was going and she said she’s never been happier since retiring. And what, I inquired, does she answer when people ask what she’s doing now. “I say I’m just being,” she said.

Now, this woman is at a point where I am not. She looked regal, her long silver blonde hair twisting in the sea breeze, a black poncho wrapped around her tall lean frame. When she and her elegant dog trotted off down the beach I pulled my dog off a rotting seagull and thought, well, there’s a role model. I never thought about “just being.”

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