Last weekend, I attended my #??? Ferndale, Michigan, High School class reunion. (You didn’t really think I was going to reveal the number of years, did you?). Suffice it to say it was before the Apple 2C. In any case, every time this invitation arrives, I think of all the insecure thoughts we all think before a reunion: I don’t know anyone anymore. What if ____ is there? (fill in blank with one of following: old boy/girlfriend …  that girl/boy who said those evil “put downs” to me in chemistry class … that clique of hip, slick, and cool girls). It’s high school fears all over again. Because, of course, that’s where we left those people. And if you live a long way from your home town, as I do in San Francisco, there’s the additional “I have nothing in common with them anymore, and most of them never moved away.”

Then, you go. Something deep inside makes you do it. On the way, you stop at White Castle with an old  friend, and you get the same heartburn that you always did. Hmmm. Something very odd is happening. That characteristic smell and the disgusting aftertaste of those sliders are somehow very comforting. It’s the taste and smell of your childhood. White Castle – and you’re home again.

On the way down to the hotel ballroom, you’re actually nervous. Then, it all goes away. The greeters are thrilled to see you. Hugs all around. You’re lit up with smiles. You hear  “OMG, Kathy Forsythe!”,  and you turn to see someone you would swear you’ve never laid eyes on in your life. You look at his name tag and his high school picture, and you say, “OMG, Randy Finney!” All those people that you hope aren’t there? They aren’t. Maybe they were the insecure ones in the end. And if they are there, you will be amazed how they have changed in 40+ years! (I’m just sayin’…).

You learn that joy and tragedy plays no favorites. Sure, some have had it better than others. Some personalities have changed, some not. There are still dorks (no names here!), a few are still funny, there are still the studious ones, some are still happy, and some are still sad. All of us are older, and all of us have been sobered by life. Some have lost spouses. Several had lost children. Some went bankrupt (several times). One guy is an undertaker (mortician? What’s the pc title, here?). He’s still the funniest person I have ever met. I asked about business, and he said, “Not bad. I had one today  before the reunion, and I got two more cookin’ for tomorrow.”  Completing the picture, there was the promkingnowdoctor who arrived in his Armani suit with 33 year old eye candy on his arm, of course. He kept his hand on her butt all evening long.

Our histories are very much a part of who we are. At my women’s event, Sex on the Porch, we talk about our sexuality in terms of how our life wisdom dictates how we act today as a man or as a woman. What I learned at Ferndale High School about being sexual gave me – and all of us – the foundation upon which we moved forward expressing ourselves uniquely as men and women throughout our lives. Were we wounded or abused?Was our first sexual experience wonderful or scary and painful? If we attended church, synagogue, or mosque what dictums were handed to us to guide us – or to turn away from? Our life wisdom all started ‘way back then. How much do we carry today that still influences our thinking?

At midlife, there’s a tsunami of change. One thing remains constant, and that’s the people who touched our lives ‘way back then. It’s good to go back and touch your roots.

Btw, who sang it originally? Gary U.S. Bonds. What’s the name of the record? “Quarter to Three” Who did the remake? Bruce Springsteen. Click here to get all the original lyrics – and have your own class reunion.

I would love to hear thoughts! Share here.

• The anguish and angst around a baby born with a malfunctioning heart
• Filing for divorce after enduring a spouse’s 20 years of infidelity with your best friend only to discover he has skipped town with her and emptied all the bank accounts
• Transporting a drunken spouse to jail on your way to the office, again and again – and no one knows
• A house fire that decimates dreams as everything goes up in flames
• A mother sings Amazing Grace and prays during her daughter’s 6 hour experimental heart surgery
• The miracle of a surrogate to mother and carry your child because age prevents safe pregnancy
• A Down’s Syndrome child who beats the odds and lives happily at age 35

Themes for a new gut wrenching, heart breaking country western song? Hardly. This is real life, folks. I spent last weekend in Chicago with 7 of my college sorority girlfriends from 40 (FORTY!) years ago at the University of Michigan. What we relinquished in Ann Arbor, Michigan, those many years ago – youth, beauty, invulnerability, immortality, untested brash self confidence – has been reclaimed in the years since as deep life experience. Tragedies and joys have carved a sensitivity, compassion, wisdom, bonding and true joy in all of us more precious than any self-possessed 22 year old exploration, escapade, or exploit. When the education stopped, life began. Between then and now, each of us has known abundant joy, carved out by deep sorrow.

For all of us, it was a weekend of true intimacy – a close bonding with others who define us. A gift to energize and affirm. Roots. Scaffolding. Connectness. Validation. Bridges from then to now. Women who knew you when you came of age. When you lost your virginity. When your heart was broken. When your engagement was announced. When you stood on the table and drank 21 beers at your 21^st birthday party, and who took care of you afterwards.  Women who said of my divorce after 33 years, “We knew he was wrong, even then.”

At Sex on the Porch 2 weeks ago, we talked about how intimacy plays out uniquely for each of us as seasoned women. We talked about the “intimacy” wedge (one of 7 wedges)  on my Wheel of Sexuality for seasoned women – the umbrella over how we articulate our sexuality as women at midlife and beyond . Intimacy is the need to be close to another person. To trust. To confide. To share. To laugh about life’s miraculous joys and mind-blowing happiness. To cry. To ache together about life’s relentless pain.

Intimacy is a critical, life-force giving component to being a sexual, sexy, seasoned woman. It’s the glue that keeps us connected to others, reflects back to us who we are, and colors our capacity to have relationships – romantic and friendship. It’s not about sex, its about connectedness.  With someone. A lover, perhaps. An old friend. A new ally.  For women, as we move beyond menopause, much of our intimacy comes from other women, though many men report finding intimacy high on their need list as they pass the testosterone laden younger years. We all need comfortable closeness and association to live a mentally healthy life. Without a community that gives us connectedness to others, deep depression results – for both men and women.

I am blessed to have reunited with my “sisters” after all these years. It was living proof of what we had discussed at Sex on the Porch the week before. It’s energizing, redefining, and empowering to circle back to old friends and enjoy the mirror on our lives that only they can provide.

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We know the answer: stereotypically, men are from mars. Men don’t need to find out, men already know. The boomer plus generation grew up with John Wayne, Paladin (Have Gun, Will Travel, remember?), and Bonanza. Bad guys got killed by good guys because the good guys knew it all. Only wimps had to ask how. We can only assume the same blind directives came (so to speak) in bed.

I asked for volunteers from the group to form an advisory committee, so we could continue the conversations about sex and maturity. Feature this: I had 3 men volunteer and 3 women! The men, it turns out, are hungry for information.

What’s happened to John Wayne, et al?  A couple of exchanges during the workshop opened the door for them to want more.

We talked about Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 1948. A pivotal point for men. I asked why. A physician in the group (still practicing at 80) identified the book as the go-ahead for men to masturbate. Prior to this, men were shamed and humiliated about the subject (not that many aren’t still disgraced today) . It will stunt your growth (tough luck for the men with short genes). You will get hairy palms (who started that one?). Not so! Says Kinsey. It’s normal, natural, and – gasp – healthy. The men in the seminar actually talked about masturbation, probably for the first time, ever. Imagine: the book came out in 1948. It’s 61 years later, and finally the audience Kinsey was trying to reach is in dialogue about it!

The summer of love, 1967 and The Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort, 1972. The Boomer generation stood up to the Victorian values of their parents and said, No More! Reminding these men in the seminar that the summer of love changed everything, allowed them, at their age, to come out, finally, and talk about sex. What a concept – and what a relief for these men.

Prostate cancer prevention: research today is telling us that the prostate is a gland. It needs liquid passing through it. A medical incentive for some self pleasuring! Who knew?

I’ve not seen men this excited about sex talk, ever. At the next planning session, the 3 of them announced that it was their personal mission to get other men at the next discussions – men of all ages, and all sexual orientations. I watch them exhale. Ah, permission to ask how. As a sex educator, my heart sings.

How about sugar water in mini wax Coke bottles – in a variety of totally artificial colors? (Did you eat the wax? My friends did. Yuk). Ruby red wax lips (we chewed the wax after the lips got all melted and distorted from body heat)? Those little dots on adding machine paper? Candy cigarettes (Remember the Marlboro Man [who later succumbed to lung cancer]?) Chuckles, Sugar Daddy, Bit-O-Honey. Sen Sen breath freshener that tasted like soap. Remember NECCO WAFERS? I hated them, but they were omnipresent, and I never figured out why. Teaberry and Black Jack gum. Can’t you just taste them? Salted Pumpkin seeds. A minor miracle that we all didn’t have hardening of the arteries on the spot.

 That’s what Patti sent me. Yesterday, (really yesterday – April 23, 2009), I ate the pumpkin seeds on my way to a business meeting in downtown San Francisco on a shuttle. I just laughed out loud (a daring act in a mini-bus filled with oh-so-serious-Ipod-wired thirty somethings). There I was, 12 years old. It was 1961. I’m with Patti at the counter of that dingy little Mom and Pop grocery store at the corner of Nine Mile and Livernois in Detroit, stocking up on sugar and salt. The Vietnam war still belonged to France. Kennedy was president. Life was innocent and very, very sweet.

 I remember my first kiss and my first date, too. Bobby Parks kissed me at my locker in Lincoln Junior High in 7^th grade. Bobby was about a foot shorter than I, but oh well. It counted. Then there was the “date” with Ben Franklin (yep). We went for a walk in the fall of 1962. 8^th grade. At one point, we stopped behind a wall. He kissed me, and pressed up against me with what felt like a thick metal pipe right on my pubic bone. Oh, ouch, I remember how much it hurt. Perhaps not as much as he was hurting to empty that pipe! I asked him to take me home.  

Funny how those memories seem so simple, and harmless, now. The first bra, the “grow bra”, and the stuffing of Kleenex into the cup. Learning about the “fast” girls, and how they kissed (open mouths, can you imagine)? First periods and the pamphlet from Modess, You’re a young lady, now! – picturing a perfectly groomed little lady in frills and a circle skirt staring in a hand mirror, amazed at how beautiful she was. Remember, ladies? The booklet told us to let our mothers tell our fathers about “our wonderful new event”.

Boys were going through their own metamorphosis. I wouldn’t dare to touch that one! C’mon men, tell us about it!

By 1971, we (some of us) were liberated by The Joy of Sex. Read more about that here. In the meantime, it was a sweet, naïve time.

 What was your favorite candy?

C’mon people, can we get past the stereotypes, please? Just once, let’s stop demanding that creativity, talent, and raw guts comes to screeching halt when we reach mid-life and beyond.

Ok, ok, so their job on Britain Has Talent  is to come back with snide quips and cutting remarks. I get that. But there is a bigger picture here. It’s a microcosm of what we fight as we age. It gets harder and harder to remain on the radar screen of society as a “pay attention to me” person. Add to it that she’s a woman, AND a self proclaimed virgin, and you have a real loser, according to our tribal values. Quite frankly, it makes me angry.

There is nothing we can do about it, right? I think there is. Susan Boyle had the guts it took to stand before that huge hip-slick-and-cool crowd – no make-up per se, frumpy dress, hair not styled, overweight, and so nervous she could not think of the word “village” when asked where she was from. We, in the midlife plus crowd, can take a lesson. When the crowd rolled their eyes, she sang, anyway. That’s when the jaws dropped.

Let’s fight to be visible. Don’t hold back. As the female panelist said, “This is the biggest wake up call ever!” Be eccentric. Be assertive. Say what you want. Let the child inside you come out to play. Let the Susan Boyle in you get on your stage and be whatever you need to be.

About the virgin thing: get over it, western culture. I’d be happy if we dropped that word completely. It’s a measuring stick. You either are, or you aren’t.

Folks, we all get a package in life. If yours doesn’t include intercourse (my definition of virgin), that has NOTHING to do with whether or not you are a sexual person!

I guarantee that the Susan Boyles of the world have found a ways to satisfy themselves sexually, whether they profess it or not. Self pleasuring is a perfectly fine way to celebrate sexuality. Touching with friends intimately works for some, as well.  Dressing to please your skin allows you to feel sensual. Dating sites can get even the oddest of couples together – if that’s what you want. Let’s just quit it – this thing about virginity.

Joyce Nishioka at the National Sexuality Resource Center has an excellent blog about virginity. Check it out, here. Joyce’s editorial reflects the gen-x view of virgin-or-not. I believe we graduate into a new view of the whole thing at mid-life and beyond.

In the meantime, Susan Boyle is an inspiration for all of us. Want to go dancing because you love it? Go do it! What to play the guitar at open mike? Go do it? Want to feel sexy by wearing those pants and shirt you feel wonderful in? DO IT! And, Susan, if you really want to get laid, go find it. Like your overnight singing sensation, it will happen if you want it to.

She’s truly a wake up call!

I remember when The Joy of Sex came out. I kept it in my bedroom, and read it with my new husband, and sometimes without him. It was “far out”. It was titillating. It was rebellious. It was freeing.

It was 1972. The Vietnam war was finally, and humiliatingly, coming to an end. Two years earlier, I had graduated from The University of Michigan. A liberated woman coming of age in the 60′s – that’s how I saw myself. A bra burner. A protester (I remember locking elbows and holding a candle  in a huge circle 200 yards in diameter, on the “Diag” at U of Michigan, singing We Shall Overcome,  interlocking arms with the Black students, a radical action for both of us. Who knew that in the presidential election of 2008, we really would overcome? We had yet to get past the dreaded Orwellian 1984!).

Somehow, however, my “liberation” led me to being married in 1970 upon graduation. It never occurred to me that being liberated did not include marriage. After all, I had marched in the moratorium on Washington. I had lain in the mud at Woodstock. So what if I got married? It didn’t mean I was giving up my cause(s). By the way, I was also in a sorority. Sorority girls got married after graduation.

There was a new freedom being born when the first The Joy of Sex came out. Old traditions were being threatened, but not entirely released. There were a lot of contradictions. Burning my bra and living in a sorority house? You had to be there to understand. As Bob Dylan proclaimed, “the times they are achangin’” (but not changing completely, not yet). We stood up and we protested everything. The environment. The War. Racial inequality. The University Editorial policy. Sex. We protested sex.

“Living together” outside of matrimony was radical. We hid it from our parents (whom, we were confident, had no sex before marriage. In later years, I found out that was a lie. Go Mom and Dad!). It was mutinous to insist on sleeping in the same bedroom as your boyfriend/girlfriend when you came home for the weekend. Ok, do that at college, if you can get away with it, but don’t shove it in your mortified parents’ faces.

The world was graduating from the Ozzie and Harriet world, and into the revolutionary, shockingly funny world of All in the Family. Still, we pretended a lot. No one was gay. They were queer (the original connotation, not the one used today). Lesbians were mostly gym teachers. “Queer” men lived in New York and did nasty, dark, unspeakable things. Everyone had 2 parents (of different genders). Wives had dinner ready for Father when he arrived home. Divorce was a desperate, tragic act.

My mother called the menstrual period, “The Curse”. Girls wore skirts, mostly (I remember my first pant suit). Sexually transferred infections were unheard of, except for syphilis and gonorrhea. Condoms were used for birth control. “Porn chic” was coming to life with movies like Behind The Green Door. Brave women everywhere were being inadvertently overdosed on estrogen as they were taking the “pill” – a revolutionary concept.

Sex was hush-hush for our parents. For us in the 60s generation, however, we wanted to be free. Planned Parenthood was continuing to listen and liberate women – at the same time that women were still dying from botched abortions (Roe vs. Wade would be decided the next year, 1973).

Against that backdrop, The Joy of Sex appeared in the book stores (no Amazon.com). We saw real sex, liberating sex. It normalized sex. It validated our new freedom. Yes, ok, it was primarily phallic focused, and we would not accept that today (that has changed in the new version). Yes, it emulated concepts that are outdated, of course. Erections were celebrated as a minor miracle. Simultaneous orgasms happened (magically, apparently, for most women) in missionary position in marriage.

 Nevertheless, our open views today were spun from that first publishing of The Joy of Sex. It was permission giving. It was honest. The male body in that version was hairy – all over. It never occurred to us to be repulsed by that hairiness. In fact, the hit musical on Broadway was Hair. Even the lyrics extolled the virtues of lots of hair: Gimme down to there, hair. Shoulder length or longer. Here, baby. There, mama.  Everywhere, Daddy, Daddy! …Hair! We were comfortable with the messiness, the realness, the authenticity of lots of hair. It was like everything else in the era – daring, statement-making, authentic, and a definite measurement of sexiness.

We look at things differently 37 years later. Today, many prefer bodies clean shaven and sterile, just like our lives - orderly, clean, and fast - much like the computers that drive us. This is the man who appears in the ultimate, revised edition. Uncontaminated and fresh, he becomes about as sexy as a Sears Catelog underwear ad avatar.

In retrospect, we may have lost something in the translation. The original The Joy of Sex gave us permission to be who we really are. It’s kind of refreshing that the authors of the original weren’t afraid to have less than perfect specimens, hairy and skinny. Like us, as we reach mid-life and beyond, bodies are what they honestly are – hairy or hairless, heavy or thin, sagging or dimpled. At mid-life, when we tumble and shift in our sexual exploits, It’s hard to hide the wrinkles and rolls. It’s almost impossible to hide our authentic selves.

The original The Joy of Sex was a joy: honest, open, a bit innocent as judged by today, revolutionary, and titillating – and permission to enjoy ourselves sexually for the first time, openly,freely and honestly. The emphasis was on Pleasure. I wonder if today we have lost the pleasure. Instead, we have one more manual on how to perform and impress. Bigger, better, ultimate. I’m not sure that’s what we need. If hair means simple authenticity rather than perfection, I prefer hair.