Still Doing It

“Are you going to take notes for later on in life?”

A woman sitting behind me in the cinema asked me this as I took out my notepad and a pen.

“Um, maybe,” I shyly replied.

She was one of many kind, older women and men who packed Block (people were in the aisle) on May 10 for a screening of Deirdre Fishel’s documentary, Still Doing It: The Intimate Lives of Women Over 65.

“Whether you still do it or you like to still do it, we’re glad you’re here,” Kathy Berger of Evanston’s Reeltime, which co-sponsored the event, said.

Barbara Schock’s short 1998 film My Mother Dreams the Satan’s Disciples in New York preceded the documentary, and it was a pretty amusing movie. It’s written by Rex Pickett, who wrote the novel Sideways. The plot follows a recent widow, Marian, who ventures from South Dakota to visit her grown daughter in big, bad New York City. Marian is delicately emotional at this time in her life, so she packs her late husband’s picture carefully in her suitcase before getting on the plane. When she lands, her experiences aren’t exactly ideal: the cab driver charges too much, and she finds out her daughter, Paula, lives on the same street as the headquarters for the Satan’s Disciples. Paula is sweet, but works a lot, so Marian is left to discover New York by herself. She loads up on maps, but gregarious men with tattoos riding motorcycles loom outside. The rest of the plot takes a few twists, and there’s some ambiguity about what really happens, but it’s an amusing story nonetheless.

“Life wasn’t over for her,” one woman commented after the movie. “It was a new beginning. I think this movie shows that people can advance at all ages – enjoy life and not be afraid.”

After a few more minutes of discussion, the documentary began, and well, it was certainly interesting. The most amusing character was Harriet, a 75-year-old hippie with long blonde hair, a husky smoke-tinged voice and a rather potent sex-drive.
“I need it like food,” she says blatantly to the camera.

“I’m not getting what I need,” she continues. “I mean, I wish I weren’t so sexual.”

There’s also Ruth, 67, who’s still working and searching for a man, Frances, 87, who met her love at 80, and Betty, 73, who met her lover, 40 years her junior, on the Internet.

All these women still like to do it.

“I love this movie,” one woman proclaims after the screening. “I think we all have these thoughts, and it’s courageous and strong for these women to come forward to talk about how women feel.”