Hey! You know who's still alive? Tiny little Dr. Ruth, talking about having sex after the age of 50. I remember her from when I was a kid, maybe 13 years old, listening to interviews with her on the radio in the car, when she appeared and became a sensation, because she was actually talking about sex, live and in person. Doing it! In the butt! In the shower! What happens when you're not doing it! What you should be doing, when you're doing it! It. She was one of the first people to actually, publicly talk about sex, and everyone was talking about her--so much that even I knew her name, and what she did. Morning DJs made fun of her accent and her shocking new frankness, and even as a dumb kid, I got the joke.

Dr. Ruth was a tiny older lady who was not sexy at all, and talked about sex in a way that made it seem safe, and totally normal. Watching her on television, late at night (instead of being asleep in bed where you belonged) was kind of like listening to your mom giving you the sex talk, saying "vagina" and "penis" all clinical-like. Except your mom described the whole act in clockwork terms: stage one a man and a woman (it was always a man and a woman, as far as my mom was concerned); stage two, a man and a woman, very close together. Kind of like poorly done, Hanna-Barbera-style animation, so many frames missing in between, or a flipbook with half the pages torn out.

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