There must be something in the prime-time television air this week, because two very different shows featured subplots about sixty-something ladies' sexuality. Awesome.
First, in this week's episode of Brothers and Sisters, "Something New," Nora Walker starts reminiscing 
about her "first," a boy she had sex with in the back seat of the car, while the song "Pretty Woman" played on the radio. All of her children run out of the room in horror, repulsed by the story, before she even has a chance to finish it. (I was insulted on her behalf.) Then, of course, the guy shows up, played by the oddly-pathetic Chevy Chase, with whom Sally Field seems not to have even a milligram of chemistry. This was seriously mis-managed stunt casting.
As was the later appearance of Lyle Lovett, who was summoned by Senator Robert McCallister, to serenade the spoiled and increasingly irritating Kitty Walker, who's peeved that she's not her husband's first wife. Whenever I see fleeting glimpses of 'famous people' who pop up on hour-long dramas, I get a whiff of desperation. Usually, such appearances are just not necessary; they aren't here, either.
An even better Sex Kitten at Sixty scene is in this week's episode of Brotherhood, "Call Letter Blues." (This is, by the way, "the finest TV show that no one is watching," as Entertainment Weekly columnist Dalton Ross put it.) Rose Caffee, matriarch of the intensely corrupt Irish-American Caffee family,
played by the incandescent Fionnula Flanagan, ditches everybody on Thanksgiving morning to shack up in a hotel with a former lover, presuming that she's headed for some happily-ever-after love nesting. She even packs a suitcase containing fur-lined handcuffs and other sex toys, only to discover that the former boyfriend's equipment no longer works. Meanwhile, her family is in a tizzy because, apparently, she's the only one who knows how to cook a turkey. (Little do they know that's not all she knows how to do!)
Flanagan, a pre-Boomer born in 1941, is 66 years old. And she plays the sex scenes straight on, as an aging woman who is hoping she's still Got It. I say: She does.
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