People smile at Jane Juska. There she is, on a rainy afternoon at the Gramercy Tavern in her cheerful red jacket, white hair tucked behind her ears, blue eyes bright behind her bifocals. "I'm agog at the forsythia," she exclaimed, marveling at the enormous arrangements. At 70, she seems to be what she is, a proud new grandma enjoying a day on the town. Though she clutched her lower back periodically - arthritis? - she ordered some wine and chatted happily about her writing. Here's a sample:

"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."

And how. Ms. Juska placed this personal ad in The New York Review of Books in the fall of 1999. Over the course of a month, she received 63 responses and spent the better part of a year following them up, an experience she recounts in her first book, "A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance" (Villard). It turns out that Ms. Juska did indeed have a lot of sex with a lot of men she liked, and still does, having seen one of them as recently as that morning. He's 35. Which might explain the lower-back problem.

Sex and the Single Senior, NYT (registration required)