Beat Around the Bush

When you tell someone your new short is about a 75 year old widow with Alzheimer’s who decides to have her very first orgasm ever, 98 time out of 100 they laugh. I know this from experience.

Then they get curious.

And how did you come up with that idea?
Well, I was asked to write a short film that took place in Stanley Park. And so I thought, what do people do in Stanley Park (Vancouver, BC)? They have sex. And who would be the most unlikely people to have sex in Stanley Park? An old (heterosexual) couple.

Fast forward. Many drafts later: the film doesn’t take place anywhere near Stanley Park and there are no heterosexual couples having sex (or any couples whatsoever) in the piece.

Alzheimer’s was one of the last ingredients added to the script.

My grandfather and I are very close. He was born in 1923, and his first wife – my grandmother– died of Cancer in 1995, and he remarried in 1997 at age 75 to Audrey. I was ten, and wondered, “if people have sex after they get married, are Grandpa and Audrey going to have sex after they get married?” Precocious as I may have been, I kept that question to myself. In 2013, while I was rewriting the script, we went to visit Audrey in the care home where she was rapidly deteriorating from Alzheimer’s disease. She had been diagnosed a few years after they married. The daughter of a fellow care home resident mentioned to me that the staff were being overly cautious due to residents getting it on with each other, and the subsequent complaints from their children and guardians.

Care homes where patients have dementia. If a person is mentally deteriorating, but is getting enjoyment from sex, shouldn’t that be allowed? This issue isn’t just black and white, and who is able to give consent is the main issue in the argument.

And even before that, society believes that past a certain age, people don’t have sex, and don’t have an interest sex anymore. Amy Schumer’s Unfuckable Day sketch proves with flawless comedic tact how that idea is perpetuated in the media.

The short, “Beat Around the Bush”, opens the discussion to both them ideas in presenting the notion that a woman who is both, a senior, and suffering from a form of dementia, still has a desire to be sexual. The time is now.

Also, I couldn’t have my lead only get what she wanted with the help of another (man).