Gemze de Lappe began dancing at age nine, with Michael Fokine’s ballet company. During the summer, the company performed a different Broadway musical each week, and one of Fokine's one-act ballets during intermission. Her favorite was Scheherazade, playing “one of the boys who got stabbed in the end, lying on stage upside down. All that drama!” she recalled happily.

Here’s a really big number: $2 trillion. According to the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post,  that’s how much disappeared from Americans’ retirement savings in the last 15 months. The upshot: Americans are going to have to work longer.  

Elbowing its way through the global recession and onto the front page today is a New York Times story about what professionals call “elderspeak – the sweetly belittling form of address that has always rankled older people.”  

In Slate’s geezer-centric issue, Daniel Engber takes a lucid look at sexual activity — or, more likely, its prohibition — in an article titled "Naughty Nursing Homes."  Engber cites an August 2007 article in the New England Journal of Medicine  about sexual activity among older people. Some predictable findings: people who described themselves as healthy were more likely to be sexually active, women were less so then men, and sexual activity declines with age. But not so fast!

Nestled among accounts of local marijuana raids is a profile of Lillian Brown Vogel in the Ukiah (CA) Daily Journal. It’s her 99th birthday.  Vogel is at work on a memoir about the secret of her longevity, but readily parts with some of the factors at work in her case:

Jim Lizzio lives right around the corner from where he was born in 1916, in lower Manhattan’s Little Italy. Housing projects and the encroachment of Chinatown have changed it a lot since hung out at Mulberry and Bayard. Now he’s more likely to be spotted at Senior Center over in Knickerbocker Village, but he keeps his visits short. “You sit down, you talk, you play bingo.  I’m not that type,” he told me over coffee in his cozy pink living room.  “Those people are too old for me.  And I’m 93.”

By Mike Peters, from the Cartoonist Group, Center for American Progress

Slate Magazine has commissioned a series of articles investigating what it’s actually like to be old — “to walk a mile in their Rockports,” as they put it. Commendable, though I could do without the coating of condescension. Rockports? Not to mention the title of the issue: Geezers.

There’s tons of good stuff in here, though, especially “80 over 80,” Slate’s list of America’s most powerful octogenarians. Ten are women, and (duh) none is retired.

Helen Gressett described herself as “a very strong adherent of social justice,  even before we really knew what that was,” and “a feminist, even before I heard the word.” At 62, after a career as a social worker, she helped establish Monterey County’s first child abuse prevention unit. It was uphill work because doctors and teachers didn’t want to admit the abuse was taking place. “I chose it because it was so unpopular,” she admitted with a smile.

At 102, Ivy Bean has become the world’s oldest person on the social networking site. The New York Post’s “Weird but True” column published the news item, snarkily citing it as further proof “that Facebook has grown utterly uncool.” Gee, thousands of Facebook members disagree.