Don't be afraid. Just play the Music!
– Charlie Parker

I am a proud fifty year old bacchante, brazenly determined to triumph over the negative forces which batter the mature woman. I celebrate Dionysus, whom the ancient Greeks sometimes called the "womanly one" because his entire existence was permeated by love. I live to seduce, enchant and engender a state of ecstasy akin to madness. Like the Theban women clad in fawn skins who harked to the "far flinging hallowed ring of the flutes," and abandoned home and husband to rampage on mountaintops, who became strong enough to uproot trees and "tear calf's to crimson shreds," I affirm the older woman's power to transcend time. I drink holy wine to induce a state of visionary eroticism.

In all Greek mythology Dionysus was the single god who did not exploit women. Instead, he exhorted them to spill wine, be bacchante and deck themselves out in vine leaves. Gradually, a female cult became attached to the androgynous divinity crowned with "essenced hair in golden tresses, with graces in his eyes." Legend attributes the invention of wine to Dionysus, who traveled around initiating his devotees in methods of vinoculture. Ground on which his handmaidens trod spontaneously flowed with milk and honey. The renewal of the vine in spring signalled his rebirth. Dionysus was associated with fertility, brought good luck to a feast and, in conjunction with the muses, blessed poets and musicians.

The Greeks with their innate sense of proportion realized the peril of denying human instincts. Euripides, The Bacchae (405 B.C.), provides an archetypal illustration of the extremes women are capable of when their erotic nature, or Dionysian side, is inhibited. This drama of bloody revenge revolves around Pentheus, King of Thebes, who refused to allow his female subjects to worship the "girl faced stranger." He barred Dionysus from Thebes and forbade his followers from drinking wine and honoring him in ecstatic dances, which originated in the "orgies of Cybele mystery-folder of the Mother olden."

Ultimately, the stiff-necked King's intransigence results in his being torn limb from limb by his own mother—leader of the bacchantes. In the throes of frenzied intoxication, she mistakes him for a mountain lion. The wine god's votaries follow her and "brush away rosy sleep . . . young wives, old matrons, maidens yet unwed"; all join together to punish the bullheaded tyrant.

I decry the perversion of love in our bourgeois context. Like Hermann Goring who once growled: "When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver." I bellow when love in our traditional, restrictive context is exalted as the goal of woman's life. Our emotions overflow at the sight of a ruddy newborn. Romeo and Juliet's mooncalf fumblings make us sigh romantically. Yet all odds are against the mature female past her "biological prime," involved with a younger man. What will her children say? Will her friends laugh at her for being a dirty old woman? I refuse to cringe like a slave at the sight of a lash and short circuit my pleasurable impulses to placate either an outer or inner censor.

Bacchantes loom out of the past and beckon to me. A favorite, the Princess Metternich, a witty bulwark of Napoleon III's court, knew how to silence tongue cluckers intent on putting strictures on her libido. When asked at what age a woman ceases to feel the desires of the flesh, she responded: "I do: not know, I am only sixty five." Another inspiration, Colette, who wrote a raft of amatory novels which examined the battle of the sexes from a woman's perspective, carried the torch of bacchanthood from fiction into her life.