Ed Asner is a year younger than my late father and the same age as my mother. In my adolescence to the present day, I have been attracted to men in their late 30’s to earn 50’s. The irony is that now my object of desire are my age or younger. I’m having difficulty wrapping my head around this, but, in my late 50’s, I find myself taking on the social role of “patriarch” and “father figure” even though I am childless.
The character of Lou Grant, as he first appears on “The Mary Tyler Moore” show and later, in “Lou Grant” is unspecified age (at least I don’t recall it ever being stated) but the actor was 40 when the series started, and in his early 50’s when it ended.
I actually met him and shook his hand in the early 00’s, at a fundraiser for Project Lamp (an NGO servicing mentally ill homeless people on Los Angeles’s Skid Row (apparently the organization is featured in the 2009 movie “The Soloist”, starring Jaimie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.). At the time Ed was in his early 70’s, a bit past it for my tastes. I didn’t tell him how he was instrumental in helping me to identify my sexuality (LOL).
