To enthusiastic applause from several hundred people assembled in the church building, Jane Fonda emerges from a side door and takes her place standing on the platform before a microphone. She does so while pulling a thin leash attached to a small white dog. She bows deeply in acknowledgement of this fervent welcome and thanks the audience.

Bewildered by all the noise, the little dog yelps. His mistress reaches down, picks him up, and cradles him in her arms for the rest of her talk.

Now in her 69th year, this stylish, dynamic woman in dark glasses  embodies a compelling ad for her popular fitness videos. She delivers a summary of her time in the world promoting her new-in-paper book, My Life So Far. Her talk, sponsored by my favorite book store, turns out to be thoroughly engaging, as is the question period that follows.

A crucial event was the death in 1982 of her father, the celebrated actor Henry Fonda. “It’s incredible when your parents die,” she recalls, “you can learn from it.” What she learned was not to have regrets, the way her father did. “It’s terrible to have regrets when you can’t do anything about them,” this daughter laments.

She recalls the other landmarks of her life. When she hit 59, Jane realized that the following year would mark a vital turning point. “I decided to face it full bore and to deal with it,” she says of the approach of the sixties. She likes to call this period “my third act.”

She admits being both famous and wealthy. Despite privilege, however, she presents herself as, until age 62, deprived of the human quality most important to her – owning herself. “For the first time in my life, I owned who I was,” she says of this breakthrough. “It meant that I was getting strong and well,” she adds.

Before that, she never had an emotionally intimate relationship, certainly not with her mother and father, nor with any of her three husbands. From the third, Ted Turner, she made a painful break of which she says “I opted for becoming whole.” About this awesome process of becoming a real human being, Jane says: “maybe that’s what God is.”

As a child, she grew up thinking she was “not good enough.” For her father, especially, Jane felt she had to be perfect. It took her 62 years to cure “this misogyny” that afflicts so many girls in American society without their knowing it. You have to get girls to reclaim their voice because they are the agents of change.

Much more of Jane emerges after the talk, when the time comes for questions. In the writing of her memoir, she acknowledges the help of the 22,000 files kept on her by the FBI. Challenged by a questioner for her support of an action of the Israeli government against the Palestinians, she regrets her decision. “I love Israel,” she explains, “but not the occupation.”

For future American elections she feels that citizens need to focus, not so much on the identity of the candidates but rather on building a grass-roots movement to change the nation’s priorities. The Vietnam War would never have ended, she is convinced, unless such a movement had pressured the U.S. government.

Women, especially must make their voices heard. And invoking language I never expected to hear in church, Jane says we all need “balls.”

About her discovery of religion, she discloses that she is now enrolled in theology school in Georgia where she lives. “I was raised an atheist,” she explains, “so I have a lot of catching up to do.” With passion, she regrets the way “the right wing has co-opted Christianity.” “It makes me happy to meet progressive Christians,” she adds.

One of the male questioners asked Jane for a hug. In answer, Jane comes down off the platform and gives the fellow a fervent embrace, an action she later repeats with a young woman.

“You have to be brave,” she advises a woman who asks about growing older. “It’s two years since I made my last picture,” Jane said. “I’m not going to have any Botox or stuff like that.”  

As a last bit of wisdom, Jane Fonda makes this affirmation: “People need their narrative heard. Move with your heart and listen with love. The great ones ─ Mandela, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and the others ─  they had it right.”

Jane’s theme of the Third Act strikes me as a useful idea for one’s later years. A bit self-dramatizing, perhaps, for those of us never in show biz like her. But it’s the part of a play where you get to see what it’s all about. The drama’s full meaning finally emerges.

In real life, too, the last act may turn out to be the most meaningful. At least, staying open to that possibility seems worth the risk.    

Richard Griffin