Nation’s Elderly Increasingly Looking to Porn to Support Expensive Pharmaceutical Drug Habits

82 year-old Eloise Nightingale lived the quiet life of a wife and homemaker in rural Iowa until she suffered a heart attack two years ago, and lacking the ability to pay what Medicare wouldn’t for her medication, soon became known internationally as porn star Wendy Tunnels after she began acting in sex videos to subsidize her new pill habit.

“‘Geezer Pleaser Part Three', ‘Nursing Home Nymphos’, ‘Fuck Me Like It’s 1945’,” recited Nightingale, ticking off some of the most notable of the seventy-four porn films she’s appeared in over the last twenty-one months, “‘Eat My Grandma’s Snatch, Mister’, ‘My Grandma’s a Whore’, ‘Granny Does Miami’, ‘Lesbian Granny Sleepover’, ‘Early Bird Gang Bang’, ‘Black Dicks, Broken Hips’, 'Bingo Bimbos' and ‘Comatose Sluts Part 5’.

Sadly, as the cost of prescription medication in this country continues to rise, thousands of women with little financial recourse like Eloise have turned to the bourgening geriactric porn industry to pay for their pills, and experts predict the catastrophe that President Bush's new Medicare 'Part D' reform is becoming combined with his recently proposed $36 billion cut to the program's budget will only serve to bring more elderly women hobbling from the woodwork.

"When her Medicaid was cut before the government finished processing her absorption into Medicare, my friend Betty was having palpitations and her blood sugar was through the roof, so I gave her the number of a producer I know. Now she's back on her heart and diabetes meds and known throughout the internet as the 'I've fallen and I need to be fucked lady'," said Nightingale.

Despite the initial shame and embarassment she reports experiencing during her first few features, Nightingale puts her participation in the industry in context with the dispassion of a bank teller discussing making change.

"I remember my first film like it was yesterday. It was a little fifteen minute vignette where I'm making a crumb cake for my nice young Puerto Rican neighbor who's come over to fix my toilet, only I was so nervous that it took me over a dozen takes to not start to cry when he said 'I don't want no crumb cake. I want your wrinkled milk sacks!' as he ripped my blouse open," she said.

"But now it's old hat. I go in, make love to a young man who helped me carry my groceries in from the car, get paid, go home and take my Avapro. It's a matter of survival. Sure, I'd rather not have to do oral on a colored fellow in a Meals on Wheels costume to get the medication I need to live, but I'm not ready to check out just yet. I'm still waiting to find out who was at the helm of that speedboat on 'As the World Turns' that put Luke in a coma and caused Stephanie to miscarriage.