At the behest of the young lady that I'm currently seeing, I decided to go to a erotic book reading that's held every third Wednesday of the month, at this little-known club on Broome Street, called Happy Endings. I shit you not. It's run by this woman called Rachel Kramer Bussel, who's something of a local sex expert/ columnist/ writer..you know the drill. Check out her MySpace profile, she actually sounds quite sweet. Also, be sure to listen to the song on her MySpace page: it's called "I figured you out" by Mary Lou Lord...really great song.

Now my passion for porn has been dissected (and disparaged) at some length on these pages, so I won't get into it again. Suffice to say that the twelve of you who read this blog know that I like porn and see no reason to be in the closet about it. And while literary erotica sounds like a good idea, I do have a couple of problems with it: most of it seems to circle excitedly around bondage and domination (fetishes which offer very little to me) and secondly, no pizza deliver guys pleasuring bored housewives. That's integral.

I digress. We showed up at this club and were greeted by a large bouncer with a small stamp. He looked at my shapely companion and stamped her hand, with zero hesitation. He looked at me...and continued to look. I looked back at him. His stare was impenetratable but it spoke volumes: I didn't look like I belonged at an erotica reading. In fact, I looked more likely to balance their books, than to listen to their books being read.

"Say something funny", he said, stare intact. I stared at him, puzzled, thought for a second and repeated a joke I heard on "30 Rock" the other day, which was still fresh in my mind.

"I believe vampires are the world's greatest golfers...but due to their curse, they may never get the chance to prove it".

He looked at me, unimpressed. Reluctantly, he relinquished his gaze and stamped my hand. I was in.

Once inside, we couldn't find anywhere to sit, so we stood by the mezzanine, just in time as the first reader was coming up. She was a blonde, blue-eyed 40-something year old with a kicking body and virtually no talent. Her story, set in a farm in Montana, had something to do with a rooster and a horse (yes, I'm aware of the innuendo about a cock and being hung like the proverbial) and some guy she used to bonk in the stables. The sentences were short and choppy and the narrative was an odd, unsexy progression of her observations about the barn (the burnt wood color of the hoe..I kid not!) and the emotions she felt when he put it in (that last bit was my own; I could have used her words to describe him putting it in, but that would have taken six pages, countless obscure metaphors and at least twelve references to her breathing. Trust me, I did you a favor). It went on for about 20 minutes, after which she stopped and flashed us a demure, half-smile, which was our cue to applaud. And that wasn't the last thing she flashed...

She then announced she had a trick to show us, called the spoon trick. Turning around, she lifted her white tank top, adjusted something, turned around to reveal to silver spoons suspended from her chest, the heads covering her pert nipples (sorry, got carried away). Everyone laughed and applauded, while I felt my companion's hand tighten in mine.

"If she'd kept those spoons up while she read her little airport novel, I might have been impressed". My partner giggled.