Saturday, October 9, 2010

Almost Cut My Hair

This past week, my good friend Viviane asked me out to the Pleasure Salon, as she always does. The Salon is a convocation of likeminded sex positive people that meets the first Wednesday of every month at a bar in NYC called The Happy Ending. Over the last few years, I've gone once or twice, usually with the specific intent of meeting up with sex bloggers that I've been in contact with. Large group social gatherings are usually not my forte, and this one was, I'm sad to say, no exception.
Viviane, who is a heavy hitter in this milieu, introduced me to tons of people who she thought I should know or meet, and my terminal shyness took over once again, as I became a wallflower and watcher, the latter being what I really like to do the most. There was birthday cake for a woman hitting a major milestone, and forty spanks for her from anyone that wanted to participate. And I just watched, content for the most part to be the voyeur once again.
Everyone wears a name tag of sorts with their screen name or blog name or something like that, and Mistress Lynx started to chat me up about my name, a pretty woman with a kind and winning smile. I wound up gassing on ad infinitum about where the name came from (a closely held secret with obscure origins) and realized that most of my references were way past her age group, as I tried to explain to her who Jackie Gleason and Art Carney were, and so I faded back into the wall once again. I did listen to a guy next to me ask a girl if it was the first time there for her, one of the oldest opening lines in the book, but strangely, in that environment perhaps, worked wonderfully well for both of them.
But the whole evening made me realize once again that when I talk to people I have to be more interested in them and what they have to say, and not to talk about what my friend The Lawyer labels his favorite topic, himself, and that it wasn't necessary for me to play match that anecdote with everyone that I spoke with.
Oh, and the title of this post? Comes from a song writen by David Crosby and recorded long long ago by Crosby, Stills and Nash---I almost ended this blog last week, wrote a final post and saved it, planning to edit and post over this weekend. But events have conspired against that, and I'll continue along, perhaps (and hopefully) posting more frequently. I want to go back to telling the story of Not Enough, I want to say things here that can't be said anywhere else, I want to write about my fascinations and obsessions.

1 comment:

Spring, Ph.D. said...

Yeah, I'm not a crowd person either. If I could meet a couple of them at at time, it would be different. But in a large group, I just sit to the side and people watch/listen.

I recognized the title of the post. I get that clueless look a lot from my students when I mention something -- usually a tv show or musician -- from my younger year.