Naked New York

Last night, I attended an event called "Naked Girls Reading Science Fiction." It's exactly what it sounds like. They were naked and they read science fiction. It was great.

Sadly, I do not have any pictures of this event. I know that everyone likes to look at boobies, but cameras weren't allowed inside, so in lieu of naked girls, you'll l just have to use your imaginations. Your filthy, filthy imaginations, based on what I know about most of you. Yeah, you know who you are.

I read a lot of geek websites, which you can peruse at your leisure via the sidebar "sites I like that you might like." The week before Valentines Day, the geeksites were crammed full of fun, sexy, coupley, lovey things: clips of Han Solo and Leia's famous "I love you" "I know" exchange from "Empire Strikes Back"; an video of scifi themed strip teases in Williamsburg, yowza on the naked Seven of Nine chick holding the "Clothing Is Irrelevant" sign; and the best and worst couples in comics, like Lois Lane and Superman, the Joker and Harley Quinn, Beauty and the Beast, and Apollo and the Midnighter.

A note about that last couple, Apollo and the Midnighter. That last picture on my previous blog post, "Fistful of Comics," was of them, but feedback from my readers leads me to believe that the picture was too small for you to see that the superheroes passionately making out high above Planet Earth are both dudes. My comment about censorship and the sucking thereof makes a lot more sense once you know that. You can go back to that post and be retroactively scandalized if you like. I'll wait.

Moving on, that same website, Topless Robot, recommended Naked Girls Reading Science Fiction. A Greenwich Village burlesque troupe, Pinchbottom Burlesque has been holding their Naked Girls Reading performances since October 2009 , when they kicked off with NGR Banned Books, very appropriate. I heard about this event after the fact and kicked myself for not going. You may recall that I love banned books. So when NGR SciFi popped up on my radar, I thought to myself, "Self, you're no square! You need in on that hot naked scifi action!" So I bought a pair of tickets and said Happy V-Day! to my BF.

I don't spend nearly as much time in Greenwich Village as I'd like, but I'm definitely going to make more of an effort after last night's excursion. The venue, Madame X, is all red lighting, red velvet furniture, and fringed lampshades. They're really committed to the old-timey bordello theme. The Naked Girls read in the upstairs bar to audiences of about 30, making it one of those warm, intimate, off-the-wall events that I'd dreamed about when I first moved to New York City. Don't get me wrong, I love the big festivals and the concerts and the bookstores, but I always had the feeling that vaguely illicit and totally awesome things were happening behind closed doors, and I hadn't yet been given the password. Last night changed all of that. I was behind the door. I was in the room with a naked turquoise-haired Englishwoman reading "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

I found the real New York.

Like I said, I'm no square. I've seen nekked people since I was a kidlet, thanks to the hippies who raised me. But I've been away from Hawaii for so long that I'd forgotten what people look like without clothes. In Waikiki, people walk around half-nude all day, so I was used to it, but the see a stranger without pants on in the middle of winter shocked me at first. (The BF was unfazed; he takes art classes with live models.)

Then they started to read and I forgot all about the boobies. Other people who have gone to NGR say the same thing, that after a while, the nudity fades into the background and all you know are the stories. They started with H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine," then went through "Hitchhikers," "Brave New World," "Ender's Game" (squeal!), "Instinct," and Ray Bradbury's "All of summer in a day." I cried a little during the Bradbury story, which is about schoolchildren on Venus who live in perpetual rain, except for a two-hour burst of sunshine every seven years. I remembered that I used to live in the sun! Damn you, winter! DAMN YOU!

The funniest story was "Tomatoes From Mars," a children's book about gigantic tomatoes--from Mars! The Naked Librarian read it for us and showed us the pictures, and since she actually IS a children's librarian in her non-naked day life, it was wonderfully naughty on a lot of levels.

I even took away of bit of wisdom from the head of Pinchbottom Burlesque, Nasty Canasta. "Nerds are smart, dorks are awkward, and geeks are obsessed." So if you ever speculate on the difference between the three, there's your cheat sheet.

Thanks, Naked Girls! Is there any problem your boobies can't solve?