Paramour Erotic Reading
at Kingston Gallery
by Liz Starbuck
photo by Peter Harris
Having tired of waking up the morning after going to rock clubs smelling of other people’s beer and cigarettes, I tried going to some poetry readings. It took about three nights to realize that there are a handful of good poets in the area, and a lot of really bad ones who obsessively go from open mic to open mic, hoping to get lucky and blunder into an enthusiastic audience. So I went in search of prose readings. I found one, an erotic prose reading. Fine by me. Presented at the Kingston Gallery by Paramour, a local “literary and artistic erotica” magazine (a lofty self-description) it was quite a stimulating event, which, of course, I mean in the Biblical sense.
The most exciting reader, judging by audience response, was Lisa Santoro, who read a piece about a man who wraps his girlfriend in the Sunday New York Times, straps her to a chair with electrical tape, and makes her help him do the crossword puzzle while he ravages her body. Actually it’s a modified version of the crossword puzzle; the “climax” comes when he insists she give him “a nine letter word, beginning with P, for enter.” “Do it, do it!” she says, to which he responds, “That’s only four letters… we’re looking for nine.” “PENETRATE!” she yells. You get the idea. The audience listened with rapt attention, leaning further and further forward as the lovely Ms. Santoro read, then eventually peeking around self-consciously and leaning back in their seats trying to look nonchalant. Both the performance and the reaction were very entertaining; I have to admit to a certain amount of squirming myself.
Ned Smith read a screamingly funny story about his guilt-ridden Mormon youth, accompanied by Scott Dakota on guitar. Dakota’s expressive playing got a great audience response when he illustrated Smith’s description of losing an erection. A very suspenseful segment involved the adolescent boy watching a shapely young woman leaning, no, pressing into a freezer to scoop ice cream, then repeatedly turning around to ask him, “Do you want another scoop?” I think he took four.
Doug Thoms (yes, Fleshflower/Boston Rock Opera/Pit Report) read, with great animation, a piece in which the narrator gets a lackey to do his sleeping for him so he can get more work done. He discovers he can get even more work done if the guy eats for him too. Then he buys him a new TV and some videos. Eventually, his girlfriend calls and…
Cecilia Tan, a local publisher, read a subtle, pretty story about a pubescent girl called “Pearl Diver,” and Oedipus (WBCN) read a bloody but surprisingly funny piece by Sylvia Plath about losing her virginity. Pia Schachter (Stuff Magazine) gave some very colorful, intimate tips on genital maintenance, and handed out a small booklet entitled “Wonder Pussy the Pia Way.” Amelia Copeland and Corwin Ericson, Paramour‘s Publisher and Managing Editor, respectively, read a raucous and shamelessly crass piece together, in which a woman is approached in a dark room by a man who she thinks is her husband, but discovers he’s not when she puts her hand between his legs, causing her to cry out “Monsieur! You have deceived me! My husband has three!” Ericson read his part with a kind of tongue-in-cheek (and I mean that in the Biblical sense) machismo, and Copeland read in a comic French accent, which augmented the very explicit, very crude sex scene with which the couple closed the piece.
A pretty steamy evening, and they even had great beer (which I didn’t find smeared all over me in the morning).
