Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Nutcracker Yes, Sodomy No !



Date: February 9, 2010
Author: Tony Bentley
Venue: KGB bar
Neighborhood: East Village
Free Drinks -- no
Q & A -- yes
Book signed -- no
UE Check Number -- 1245673

On my way to Toni Bentley's reading at KGB , I stopped at the McNally Jackson bookstore to buy a book of hers for my daughter's sixteenth birthday. Nicole, my daughter, is a ballet dancer.
I was looking for Bentley's first book, "Winter Season: A Dancer's Journal." It is an account of Bentley's time as a dancer with the New York City Ballet. I told the clerk I needed a copy of "Winter Season" for my daughter's sixteenth birthday. He looked it up and then said, they didn't have it, but perhaps I'd like to substitute another book of Bentley's called "The Surrender." The subtitle of "The Surrender" is "A Erotic Memoir," but maybe that didn't come up on the clerk's screen. What I knew, but that he presumably didn't, was that "The Surrender" is a book-length paean to the pleasures of anal sex for women.

I did an impromptu routine at the bookstore's counter for the two employees and a few customers behind me in the cash register line on the inappropriateness of buying a book about the pleasures of anal sex for my daughter on her sixteenth birthday.

Then I went to KGB. When Bentley finished reading from a collection of her more recent work, I told her the story. She laughed and said it might not be too long before my daughter might be interested in "The Surrender" as well as "Winter Season." Maybe so, but the less I know about that, the better. I found a copy of "Winter Season" for Nicole's birthday present at another independent bookstore.

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