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Via Flickr user Brian Turner

Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH) is one of those groups with such a vague-sounding name that you know they're up to something strange. In fact, the New Jersey–based nonprofit was in the business of "curing" same-sex attraction, which they call SSA. JONAH was founded in 1999 by two sets of parents with homosexual sons, and it's been an object of ridicule among mainstream scientists pretty much ever since.

The American Psychiatric Association has been pretty adamant that "conversion therapy," a..k.a. "reparative therapy," a.k.a. the practice of trying to turn gay people into straights, is harmful. The rhetoric of its practitioners has been used to promote genocide in Africa, and people who do it can be driven to the point of performing exorcisms on themselves. Still, until Tuesday, no one with legal authority has ever called out an organization like JONAH.

Tuesday was when New Jersey Superior Court Judge Peter F. Bariso, Jr. likened reparative therapy to consumer fraud and told the group it could no longer say that homosexuality was a disease that needed curing. A deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center told NJ.com that the decision was "monumental and devastating to the conversion therapy industry." New Jersey banned reparative therapy for minors in 2013, but this case could be the one that shuts down outfits like JONAH for good.

As it happens, a few weeks ago I got curious and decided to see what would happen if I filled out a form on JONAH's site requesting a consultation. Almost immediately, Arthur Goldberg, one of the organization's founders, offered to give me a call. I'm not proud of my trolling, and never expected to use it for a story, but what he told me mirrors what he apparently told the plaintiffs in the case: That there was a way to go from gay to straight. Goldberg ticked off theories about why I was "same-sex-attracted"—maybe I didn't fit in as a kid, maybe I had body-image issues. He told me that I could fix all this, and to ignore the haters in the media. "That's bullshit that's out there about how people can't change," he told me. "Hundreds of people have gone from gay to straight."

Obviously I never hit up the woman whose number Goldberg gave me after our conversation. But the lawsuit (pdf) gives some insight into the quackery I could have expected had I been serious. Chaim Levin, one of the plaintiffs, was 18 and living in a very Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood when he came across a JONAH ad in the Jewish Press. He told me gay people lived "in the Village, and Manhattan—not in Crown Heights," meaning he only knew what his rabbi told him.

When he hooked up with JONAH, his therapist asked him to slowly remove pieces of clothing while saying things he didn't like about himself. Then he was instructed to "touch his penis and then his buttocks," according to the suit.

"I remember feeling humiliated," Chaim, now 25, says. "After that session I left without telling anyone for a year and a half. Even though [my counselor] didn't physically force me, I felt very pressured."

The jury trial doesn't start until next week, but it seems like JONAH won't have a leg to stand on, considering the judge has also ruled the group won't be allowed to call "experts" to the stand. Chaim, at least, has no doubt about what the outcome will be.

"I really do think any jury will be able to see what they're doing is so, so wrong and so, so harmful," he said. "I was struggling with a lot when I was 18, and JONAH definitely made everything a lot worse."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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Photo from NBC/NBCU photo bank via Getty

We don't have to tell you how Saturday Night Live has been America's premiere laugh factory since 1975, week after week churning out some of the funniest, weirdest, most popular and catchphrase-coining sketches to ever appear on network television.

Sunday, February 15, is Saturday Night Live's big 40th-anniversary special. If you haven't already heard, the confirmed lineup includes a slew of former cast alumni as well as celebrities like Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Murray, Amy Poehler, Justin Timberlake, Alec Baldwin, Tom Hanks, Chris Rock, Chevy Chase, Kristen Wiig, and so many more that they had to stretch out the show to three and a half hours.

To celebrate, we locked ourselves in a room and watched hours and hours of classic and contemporary SNL sketches to dig up the funniest (or close-to-funniest) clip of each confirmed guest. That was a couple days ago. When we emerged, malnourished and squinting dumbly at the sun, we learned that more people were still being announced, and getting a clip for everyone on the constantly expanding roster would be near impossible. So here are sketches from everyone confirmed as of 24 hours ago, in no particular order.

1. Alec Baldwin: "Glengarry Christmas—Elf Motivation" (2005)

"This gumdrop cost more than the mushroom you call your house."

2. Dana Carvey: "Tom Brokaw Pre-Tapes" (1996)

"That'd be a huge story, Gerald Ford dying and you coming out."

3. Chevy Chase: "Word Association" (1975)

"What'd you say?"

4. Tom Hanks: "Mr. Belvedere Fan Club" (1992)

"But I shouldn't want to cut into him, to tear the flesh, to wear the flesh, to be born unto new worlds where his flesh becomes my key."

5. Chris Rock: Monologue (2014)

"These Toyotas are practically free at last."

6. Amy Poehler: "Sarah Palin Rap" (2008)

"Can I get a what, what from the senior section?"

7. Christopher Walken: "Centaur Job Interview" (2001)

"If I were to watch centaur porn, but with the bottom of the screen blocked out with a piece of cardboard, would I find the human halves of the female actresses appealing?"

8. Kristen Wiig: "Today Show: Regis Philbin Stops By" (2011)

"No humps for this camel—only toe."

9. Maya Rudolph: "Super Showcase" (2012)

"You said 'beef.' Which is wrong."

10. Will Ferrell: "More Cowbell" (2000)

"I find Gene's cowbell-playing distracting."

11. Eddie Murphy: "James Brown's Celebrity Hot-Tub Party" (1983)

"Should I get in the hot tub?"

12. Derek Jeter: "Derek Jeter's Taco Hole" (2001)

"Just off Route 3, there's a place called Nutley, New Jersey."

13. Dan Aykroyd: "Royal Deluxe II" (1977)

"Performing circumcision is demanding."

14. Justin Timberlake: "3-Way (The Golden Rule)" (2011)

"This rule dates back to ancient Greece."

15. Jimmy Fallon: "Jimmy Mirror" (2011)

"He's got the best ponytail—so sick."

16. Steve Martin: "Toonces the Cat" (1992)

"I guess I just assumed he could drive."

17. Adam Sandler: "The Hanukkah Song" (1994)

"He converted."

18. Peyton Manning: "United Way Spoof" (2007)

"Just a few hours of Peyton's time helps create childhood memories that will last a lifetime."

19. Tina Fey: "Girls Promo" (2013)

"You are unpaid prostitute?"

20. Mike Myers: "Wayne's World" (1990)

"Dear Wayne, what does Garth think about when Wayne is talking?"

21. Melissa McCarthy: "Arlene" (2011)

"Do you like your coffee pretty hot, Tim?"

22. Jerry Seinfeld: "World War II 101" (1992)

"Mr. Thompson, the French are still in Europe today."

23. Robert De Niro: "Three Wise Guys" (2013)

"Eh, that's not north—that's up."

24. Paul Simon: "Thanksgiving" (1976)

"And we talked about the old times, and we drank ourselves some beers."

25. Molly Shannon: "Mary Katherine Gallagher at St. Monica's Talent Show Audition" (1995)

"My grandmother is my legal guardian, and she lives in a motorized wheelchair, and she says I bear a very strong resemblance to a young Elizabeth Taylor."

26. Bill Murray: "Bill Murray's Apology" (1977)

"I saw you on the show Saturday night, and you stunk."

27. Kanye West: "Power" (2010)

"They say I was the abomination of Obama's nation."

28. Jack Nicholson: "Helen Hunt Monologue—Jack Nicholson Impressions" (1997)

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

29. Jim Carrey: "Jacuzzi Lifeguard" (1996)

"Next thing you know, a body goes under and there's bloated carcass stuck in the filter."

30. Taylor Swift: "Roomies" (2009)

"Who wants some blankets?"

31. Paul McCartney: "Cut Me Some Slack" (2012)

"Set me free."

32. Garrett Morris: "News for the Hard of Hearing" (1975)

"Francisco Franco is still dead."

33. Andy Samberg in "Lazy Sunday" (2005)

"Let's hit up Yahoo Maps to find the dopest route."

34. Martin Short: "Ed Grimley" (1984)

"You sure like talking about Wheel of Fortune ."

35. Betty White: "Lawrence Welk" (2010)

"Daughters?"

36. Bill Hader: "Stefon" (2011)

"Booooooooof, with nine O's."

37. Jane Curtin: "Point Counterpoint" (1979)

"I suppose that kind of fashionable promiscuity means nothing to you."

38. Jon Hamm: "Jon Hamm's John Ham" (2008)

"If you're as busy as I am, every day you have to make a decision: 'Am I going to eat lunch, or am I going to go to the bathroom?'"

39. Laraine Newman: "Catching Up with the Coneheads" (1979)

"I had to walk ten dextrons knee-deep in far-lite crystals each day to a little red one-room data center."

40. Norm Macdonald: "Weekend Update" (1994)

"Now you look at him and think blood clot."

41. Seth Meyers: "Pranksters" (2003)

"Some would call her a queen-size Stiffly Stifferson, but I call her my sister."

42. Jason Sudeikis: "Just Friends Booty Shorts" (2012)

"Tired of you and your straight friend being mistaken for a homosexual couple?"

43. Paul Rudd: "What Up with That?" (2010)

"You got it, dude."

44. David Spade: "Matt Foley: Talking to Kids about Drugs" (1993)

"Hey Dad, I can't see real good—is that Bill Shakespeare there?"

45. Kerry Washington: "Michelle Obama at the White House" (2013)

"Is Jay Z with her?"

46. Fred Armisen: "History of Punk" (2013)

"Oy, that's the prime minister you're talking about."

47. James Franco: "Porn Stars" (2014)

"You don't ned a Ph-dong in porn to appreciate seersucker yachts."

48. Zach Galifianakis: "Darrell's House" (2013)

"I want you to put a doorbell effect in there, right after I say, 'Guest.'"

Love is a lot of things, but when you strip all the poetry and highfalutin ideas away from it, it's just a chemical reaction in your brain and limbic system. So it stands to reason there must be a way to approximate that feeling by putting chemicals in your brain and limbic system, right? And if love is attainable through some combination of drugs, is there any way for an average person—i.e. me—to figure that combination out?

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), an organization that studies the effects of psychedelics on human emotions, balked at my query. "[Drugs] may be able to help reveal what's missing and what's working," the MAP PR rep said in an email, "but they can't do the work for you." But with that caveat, I was put in touch with Dr. Ilsa Jerome, who guided me toward some of the chemical explanations for this handful of feelings.

Jerome gave me an additional warning: "I don't think you can simulate love chemically because social interaction is complex and produces different types of gain, not just feelings," she said.

"Just feelings" would have to do for the moment. But before we began, I needed to define what "love" is. I'm not a poet, but I approached this task with workmanlike efficiency, taking a long list of emotions—lust, infatuation, warmth, etc.—pruned off the terms that didn't apply to romantic love, and lumped the rest into three basic emotional categories:

1. Tingly Excitement
2. The Need to Cuddle
3. Just Really Liking Someone

It wasn't exactly a sonnet, but it would have to do. So how can I achieve these things with a few pills?

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The feeling of butterflies in your stomach seems to come from the body's naturally occurring phenylethylamine, an amine that signals the release of the more familiar-sounding hormones dopamine and norepinephrine. This is an old notion, based on the 1983 findings of a psychologist named Michael Liebowitz.

You can buy 200 grams of phenylethylamine for $15.88 plus shipping and handling. The problem is, phenylethylamine doesn't work in pill form: Your body will metabolize it into phenylacetic acid, which is also known as the smell of stinky fungus.

Fortunately, another drug you can get your hands on for pretty cheap, provided you have an ADD diagnosis, also tells your body to produce dopamine and norepinephrine: amphetamine. Amphetamine, a.k.a. Adderall, can be obtained much more easily—and legally—than other nervous-system stimulants with similar mechanism of action like cocaine. Most people who have taken ADD medication know that it produces a feeling of being jazzed about life in general. Sounds like love to me.

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Photo via Flickr user Lordkhan

The Need to Cuddle

Also in Liebowitz's book was the idea that endorphins play a crucial role in forming bonds between lovers. Endorphins are, as you probably know, the naturally occurring opiates your body pumps out that are probably responsible for the comfort you feel after an orgasm. But don't think you can just pop your nearest opiate—Vicodin, for instance—and feel romantic.

Liebowitz says that your body withholds its natural opiates from you when you're lonely, meaning it's not that the presence of endorphins feels like love—it's just that you feel shitty when they're not there. "Most adults feel some anxiety when separated from important figures in their lives, and some sense of increased security when their closest relationships seem stable," he writes. In this analogy, we're all addicted to opiates, and opiate withdrawal, followed by a relapse, would be a good way to simulate reuniting with a loved one. I can't recommend that.

To simulate being comforted by a loved one, scientists are moderately certain you would need to get your hands on another familiar-sounding hormone called oxytocin, a.k.a. "the cuddle hormone." Like phenylethylamine, oxytocin is widely available, and recent studies show that its nasally administered form really seems to calm people down.

The danger with putting oxytocin in your body like you would a drug, according to Dr. Jerome, is that it's a hormone, and hormones have complicated effects. So while it makes you feel comforted, it also "actually makes people biased toward their own groups," she says. In some cases it can make you hostile to outsiders—in one case study, a person taking oxytocin habitually reported going out and picking fights with people, and then regretting it later. That's no simulation of love.

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons user Matthew Hunt

Just Really Liking Someone

For drug-induced fondness, you probably already guessed that there's nothing quite like good old MDMA. In fact, MAPS has documented that MDMA "mimics the post-orgasmic state," which is probably why it's so popular with the kids these days.

What's more, MDMA appears to simulate bonds of affection by encouraging the production of the hormone prolactin, which apparently helps parents form bonds of affection with their kids. A flood of prolactin is almost certainly a component of the love a mother feels for her child, but it also seems to be a part of the tender emotions you feel when someone is starting to seem like more than just a good lay.

"In a laboratory setting," Dr. Jerome told me, "subjects on MDMA have reported feeling lonely." That may sound like a drag, but it goes hand-in-hand with fondness for loved ones. As anyone who has ever taken MDMA and stayed home will tell you, you feel an overwhelming urge to call and text everyone you care about.

But there are downsides to MDMA as well. It makes for a cheap, and very temporary, love substitute, and it's notorious for making people feel like shit for up to a week after a rave. In fact, some people hate MDMA for that reason. Whether it's a "cup of coffee, or tablet of Prozac, or MDMA," said Dr. Jerome, "they're operating in different brain 'environments.'" Just like movies and music, everyone likes different kinds of drugs—unlike love, which we can all agree feels pretty fucking great.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. Today: Twelve Taliban militants have been arrested in connection to Pakistan school massacre, Myanmar's government heeds Buddhist calls to withdraw Rohingya voting rights, watchdogs grow concerned over press freedom in Bulgaria, and nearly 500 million people travel to China for New Year festivities.

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Photo by David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons

After three Muslim relatives were murdered in their apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Tuesday, Muslims across America had no choice but to take notice.

The police have so far maintained the trio was targeted because of "an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking." But on Thursday, the FBI launched an inquiry into whether the shooting might constitute a hate crime, and Suzanne Barakat has told CNN's Anderson Cooper that she believes the death of her brother Deah Barakat, his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and her sister Razan stemmed from a dislike that Craig Stephen Hicks, the man charged with the killings, had for the victims' appearances. Given that the young women who were killed wore headscarves, it's not surprising that the shooting has America's Muslims rethinking just how overt they should be about their faith.

The killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 led to a lot of black parents publicly discussing "the talk" they give their children to protect them from potential violence at the hands of law enforcement officers. "It's about survival," one black father told ABC News while describing how he told his sons to keep their hands in sight and address officers as "sir" if they're ever pulled over or arrested.

For a lot of American Muslims, a similar conversation on avoiding engaging with police or security officers came up in the wake of 9/11 and has resurfaced after the murders in Chapel Hill.

Many parents, even those who are religious themselves, discourage their kids from praying in public or wearing headscarves—things that would "out" them as Muslims, and, they fear, invite prejudice or violence. They certainly have reason to do so: Just under half of all American Muslims polled by Gallup in 2010 said that they have experienced discrimination based on their faith—the highest percentage among any faith group surveyed.

Nigah Mughal is a 24-year-old law student and Arlington, Virgina, resident who says she's worn a hijab since the summer of 2001, but the day after the Chapel Hill shootings was the first time she consciously decided to hide her headscarf under a hood.

"Even after 9/11, I did not make the conscious decision to hide my hijab, but [on Wednesday], I did," Mughal wrote in an email. "That scares me; my decision scares me. Have things become so bad that I am trying to hide myself?"

But Mughal does, on occasion, hide parts of her identity. She usually speaks an English-Sindhi mixture with her family, but when in line at the airport or on board a flight, she deliberately chooses to only speak in English.

After the shootings, Mughal said her parents called her from Arizona to implore her to avoid public transportation, to get home early, and to refuse to open her front door for anyone.

Some Muslims I spoke to for this article described getting some form of that advice from their parents this week, but many more said discussions about avoiding conflict and concealing their religious beliefs were recurring ones in their families. Fourteen of 21 Muslims who responded to an informal survey I sent out to various Muslim listservs had been given a talk on personal safety by their parents and issued some version to their own children.

"I personally have been physically attacked while praying in public," Mohammad Jehad Ahmad, a student at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, told me.

"My parents had 'the talk' with me after 9/11," he added. "Since then, my mother begs me to 'lay low' and not pray in public. My mother is especially afraid for me, being a male in my 20s. She wants me to be proud of my religion, but to be careful because she's afraid for my life."

"The world is not made for us, so don't do anything to upset the world," 20-year-old New York City resident Nancy Uddin's father said to her.

Many respondents described similar attacks that seemed to target their beliefs and ethnic heritage. These ranged from people shouting racial slurs like 'sand nigger' to waving guns and decrying Sharia law to politely asking Muslim Americans—many of whom were born in America—why they can't just go back to their own country. One respondent even described a very similar "parking dispute" to the one that allegedly took place in Chapel Hill that has been going on for two years her family's home in Santa Clara, California. It's left them feeling isolated and living in fear.

But as respondents reflected on religious or racially motivated attacks, they dismissed them as expected parts of their lives. One young woman concluded a list describing instances of hate speech, racial slurs, and veiled threats by writing, "But nothing dramatic has ever happened to me." This comment was reflected in many more accounts. Many Muslims have, like her, written off incidents that didn't leave physical scars as commonplace—or at least nothing worth getting riled up about.

"The world is not made for us, so don't do anything to upset the world," 20-year-old New York City resident Nancy Uddin's father said to her.

"My parents priority is ensuring my safety, so yes in some forms they give me 'the talk' every day," she added. "They hide behind American flags and nationalism, suppressing their Muslim identities and tell me to mask my rage sometimes."

"When I started wearing hijab, my dad actually told me and really begged me not to because he was afraid people would treat me differently and that I would not get the opportunities I deserved because it would hold me back," said Hirra Amin, a 31-year-old New York City lawyer.

Due in part to all the cautionary advice from their parents, many Muslims agonize over their outward appearances. A few respondents described almost daily struggles over whether to don a headscarf, an abaya, a beard, or even a small necklace that reads "Allah." Even if their own religious beliefs and cultural traditions push them towards such attire, they fear how their appearances will be seen by others—and if such overt displays of their religion might cause them to be looked at askance, passed up for jobs, or even assaulted.

For men especially, the talk seems to revolve around interactions with security personnel or law enforcement.

"My parents' initial advice via the talk was to obey law enforcement, comply with their demands to 'randomly select for inspection/surveillance' my bags and/or person, and never run away in fear," said Farooq Zafar, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Elmhurst, New York.

Although interviewees say "the talk" imbued them with a pervasive sense of fear, others reported using the conversation to foster a sense of safety and pride.

One respondent suggested that she took the initiative to have "the talk" with her parents and brothers when she became a lawyer and learned more about her rights. She sat them down to explain to them what their legal protections were if their if their homes were ever searched or they were ever arrested.

"I feel our men (people of color and Muslims) are often targeted by law enforcement, so I made sure to be extra particular and specific when speaking with my brothers about all the ways that they could be targeted and how to protect themselves," Amin said.

If we accept as Muslim Americans that we are justified in 'living in fear,' we have let violence and hatred achieve its end, which was to destroy more than just the people it targeted, to destroy everything that connects us.

Although this was an anomalous experience among the respondents, Amina Foda, a graduate student who also lives in New York, said that "the talk" she got from her parents was actually rather optimistic.

"It was made clear to me that I was different from my peers because I was Muslim and Egyptian—and that difference is what is valuable and deserves to be treasured and protected," she told me. "I was raised to be proud of my minority identity but the disadvantages of what that minority experience were not discussed explicitly."

The line between pride and fear is one many fear having to draw for their children.

One respondent described hugging his infant close just thinking about having to give him the talk when he gets older. Respondents who didn't yet have children expressed sadness at the thought of having to discuss how to be safe while being Muslim with their children once they have them.

Still, some Muslims got by just fine without any special chat. Jameelah Shaheed, a Dallas-based education coordinator, is one of them.

"I wore hijab for 12 years and I grew up in rural Texas, but I never felt there was a place I couldn't go or that I was limited in any way," the 29-year-old told me. "My parents went through integration and the Black Power movement, so I think they are just two tough, almost fearless people. We weren't the type that didn't go to the masjid [mosque] after 9/11. Without saying it directly, it was clear that if we're in the right we have nothing to fear, come what may.

"I honestly just feel like [my parents were] the two people who bucked the system and wore their 'fros, then traded them for a hijab and a beard, never backed down and taught me the same," Shaheed added, before acknowledging that after the Chapel Hill shooting, she feels more unsettled than ever.

Asra Nomani, a journalist and professor at Georgetown University, said in a Facebook post replying to a query on the topic, "I didn't issue any warnings to my son, Shibli, 12, except to talk to him about how the most ordinary of situations—like parking—can become violent if we are dealing with someone who is unstable and angry."

She said that she prefers to reserve judgment about the motivations behind the Chapel Hill murders, and asked her son to do the same.

"I told him, too, that the rush to judgment of the murders as 'hate,' with the jury still out, reflects, to me, the hyper-reflexive nature of too many in our Muslim community to cry 'Islamophobia' and 'hate' when sometimes much more ordinary realities—like short fuses tragically ending in murder—are at play."

Nomani is not alone in expressing doubts that the three murders were motivated in any way by the victims' religious identities. Quite a few Muslim American respondents also wanted to sidestep feelings of fear because, in short, they don't think they should have to feel afraid in America—a country that explicitly protects freedom of religion.

"We easily accept as Americans that if we 'live in fear' we have 'let the terrorists win,' because they want us to be afraid," said Fareeda Ahmed, 30, a corporate strategist and brand consultant who lives in New York City. "By the same token, if we accept as Muslim Americans that we are justified in 'living in fear,' we have let violence and hatred achieve its end, which was to destroy more than just the people it targeted, to destroy everything that connects us."

Nigah Mughal, the Arlington-based law student, found her own way to push back at fear in her own life when she was accosted in a Washington, DC, subway station.

"A homeless man told me he was going to slice open my throat and stuff a pork sandwich down it. I ignored him and continued to walk. I called the DC shelter hotline. He was homeless, it was a cold day, and perhaps he just needed somewhere warm to be," she said.

Beenish Ahmed covers international affairs for ThinkProgress. She's a former Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting grantee to Pakistan and a former Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom. Follow her on Twitter.

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All photos by Richard Termine

Unless you have an erotic fixation with jazz hands, few things are less sexy than the average musical comedy. At first blush, this might make a musical about porn sound like a terrible idea, two great tastes that just don't go well together, like semen and Starbucks.

But if your goal is to examine porn as a business first and a fuck fest second, as The Civilians have done in their new musical Pretty Filthy, then the resolute asexuality of the Great White Way is an asset. It tempers the corporeality of the subject, making it possible to explore everything from gay-for-pay straight boys to MILF porn without getting a triple X rating or discomforting the entire audience. More importantly, toning down the sex makes it easier to focus on the work. Pretty Filthy offers audiences the chance to see porn as just another sector of the entertainment industry trying to cope with the disruptive effects of the Internet.

Pretty Filthy got its start in 2010, when Center Theatre Group commissioned The Civilians to make a show about Los Angeles. After they landed on the idea of looking at the porn industry—"the other Hollywood"—The Civilians spent months interviewing more than 100 people in the business, from agents to directors, from porn actors to porn stars. The result loosely follows the story of Becky and Bobby, two middle-American kids who move out to LA to work in porn. But the real stars of the show are the minor characters that emerge from the wings to give monologues so real they feel like DVD extras from Anal Sluts 4.

Right after Pretty Filthy's first preview at the Abrons Arts Center in Manhattan, I sat down with playwright Bess Wohl to discuss porn, writing, and the relationship between a playwright and her subjects.

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VICE: When you started this process in 2010, did you have a sense of the show you wanted to write?
Wohl: We knew pretty quickly that we would have to focus primarily on straight porn, because the gay world is so separate. Then we also learned that the intersection of race and porn is really complicated. So we realized that doing a show about the African-American porn community would be a whole other show as well. We tried to incorporate some of those ideas, but it really became about straight white porn more than anything. Because we were looking at Porn, capital P, it was the one that felt like it would have the most breadth.

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You had a staged reading in LA in 2011. How has the show evolved since that point?
Wohl: When we first started, the idea was to make a fictional musical, where the interviews would just be inspiration. So the first version was a musical comedy, with a romance and much more plot then there is now, and almost no direct address to the audience.

But Michael [Friedman, who wrote the music and lyrics] and I began to feel that we had all this incredible material, and because it all felt fictional, the audience wasn't getting the benefit of the real things the people said. So the process became leaning more and more into the documentary feel of it. Our goal with this last version was to make people feel like these are things that were actually said.

And they were. Though I still have to ask—to what degree, exactly, were the characters based on specific people? Are any of them composite?
Wohl: They are mostly based on real people that we met. There were places where we would base a character on a real person, and then find a piece of material that somebody else said that was also in that vein, so there was some blending and reassigning. But I feel good saying all of them are based on real people that we met.

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There are a few moments in the show where characters ask if they can be in the play. It brought up a question for me about how they feel about the process. Was the relationship between you, the playwright, and your subjects hard to navigate?
Wohl: These people have been, depending on your point of view, exploited a lot in society. We thought a lot about whether we're exploiting them. We're not paying them. What are we offering them? More "exposure"? But is our theatrical exposure different from the way they're exposed in their professional life? What are the nuances of that?

I think that's why we leaned into the reality of it, because we felt like the answer was to let them speak in their own words, and give them their own voice. That felt like a way of putting them on stage without taking advantage of them.

As a writer, the way you position the material, the way you cut it and edit it can make someone sound really smart or really stupid. So I was very wary of ever positioning something in a way where someone sounded less articulate or intelligent than they really were, or something that got an easy laugh from the audience, That would be exploitative. At the same time, a lot of the material makes the audience laugh because it' s about sex, and also some of it is really funny. So I walked that line of letting it be funny, without playing it as a comedy.

Follow Hugh Ryan on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy of Flickr user Petras Galigas

It's Valentine's Day. Personally, I'm at home eating piles of my boyfriend's homemade nachos. But considering that we got in a fight last night about an open relationship that left him in the fetal position under the sheets, I figured I should stop taking my own advice and seek out some love wisdom from those with a few lifetimes on me.

Steve is an 82-year-old artist who swings both ways and lives in a gigantic loft in Soho surrounded by paintings with his cat Spooky. Sid is a 98-year-old chemist who figured out how to successfully dye polyester without using hazardous materials and has outlived two lovely wives. Joe is a 96-year-old widowed veteran who spends his days doing the foxtrot with his new girlfriend.

- Sophie Saint Thomas

VICE: So, who is the love of your life?
Steve: The love of my life? Oh my god. This is very dicey. You see, I have a rather checkered background. Well, the one that was involved in my life for the longest was Cornell.

How did you meet Cornell?
I don't remember. It was so far back. He's in the great beyond. It's a good place, I hear. And then there's Kaitlyn. I was involved with her rather than her being involved with me! It's been very strange. Ida was in my life for some time. I was going to marry her. But then... things got in the way. I don't want to get into it all that. Ida was very important, I can't say more than that. She's in Florida now. I gave her about ten paintings. I doubt she kept them. She probably got rid of them. It doesn't matter.

What was the dating scene like in New York when you were younger?
Younger! That's a long time ago. I'm 82; I don't even know how I got to this point. I don't know what to make of this, it just happens. You just keep on living and here it is. I wasn't too good at dating. There were some beautiful times and there were some not too beautiful times.

Do you have any regrets or things you wish you'd done differently?
No. I had some very nice relationships with both men and women.

Nice. I date both women and men also.
You do? Save a little for me! It doesn't matter to me. I like the person, you know? It's the person that counts. Cornell was great. These days, Kaitlyn is someone I see every so often but we're not having any smoochy-woochy. I told her I loved her once and then she didn't see me for three or four weeks. That didn't feel too good.

Do you have any dating advice for me?
I wish I did. I'm at a loss for everything lately, I don't know what's happened but my mind's been shot. Wait, wait. My cat's getting into something here. Spooky! Hey! His name isn't Spooky for nothing. Oh my god, this place is a mess. The loves of my life are cats!

--------------------------------

VICE: Can you tell me about yourself?
Sid: I was born in Portland, Maine. I lived in Portland through high school, until 1933. I was born in 1917. I just celebrated my 98th birthday. I finished high school when I was 16 then graduated in 1939 with a Cum Laude degree in Chemistry from Harvard.

Tell me about your experiences with love.
I've had two marriages. One of them took place after I finished college. In 1940, I was married. My wife and I had a wonderful marriage; she died in 1998 after 58 years of marriage. She died of cancer. After she died I purposefully avoided being fixed up on dates with other women, but there was one who had two husbands who died who I knew for over 50 years. She happened to be a very good friend of my wife. That marriage lasted nine years, and she died of cancer! So now I haven't even looked at another woman since and I don't intend to.

What advice do you have to give about love?
Well I've had two great marriages. I think that the thing is not to say or do anything that you think will make your partner unhappy.

Will you give an example?
She wanted to buy a certain coat, which I didn't like. But she liked it. And I didn't say "That doesn't look well on you at all." She liked it, that's the key thing. If you think what you say or do will make your partner unhappy, don't do it! The other thing is you have to love this person first of all, and not just in a certain way. Not just going to bed with somebody. What she does, what she is, what she likes, that's love.

How would you celebrate Valentine's Day?
We wouldn't make a big fuss out of it. We would send each other Valentine's Day cards. We didn't make a big fuss about our love for each other, we just did it.

--------------------------------

VICE: Are you married?

What did being married teach you about love?

You served in the war?

What was it like being married while being so far away from your wife, living through such horrors?
We wrote to each other all the time. Almost every day I got a letter. She sent photos; always sent me a Valentine; a birthday card. I would write her but couldn't tell her details about where I was.

Do you still have your love letters?
The men in my platoon were [Native Americans] and they were illiterate. They were gentlemen, just didn't know how to read or write. So they asked me to write letters to their wives. They said, "What do you write?" I tried to make up stories from my own letters. But you know it's a very personal thing, a love letter. And then I'd have to read the wives' letters back to them. But I was happy to do it. To answer your question, I don't have the letters from my wife.

When were you married?
I was on furlough. We had a week together. It was the most blessed week of my life.

What was it like coming back to your wife from the war?
She fed me for a year and helped me get back on my feet. I was under a lot of tension and fear for a few months after being discharged from Fort Dix. Then I went into the poultry business and became very successful.

What makes a marriage successful?
You can argue all you like, but when you go to bed, make up. We didn't have many arguments. I was too busy. She'd have dinner ready for me and we'd listen to the radio together.

What types of things did you do together to keep the romance alive?
We'd go out to dinner; out to shows. We'd go dancing. Ballroom dancing: the tango, rumba, fox trot, merengue. Not disco like today. We would go to nightclubs—La Conga, Havana Madrid, Latin Quarters,The Copacabana. Sometimes it was just the two of us; sometimes I'd take my mother-in-law and her husband with us. One of the most romantic times I remember was when my brother and sister-in-law took us on a boat ride in Bear Mountain. It was the first time I felt free.

How do you know you're in love and not just infatuated with the person?
When you're young, love is real. When you're old, it's infatuation.

I would think it would be the other way around.
You have the expectation of spending your life with someone when you're young.

How did you meet your current companion?
Here [at the Knights of Columbus] at a dance social. Ballroom dancing, not disco. We were seated at a table and everyone else had gotten up to dance and we were the only two left. So I asked her to dance.

What's dating like at 96?
We speak to each other every morning. I got her an apartment next door to me. She has supper with me some nights. She cooks, I cook. My daughter cooks. We dance with each other when we go to parties or weddings. You love each other in a different way when you're older. I told my girlfriend, "If you're looking for marriage in this affair, it's not going to happen. I was married for 50 years and don't want anything to change that." She had also been married; she's a widow so she wanted the same thing. That's good and that's where we are today.

Follow Sophie Saint Thomas and Jill di Donato on Twitter.

Can two strangers really fall in love by asking each other 36 psychologist-approved questions and staring into each other's eyes for four minutes straight?

It worked for a New York Times guest columnist, but what about for more than 100 people who responded to an Instagram-posted open call to test it out?

Three 20-something filmmakers, including Gia Coppola, the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola, actress Samantha Ressler, and musician and filmmaker Tracy Antonopolous have made a short film documenting what happens when you follow a doctor's prescription for finding true love.

Each of the three filmmakers separately read the NYT's article, To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This, and instinctively wanted to see if it works for random strangers. They posted a blind open call on Instagram inviting people in LA to come be part of their film. More than 100 people showed up. With three camera crews on hand, the filmmakers were overwhelmed with the response and wound up also filming people with their iPhones. People laughed, cried, kissed... Nearly everything that could have happened did. It's fascinating to watch.

On any given Thursday night, Parisians pack the covered patios in Oberkampf, a neighborhood in northeast Paris. This nightlife district falls on the path of Paris's gentrifying corridor that began in the Marais in the 2000s and has since crept up past Republique toward immigrant communities, increasingly blurring the line between fro-yo zone and no-go zone, suburban and Sub-Saharan, rapidly pressing towards Paris's northeastern banlieues.

Oberkampf is where I first saw Umar (not his real name), one of Paris's many rose sellers. In the yellow streetlight of the world's most romantic city, Umar walks and sings on the sidewalk. He is middle-aged—late 40s—and clean-shaven with a sudden smile. He walks with a straight back. Like hundreds of other South Asian men in this city, Umar spends his nights selling roses to the 20- and 30-somethings who pack the cafés, bars, and pubs of the Parisian nightlife.

These men are ubiquitous in the bar scene, weaving through stools and booths in 15-minute intervals, rarely acknowledged by more than a grimace, a waved hand, or a shaken head. Sometimes they sell flashing mouse ears.

Umar missed our planned meeting time but he probably had other things on his mind, like how he would make his 20 to 30 cents on the Euro selling the individually wrapped roses he holds in his left hand. He buys them in bulk from vendors in northern Paris, for prices ranging between 60 and 80 Euro cents per rose. Umar's selling price? He demonstrated as he approached a group of bar-goers.

"One for one! Two for two! Four for four! And for you—" He paused and gently nudged his knuckles into the cheek of a remarkably receptive man seated beneath a heating lamp. "Five for five!" His company at the table laughed, as they always do with Umar.

Umar is a Pakistani immigrant denied asylum and living without papers. He has been in France for two years and some months, choosing to flee a dangerous professional situation on recommendation from friends who have been living in Paris for ten years. He left behind a wife and four children, two teenage sons and two young daughters. He speaks to them every week. Without working documents and with his asylum case rejected by the French administration, it is difficult to find a source of income, and he, like the many other bouquet-toting men from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, has taken to selling roses from bar to bar.

"I pay 200 for a room. Plus electricity, and food. And other bills. I have to find money," Umar explained. "Some have language problems, some have no papers, but rose sellers are pure people. Not thieves. Not liars. We do things the right way, not the wrong way."

And Umar's is really the right way. Over the course of the evening, he sold close to 30 flowers. He said it's because these are the days of love, with Valentine's Day fast approaching, but another vendor I spoke with on my walk home sold none.

Umar's relative success as a rose seller may be the result of his having turned himself into a fascinating brand; he sells a brief performance of himself, rather than just a flower. He is charismatic and gregarious, flipping apathetic Parisians into laughing buyers within seconds. He turns them into kids. He serenades them. He invades the personal space of canoodling couples with panache and charm.

"MONSIEUR!" He bellowed in his rich, sing-song voice as he walks into a café and pulls out a shimmering blue flower. "Extraordinary new variety, Monsieur, WATER DIAMOND! WATER GALAXY! GALAXY FLOWER!" The flower is blue, with sparkles. It's also fake, as Umar told me beforehand, laughing like he'd pulled off a sly trick. All in all, Umar concedes that Parisians are polite, kind people. The man buys two flowers for the women at the table.

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Photo courtesy of the author

"Red roses are the symbol of love, so they are the most popular," Umar explained. "But white, too, is popular. It is the symbol of friendship. And it is the symbol of purity. And it is the symbol of peace. And white people buy the most," he told me, "for their girlfriends."

While bartenders and restaurateurs are generally disinterested in rose vendors, allowing them to take benign spins around their shops, they literally embrace Umar. One restaurant owner talking on a cell phone kissed Umar on both cheeks. Inside, Umar bowed to the owner's son behind the bar with a flourish; the son bowed back, and Umar turned to a table in the relatively upscale restaurant, where he sold a man a rose.

"Lots of people remember me. They say, 'Your way of selling is the best,' or, 'Your smiles are the best,' or, 'Oh! Singer Flower Seller!'" Umar told me with a smile.

I asked if he sang when he first started selling and he told me no. When I asked why he began to sing he looked at me like I was dumb. "Because I have the best voice."

On the street regulars gave him hugs and asked how his night was going. When he walked past someone he recognized in a bar, he'd backpedal and blow them a kiss. Servers saluted him. If an acquaintance spoke to him in French, Umar just started to sing and pranced away.

"I only speak English. Here are the French words I know. Bon soir: it means, 'good evening.' Bonjour: it means, 'good day.' Mademoiselle, monsieur."He looks straight ahead. Does he want to learn French? "Nah," he shrugged.

"Even though you've been here for two years?," I asked.

"And some months," he replied.

Umar only works Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. For the most part, bars are closed on Sundays and Mondays. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are not busy enough. That's 50 euros a week, if things go exceptionally well.

But each month Umar manages to send money home to Pakistan. He told me this toward the end of our evening after we'd spent a few hours together, as more and more cafés closed.

"My children are students. I send money so they can keep going. School is their life." Umar's demeanor switches between joking and serious frequently and suddenly.

He grew quiet. His few remaining roses, Water Galaxy included, swung by his left leg as we walked through a quiet square. I asked him what he spoke to his children about.

"I am a father of little kids. I love my family. Our children. From France, I love them because it is very important for them to be happy. When we talk—we talk about love."

I asked him their names and he told me each, slowly. We stopped at an intersection even though there were no cars. "My children say, 'Papa. You come back.'" His voice shook. "'Because I need not money; I need Papa. Papa, come back.'" Umar turned away, with wet eyes. "Life is difficult in Paris because I love my children. I cannot return because I do not have papers."

"Without paper, no life. I have no solution." He looked at me once again, wiped his nose, and put on a sudden smile. Like that, he walked into another bar.

When he came back out, he looked up the road and said, "I must finish my work time now." With four or five roses still in his left hand, he turned and walked away.

Follow Lawrence Neil on Twitter.

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Photos courtesy of Garren James

"I should send over some guys."

So began my interview with Garren James, the owner of the first exclusively straight male escort agency, Cowboys4Angels. His offer came after learning that I was heading to Vegas that night with 15 other girls.

James began Cowboys4Angels back in 2008. His business now employs about 60 men across the country, hand-picked from over 10,000 applicants. With two million dollars in sales last year alone, James's business is taking off. But before starting Cowboys4Angels, James escorted himself, charging up to $5,000 for a weekend.

James is a man whose full-time job is understanding women, and it shows. He interacted with me through a perfected series of intrigued and deferential glances and smiles, a non-combative establishment of power and distance. He is hyper attentive, with eyes that widen at all the right moments, showing an obsessive self-awareness I oddly respect.

Curious to learn more, I spoke with James to learn more about his beginnings in the industry, the challenges he's faced in building Cowboys4Angels, and how he figured out what women want.

VICE: Can you tell me a little bit about how you got started?
James: There's a couple different ways that I got introduced to it. I had a girlfriend who owned an agency, women for men. [She] wanted me to work with somebody that was doing something for her home—a mortgage. I was in the office with her and [the mortgage broker] was like, "You're boyfriend's hot." So we worked out a deal for a discount.

But what really happened was that I looked online and there were no agencies that were men for women.

How did you figure out what women wanted in an escort?
James: I put up some profiles of some men and tried working with porn stars at first, and it didn't work. I thought it would be cool, like, "Would you want to meet Tommy Gunn?" but women didn't want that.

And I tried body builders; women didn't want them. I thought it was interesting: Would you like to touch these muscles? didn't work. I put up guys who were high fashion, Abercrombie models. I found that guys who were in their 30s and 40s, who are really handsome but don't have these super editorial, Versace-posed outfits tend to work. So it's more about very lifestyle-type, smiling photos; those are the guys that work. Rarely do I get a 21-year-old that works a lot.

How do the guys get started? How do you train them?
James: A lot of guys that have done modeling have done imaging work in other countries. Imaging is when certain clubs want you to hang out in their VIP section and mingle. It's like promoting but not really. You'll get paid a certain fee to spend four hours in the VIP room, and your job is basically to not get drunk, but to have cocktails and encourage other people to have a good time.

Some men have worked independently, some men have worked for agencies in Europe, some men have never done this before. But they've dated; it's like they've done it, but they haven't done it for a fee.

I'll say, "If you had a fantasy, one woman in the world, like an A-list celebrity or top model, who would you [want to] go on a date with?" That's what I tell them to imagine for every client. You're going to go above and beyond for that date. You're going to hold the door, you're going to push in the chair, you're going to stay focused, you're not going to be on your phone, you're not going to be looking at the girl at the bar. All of those things you would do for that fantasy first date.

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Photo courtesy of Garren James

Do you ever still go out yourself?
James: Oh, no. I'm married now.

Congratulations! What do you envision 10 years from now?
James: In 10 years, I wish we will be in every city. I wish I could have a couple of assistants to help me. I see a romance line novel, Cowboys4Angels. I see a matchmaking show. I see many, many, many happy faces.

Our business is very unique. There's not too many businesses out there where the ultimate goal is to make somebody smile. I've gotten so many emails. One of my favorite emails was from a client, and I'll pull it up because I have it saved and flagged. It says, "The best thing about Bradley is that he made me feel beautiful and sexy. I truly believe I am the ugliest person in the world, and he made me feel so beautiful just by his personality. Please tell him I said that. Tell him, 'Thank you for making me beautiful.'"

All of those emails are worth it to me, to [deal with] those people out there who say, "Your men are hookers and prostitutes. You guys are fucking scumbags." Whatever they want to say. They don't have any clue. It's all this moralistic judgment. They don't have any clue what our business is really about.

Do you have any tips for those using Cowboys4Angels for the first time?
James: First thing is don't be nervous. It's not a blind date. You don't have to care what he thinks about you. You can cut loose, you can be whoever you want to be. You can be a jerk, you can be rude—whatever. We don't do client reviews.

The second thing is that a lot of women will be like "So, what does Billy want to do tonight?" It's not about Billy and what Billy wants to do. What do you want to do? Please don't ask me what Billy wants to do. You're paying tonight.

And, listen, I'm serious. I've got a guy in Vegas. He's available tonight; his name is Jax. He's extremely attractive and a nice guy, very friendly.

Follow Brittany Malooly on Twitter.

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Photo by Mathias Arvedsen

A 40-year old man was shot dead and at least three police officers were wounded when two gunmen opened fire on a cafe in Copenhagen today. The cafe was hosting a debate on blasphemy and free speech called Art, Blasphemy, and the Freedom of Expression. The unidentified attackers are still at large. Those present at the forum included the event's organizer, Lars Vilks—a critic of Islam who has drawn several caricatures of the prophet Muhammed—and the French ambassador to Denmark, François Zimeray. Neither were injured.

The attack happened just before 4 PM GMT, about 15 minutes after the debate started. The gunmen fired several rounds of shots, using what is being described as a high-caliber automatic weapon. In an interview with the Danish Broadcasting Service (DR), eyewitness Pelle Vedel says that Lars Vilks was quickly taken to safety by police.

The attackers escaped in a black Volkswagen Polo. It has now been found on Borgervænget at Østerbro according to DR. A large manhunt for the attackers is underway.

According to several Danish media outlets, Vilks wanted to continue the meeting despite the attack. This didn't happen, and police quickly escorted the 50 attendees away from the area in a bus.

Vilks is a well-known character in Denmark, and is protected by the Danish intelligence agency PET, who were also present during the meeting.

According to DR.DK, the PET views the attack as planned, and believe it to be an act of terrorism. Copenhagen police also consider it a terror attack, and are investigating it as such. Currently the police suspect at least two attackers were involved.

Update: A separate shooting has occurred in Copenhagen at a synagogue. One person was shot in the head and two police officers were injured. For more, go to VICE News.

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Photos by Logan Antill

Today is Valentine's Day, America's sacred day of sad wine memes. This essay isn't really about that, or consumerism, or 13 Crazy Ways to Knock Her Socks Off. I guess it's about women and being alive and lying naked with a human you love or only maybe love. Obligations are a bummer. Conventions are a bummer. But she, standing there, looking at you, whatever day it is, is not always a bummer. Let's eat some fucking chocolate.

She is standing at the jukebox in a dark bar. She sees you at the opposite end. It is crowded and her face is obscured by shoulders and tap handles but you can see her, too. A look that vaguely implies something filthy. Wild ideas. Collaborations. Plans for each other and the universe. A fast-forward to a sweaty moment in the backseat of your car. A look that is itself a rocket ship; with her you are above the clouds with the top down, picking meteors out of your teeth. She is beyond logic, chemistry, beyond your capacity to feel things, and this is terrifying. Because to be with her is to reconsider your own understanding of a species. How one person can permeate the being of another.

She plays nine dollars' worth of songs that are for everyone, for her, for this half-drunk moment, but they are for you, really. Songs that are so perfect they twist through your flesh like a sniper bullet. You sit and shake your head and idly pick at a damp coaster.

You sleep most weekends at her place one summer. You listen to Gladys Knight and have sex and watch The Larry Sanders Show. Her air conditioner sucks every trace of moisture from her bedroom. The front of it has fake wooden panels, like the sides of an old station wagon. Artifice, failing technology, wood as a signifier of domesticity: America, baby. You wake up in the middle of the night and hold your eyelids open until you start to tear and then you go back to sleep.

Sometimes you don't turn on the air conditioner and everything feels sticky, every surface, like you are covered in dried soda. Sometimes you lie with her on the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor, touching each other's hands, rolling, looking for new cold, listening to the rumble of the dishwasher, to the metal pull-chain on the ceiling fan clanging against the light bulb, to her working through her problems out loud. To you both pretending you have answers. Years before that she lived in Hong Kong with a boyfriend. They tried heroin and rode around on an old green motorcycle and one time he had another guy jerk him off while she watched. He was a stand-up comedian who never quite made it. She likes you because you are none of these things.

Before bed she sprinkles baby powder on her chest and behind her knees. In the morning it is in messy, clumped streaks from where the sweat was. Here is proof, evidence. A human alive; a body in operation.

You want to inhale her, her skin, her elbows, her shoulders, and every wrinkle of her brain, every movement, every noise, the face she makes when she calculates a tip. How sometimes she laughs so hard you can hear her from downstairs. How she laughs even harder and doesn't make a sound at all. How she paces and looks at the lines on her palms when she is talking to her mother on the phone. How she doesn't pace when she is talking to her father, because she never talks to her father. Her father is no good, and she came from that no-good, but now she is this woman, she is bulletproof, she is King Kong swinging from the skyscraper antenna, she is eating traffic and exams and brunch shifts like grapes.

You are in bed next to each other in the morning, on your backs, not wanting to move, wondering how much time you have left, doing the math together. Feeling the narcotic monotony of domesticity. The neighbors upstairs, heavy high heels clicking on hardwood floors, half-naked people almost-arguing and slamming doors. Green WiFi lights spazzing across the room. Spotify ads for fertility clinics interrupting Hall and Oates songs. "Is this the one for excessive bleeding or men developing breasts?"

She's in the bathroom brushing her teeth now. You are in bed waking up. You think about saying something to her but you don't. You can just watch her, exist with her; you are OK with that. Being in her orbit. She holds her hair back and spits into the sink and licks the toothpaste foam off her lips. She looks at you in the mirror. She doesn't say anything but she is looking at you at an amplitude that is making your organs rattle against each other.

She is delicate and she is powerful. She is the beach city and the typhoon. To love is to have the launch codes to each other's nuclear weapons. To be naked and in danger, stuttering and trying to be cool but sometimes not being cool, dependent and in awe, showing each other your weirdness. Not so the weirdness can be inspected but so you can hang it on your walls. You help each other levitate. You understand now that we are all this way, struggling to be strong and knowing we are scared. And you understand that she will always be stronger than you, that she is immune to this paradox.

She dries her hands on her bathrobe because she can't find a towel. She starts to hum a song, she gets on her tiptoes and looks at her thighs; she thinks you don't see this but you do, you're still watching her. She turns off the faucet. You roll over and close your eyes but in your brain she is still right. fucking. there.

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She gets back from her aunt's in Katonah or Mount Kisco or wherever. She tells you about the girls she saw on the Metro North, girls with giant sunglasses that reflect every microscopic movement around them with perfect accuracy. Tan even in between their toes and beneath the overhang of their long, glossy fingernails and cuticles that look like plastic. Girls fidgeting with their iPhones and chewing gum and talking about nothing with other girls who are also chewing gum. Girls who speak in a dialect of "yeahs" said with slightly varied inflection. Paragraphs of communication that contain only the word Yeah. Yeah? Yeahhhh. yeah. Yeah-uh. YEAH. Nothing has ever seemed as imperative, as urgent, as two of these girls showing each other text messages, what he said, what she said, what happened last night . "Like I love him obviously but he's so stupid what does this even mean?" You are washing a dish in the sink while she relays this to you. She comes up behind you and kisses the back of your neck. She says lots of words that are not yeah.

It's later the same day. You are with her on a corner downtown. She is standing barefoot, holding her high heels, taking no prisoners. And then she is sending terse emails to her boss in the cab on the way to the restaurant, giving the middle finger to her phone, putting her phone in her bag and her hand on your thigh, looking at you now like her boss never existed, only you and her, right here. It is after the restaurant. You are standing and sweating on a subway platform with her, wondering if you are getting on the right train, not giving a fuck if you are getting on the right train, smiling at the sleeping man on this not-right train with a newspaper and a half-eaten apple still in his hand.

When you get home her collarbones shine in the light of an infomercial about exfoliants or food processers. She is falling asleep against your shoulder; she is mumbling something semi-consciously about giraffes or the end of the world. In the morning she is sitting on the radiator with her feet on the window sill, smoking cigarettes as the sun comes up, sky the color of Trix Yogurt. Watching the people across the street washing their clothes in the sink and drying them on the fire escape, windows glowing all over like fireflies.

She is an absolute conqueror in this world without you, but sometimes it seems like she likes having you here.

You are leaving her place now. You are standing in the fog on a train platform at six in the morning, in a half-conscious mass of people going to work, faces down, grunting and hiking bag straps on their shoulders. You feel the deep dull ache of the unknown and then the pulsing high of confronting that unknown, you and her, what it is, what it will be.You are listening to the Ronettes as loud as they will go, young girls singing about the guy who left them but then he came back, how ephemeral all this is anyway.

You stare down at the tracks, at the Burger King cups and Skittles wrappers and discarded MetroCards. You think about how these are remnants of other people's lives, things that were at a moment essential to their existence. That someone had to make a train to meet a girl and dug in a pocket for a dollar to cram into a slot on a robot machine. Then that someone watched the crumpled corners disappear and prayed that the dollar wasn't rejected, and in this instant his brain played a montage of every other dollar he had ever inserted into a robot machine, soda machines and cigarette machines and arcades, and whether those were more crumpled but were accepted anyway, what his chances were now, because he loved this girl and maybe she loved him, and he was trying to find out.

You think about how we are alone in infinity, ricocheting between stimuli and hope and orgasms. We wander. We stare out train windows, at bedroom ceilings, examining the nail pops in the sheetrock, eating reheated egg rolls, trying to understand it. You are standing there like he was standing there, you don't know where you are going, you don't care, you drift. She is somewhere and you are here and in the meantime you wait.

Follow John Saward on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user camknows

I'm told I shouldn't feel bad for Jennifer Aniston, who launched a failed Oscar campaign for Cake, a movie now destined for the annals of film history. She sent Sprinkles cupcakes to awards voters. Arianna Huffington hosted a screening for her. None of it worked—imagine the cruel irony when she lost out to Marion Cotillard, who didn't spend a cent or second campaigning (though her performance was infinitely better than Aniston's).

Militant efforts like Aniston's are reminders of how impossibly labyrinthine and politicized the game of Oscar campaigning has become. It's a process that forces artists who produce great work to kiss the right asses to gain recognition.

It's a particularly brutal process for women, who find themselves working actively against the baggage that has followed their public personas. It's no secret that women in Hollywood have their private lives exacted with more scrutiny than their male counterparts, and this scrutiny often poisons their right to be ambitious.

Aniston is no stranger to this. Since her now folkloric breakup with Brad Pitt, she's become the subject of our derision and false sympathy. Everything she now does is destined to be tinged with the bitter resentment of a woman who was wronged by Brad Pitt and his glamazonian lover-turned-wife.

With her non-starter of a campaign for Cake, Aniston's persona has adopted a new angle. She'll now be known for her childlike obsession with wanting to be taken seriously as an artist, forever unable to escape Rachel Green. In the run-up to the announcement of the Oscar nominations, Aniston worked the circuit hard. She openly spoke out about facing her biggest fear of going underwater while filming Cake. She opined about how much she loved her now-deceased ex-boyfriend.

In those moments, her hunger for an Oscar nomination seemed feral, and she became an easy and convenient target for our cultural anxieties regarding ambitious women. Oscar pundits have had a nasty habit of chiding women, like Aniston, who play this game exactly as they should: with palpable thirst. What's so attractive about mocking these displays of vulnerability?

We can look back to 1973, when Diana Ross was nominated for playing Billie Holiday inLady Sings the Blues. It's a performance as absurd as it sounds, but Ross's narrative was an enticing one. Like Aniston, she was an artist who wanted to be taken seriously. By most accounts, it worked. She drew near-unanimous critical praise—Roger Ebert famously proclaimed "this is acting" when he saw her—that, in retrospect, probably had more to do with the fact that she wasn't a total bore on screen. Her mentor Berry Gordy aggressively ran full page ads in local trades extolling her praises. She lost to Liza Minnelli for Cabaret.

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Photo via Flickr user Alan Light

A year later, Candy Clark, not exactly a household name, paid $1,700 to put ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety for her role in 1973's American Graffiti, for which she got a Best Supporting Actress nod. Her performance was quietly enchanting, but she was, weirdly, the only one from her great ensemble cast to be cited at the Oscars.

Carol Kane, well known for playing Woody Allen's first wife in Annie Hall, knocked on voters' doors in 1976 to get them to recognize her work in Hester Street. It's a small film with mostly Yiddish dialogue that exactly no one has heard of, but her work was ingeniously expressive, subdued, and sort of devastating. Voters responded by including her in a particularly barren field for Best Actress. That was the year when Louise Fletcher—the least ubiquitous Best Actress winner this side of Marlee Matlin—won for playing Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

In 1986, after being nominated for her role as Shug in The Color Purple, Margaret Avery sold her kitchen stove to put a trade ad in Variety that begged readers for an Oscar win. Adopting some sort of Southern affect that was actively at odds with the way her character spoke, she wrote, "[n]ow I is up for one of the nominations fo' Best Supporting Actress alongst with some fine, talented ladies that I is proud to be in the company of." It was hilarious, pathetic, and more than a little sad.

There was Diane Ladd, Laura Dern's mother, who got nominated for a bonkers performance in David Lynch's bonkers Wild at Heart in 1991. Ladd schmoozed voters by screening her film after treating them to home-cooked spaghetti meals. She also wrote to voters personally with letters and offered to send them videocassettes of the movie. She charged $15,000 to her credit cards to put out four ads for herself in the trades. Funnily enough, she went to bat for her daughter this year, too, proclaiming that Dern created a "light-filled" performance in Wild, a film for which Dern was unexpectedly (and deservedly) nominated.

Melissa Leo put up some kitschy trade ads, donning faux fur against one simple word—Consider—when nominated for The Fighter in 2011, in protest of the fact that aging actresses like her didn't have the luxury of adorning magazine covers. She won the Oscar.

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Photo via Flickr user minglemediatv

It's easy for queens like me to criticize these women, especially when the qualities that endear us to them start turning sour. Watching Anne Hathaway's charms mutate into grotesque vanity as she won every award for Les Miserables was a glimpse into my own private hell.

But even Hathaway's manic, cultural PTSD-inducing campaigning gets at a truth we all know. Nowadays, Western cinema has a dearth of roles for its many talented women. An Oscar, as much as we distance ourselves from any imagined weight or importance it carries, can do something to correct that truth. It has the power to resuscitate dormant careers.

Some women could've used that kind of attention. Ann Dowd, that kind of yeomen actress who received critical accolades for her truly great work in Compliance (2012), financed an Oscar campaign out of her own pocket because the distribution company was too poor to do it themselves. She wasn't exactly rolling in trust fund cash, either; she was a working-class mother of three. In spite of her efforts, she didn't get nominated, and casting directors haven't been exactly knocking on her door since. After all, she's no spring chicken—how many roles for women over 50 are there?

Every Oscar season, we tend to blame the Academy for problems that are endemic to the movie industry itself. The Oscars are a symptom of the problem, and expending energy attacking them would be like putting a Band-Aid on a diseased leg. I sure as hell understand and sympathize with the impulses behind memes like #OscarsSoWhite, but it's foolish to blame the Academy for under-nominating Selma or Top Five. Don't blame the Academy. Blame the distributors like Paramount who prioritized a Christopher Nolan movie over much finer films whose casts were predominantly black.

And every year we bemoan the state of the barren Best Actress field without acknowledging the generally shitty landscape Hollywood provides for female actresses. It produces a troubling call-and-response when awards season rolls around. Aniston's role in Cake was the richest she'd gotten in quite some time. She received a modicum of praise for it upon its release at the Toronto International Film Festival. Then, her campaign managers seized upon an opportunity when they saw an open spot for her in a bleak Best Actress field.

Let's enjoy the Oscars for what they are: shiny mirrors of a supremely fucked-up industry that occasionally traffics in fantasy. The Oscars are capable of producing narratives that read like cosmic justice. Before she became the cultural monument she is today, Cher trudged through the manure of 1980s American cinema to undo the baggage of her public persona. Emphatically a non-actress at the beginning of that decade, she became a hot commodity after getting roles from cool kid directors like Robert Altman, Peter Bogdonavich, and Mike Nichols. Soon, she'd win a Golden Globe for Silkwood (1983), a Cannes Best Actress award for Mask (1985), and, ultimately, an Oscar for Moonstruck (1987). Seeing her on that stage with an Oscar in her hands was stupidly magical.

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Photo by John Mueller via Creative Commons

Some women don't get to enjoy that moment at all. Indeed, one of the women Cher beat out that night was Sally Kirkland, whose fairytale ending never came. Perhaps the most infamously desperate grassroots Oscar campaign was Kirkland's for a film called Anna. Kirkland plays an aging, immensely talented, and unlucky Czech actress who's struggling to make ends meet in New York. In the film, she loses out to some hot young thing (Paulina Porizkova). Kirkland personally called and wrote to Academy members, enlisting the help of anyone important she knew. Though she won a Golden Globe, she didn't win the Oscar.

But Kirkland, now bordering on self-parody, still talks about the experience vividly today, in part because she hasn't had a plum role since. This past year alone, she campaigned to get traction for her little indie film that couldn't, The Archaeology of a Woman.

It's easy and tempting to make fun of Kirkland and Aniston for their campaigning. If we laugh at these women, let's recognize the tragedy in that funny, desperate dance they do every awards season. Do they really have another choice?

Follow Mayukh Sen on Twitter.

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Photos by Rachel Robinson

Already the howls leak onto 12th Street. And as you pass through the heavy black doors of San Francisco's go-to gay biker hangout, The Eagle, the scene that greets you isn't the expected handful of dudes quietly gathered at the bar to catch the Warriors game. It's more like a rave at the SPCA.

Bare-assed except for tail-shaped butt plugs and Nasty Pig jock straps, sporting custom leather puppy masks and MMA mitts, several go-go boys hop and fidget to Berlin techno above the packed crowd. Huge cutouts of snarling pooches and giant bones loom over the dance floor. On the back patio, a hunky daddy dressed to the leather nines sits in a large chair, reading a newspaper, puffing a fat stogie, and resting his feet on a coiled human pup, who excitedly chews on a squeaky SpongeBob. A bootblack and a barber, both dressed only in latex aprons, ply their grooming trades with fanatical skill. Over in the corner a big cage rattles, as the human pups inside bark and throw themselves against the bars.

This is Pound Puppy, the monthly party that's quickly become one of the most successful in San Francisco, combining fetish imagery from the thriving human puppy BDSM roleplaying scene with underground dance music. (Yes, there are drag queen poodles.) Pound Puppy is where you'll find a lot of the queer artists, intellectuals, and fetishists who've survived the city's skyrocketing rents and evictions. You'll also find an infusion of freshly-arrived tech workers, eager to experiment with sexual identity and escape the "boring techie" stereotype. In a dog-eat-dog world, everyone's letting out their inner pup.

Pound Puppy is just one of a spate of pup-themed dance parties that have exploded along the West Coast, including Seattle's ARF! and The Kennel in Los Angeles. In terms of actual fetish play, the promoters admit that their parties differ from traditional puppy play parties, which have been around for decades and usually include mosh pits (rough-and-tumble puppy play pens), tons of sniffing and licking, and hours of immersive role play.

But parties like Pound Puppy are giving the human K9 community more visibility and stoking fascination with pup culture. That culture is growing: young devotees are posting Pets Express shopping haul pics to their Facebook pages, and choke chains are de rigeur. With its sleek gear and playful vibe, K9 has a certain trendy cache. And for the curious, it offers a gentle launch pad into the world of BDSM.

But for many, the draw of pup-themed club nights is that they provide a more human connection than they find in online interactions.

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"The ARF! concept came from a growing desire to express affection through touch and bouts of submission and control," says DJ Nark of his party, which regularly draws fetish porn royalty and local celebrities like Dan Savage. "The quintessential meaning of a gay bar is to express your inner desires freely. Part of the purpose of ARF! is to give a soft scratch behind their ear, and let the community know that we want to play with them too."

That sense of support has in turn boosted the virtues of pup life on the web. "Pup play is definitely more visible now, among my generation," said young pup Amp, a member of SEAPAH (Seattle Pups and Handlers) who helps DJ Nark with the party. "We see a lot more [human puppy sites], and know where and how to find the answer to questions, should we have any."

Pound Puppy's Jorge Portillo told me, "Pup play is a fresh take on the traditional 'master and servant.' K9 imagery is great because a lot of this generation of fetishists, it seems, are embracing sex as something less structured. Our party creates a space that is accessible and relatable to people seeking a way to explore something different about themselves. It's a bonding experience based on timeless instinct."

Alpha Pup Turbo is often at Pound Puppy with his pack, whose hierarchy includes beta and omega pups, a barking order he keeps in place with a soft touch and familial nudge. He also has a handler, who named him and watches over him. Pup Turbo, a teacher and researcher at UC Santa Cruz, told me, "When you think about real dogs, or 'bio pups,' and their owners, there is a lot of variability in those relationships. Dogs often have a lot of power in the relationship, so handler or alpha status affords more nuance and flexibility.

"I've met handlers and alphas who are very strict with their pups," Pup Turbo continued, "with many rules, leaning toward more of a control dynamic. I've also met handlers and alphas who are really more interested in the playful, nurturing, and mentoring aspect of the relationship. Dominance is maintained and respected, but in a less controlling manner. My relationship with my handler is more on the nurturing side, and that is also how I am with members of my pack."

Trending parties aside, puppy play is already a vibrant institution. Figaro Pup is the 28-year-old International Puppy 2015 titleholder, president of VAN-PAH (Vancouver Pups and Handlers), and alpha of the Wruff Pack. He's a natural nuzzler who signs his emails "woofs and wags" and whose name reflects his classical singing interest. He loves "snickerdoodles, scritches, moshing, and sitting with his tongue out."

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Photo by Fabian Echevarria

Figaro Pup identifies as a border collie. "I share a lot of traits with the breed. I get bored easily unless something is really holding my attention. I am always trying to keep groups together or herd people or pups. My husband is my handler, although I and the other pups in our pack call him Daddy. A typical day is surprisingly mundane. We do all of the normal things that couples do, work, chores etc. There are just a lot of little things that call out our other relationship dynamics. We switch from husbands to daddy/puppy fairly seamlessly. When we kiss hello, maybe I'll get some scritches behind the ear, or I'll play with a squeaky toy while we watch TV, unless it gets taken away."

In order to win his best-in-show title at the International Puppy Contest in St. Louis last year, he went up against several others, judged on gear, paw-shaking, a short speech, and his ability to improvise play when given a paper bag that contained mystery items. He talked to me just after he returned from January's big Mid-Atlantic Leather Conference in DC (the big S-M convention, along with the Chicago's International Mr. Leather Weekend in May), where he had been promoting his anti-suicide initiative Project Touch Base.

But mostly Pup Figaro was ecstatic to have come into contact with other pups. All the pups I talked to cited a real-life encounter that sent them on their K9 journey. "A few boys were out in puppy hoods and tails at a leather bar here in Seattle," Pup Amp told me. "What first drew me to the puppies was a connection that one of the puppies had with his significant other, his handler. They were very cute, sweet, and affectionate in a way that was so much more than boyfriends. They just seemed to glow with energy."

Pup Figaro describes the openness of the community. "Pups come in all varieties. There are male pups, female pups, trans pups, gay pups, straight pups, leather pups, rubber pups, military gear pups, sports gear pups... It's a friendly way to try something in the kink and fetish world and see if it resonates." Human pup play also overlaps with the furry and other fetish communities, forming a network that thrums with diverse expressions.

There's another reason puppy play may be on the upswing: a generation has come of age after AIDS, which wiped out many of the daddies that would usually guide them through the ins and outs of gay sexuality. The puppy play community offers a code to try out, a little guidance paired with emotional connection.

Or maybe it's just hot. Two of the elders of the puppy play community, Papa Wolf and Brue, offer a more expansive look at the scene.

Papa Wolf is the cheerful co-owner of the International Puppy Contest, a teacher and historian of the kink who takes it way back. "The first notations of puppy play appear in the leather community around the 1960s," he told me. Papa Woof has also written about puppy play in anthropological terms, citing ancient customs of therianthropy, or non-sexual animal role play.

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Brue identifies as a dog rather than a pup. "I've been in the community too long," he laughs.) Brue organizes the annual Woof Camp area of the International Mr. Leather gathering, which offers everything from Happy Puppy Yoga to advice on good pup health. (Running around on all fours can seriously dehydrate you.) Along with his SF K9 Unit organization, he puts on Woof Camp Weekend, allowing some prime fetch opportunities in the great outdoors.

"As with any curiosity, people want to explore the latest trend," Brue says of pup-themed club nights. "Because of this, advertisers and businesses are tapping into the 'newer' market. My observation is superhero play will probably be the next big thing."

Both Papa Woof and Brue take great pains to insist that puppy play is not about bestiality (although the latest promo video for the Pound Puppy party features a well-bearded man playing tongue hockey with a very licky pit bull). They also emphasize that being a human pup is not a "cookie-cutter lifestyle," and that its biggest strength is its flexibility when it comes to handler-pup relationships.

"Puppy life is about inhabiting a headspace," says Papa Woof, about living out an alternate reality, offline and surrounded by a supportive pack.

"Have you ever owned a pet?" Papa Woof asks. "How many times have you come home from a stressed day and thought, what a wonderful life they have? Someone to pet, feed, play with them. They are happy, mostly carefree... That's what the headspace of puppy play is all about. Putting the binds of the human world to the side for a while and just puppying out. Not having to deal with the sucky thing called being an adult!"

Paws up for that.

Follow Marke Bieschke on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Lydia Glassman

Before she became a shaman, Olivia Olkowski worked in advertising. Unfulfilled after 20 years in the business, Olkowski decided to pursue a three-year master's course in feng shui at the New York Open Center. It was there that she discovered what she refers to as her abilities. "I started seeing and feeling things and saying, 'What's all this about?'" Olkowski recalls. "Did I plan this as a kid? No! But I loved trees. I loved mudpies! And when I started down the [spiritual] path, the rocks would talk to me."

Today, Olkowski has become precisely the kind of "crystal lady" she watched from a distance when she was young. "I'd see these ladies wearing purple and think, Oh, they're crystal ladies. And now here I am, in my 50s, wearing purple and crystals."

Perhaps it's this self-awareness that makes Olkowski such an attractive shaman for women seeking love, guidance, and what Olkowski refers to as "heart healing." Despite being freshly engaged to a man I couldn't have manifested if I tried, I decided to attend Olkowski's seminar on "visioning a mate" on the eve of Valentine's Day. Walking to the New York Open Center, I passed rows of dimly-lit restaurants filled with conspicuously done-up couples—from the outside it's oddly hard to discern between couples in the midst of romantic ecstasy and couples in the middle of glaring fights—and I wondered about the kind of person who would choose to spend this particular Friday night in a new age bookstore, hoping to manifest a mate.

Turns out, that kind of person is the hot kind of person. After purchasing a ginger tea and some gross-looking (but delicious) vegan macaroons from the bookstore cafe, I headed upstairs to a room filled with beautiful people. These were not the desperate, ill-dressed, middle-aged women I'd ashamedly expected to find. These were, by and large, put-together, game-face women ready to manifest the fuck out of their future mates—plus a bespectacled, middle-aged dude in the back row. I took the open seat next to him and turned my attention to Olkowski, who had drawn some sort of diagram on the whiteboard of a human body with lots of terrifying lines pulsing out of it. These lines were meant to represent the residue of our upbringing, the ways in which being brought up, say, Catholic and repressed may have "junked up our energy field."

"Think about a woman who's afraid of dogs. She's walking down the sidewalk and there's a dog on the other side of the street. What's going to happen?" Olkowski paused, but we just stared at her. "The dog is going to smell the fear! The dog is going to walk over to her. That's what we mean when we talk about vibrations and frequencies." Right, I thought, wondering what frequency I had given off when I attracted that unhinged theater director two summers ago.

Olkowski asked how many of us were in relationships. A third of the women in the room raised their hands. "I have to tell you," Olkowski said solemnly, "Once you start down the spiritual path, you might lose spouses. You might lose parents. I've seen feng shui lead to divorce!"

Soon Olkowski started getting into the good, sexy stuff. "How many of you had too much fun in your 20s?" A smattering of hands went up. "There is a thread of energy running from us to all of our past sexual partners, even one night stands! You have to clear your mate space. You have to put up a Vacancy sign instead of a No Vacancy sign." Is she referring to our hearts or our vaginas? I squinted at our shaman as she brought out a drum, painted with an owl.

"Now we're going to go on a journey," she said, dimming the lights. "We're going to find our guides, and we're going to ask them how we are blocked up in love." I ate a macaroon so I would have something to chew on during my first shamanic journey. The man next to me sat up straight, his legs spread open. He seemed like a real pro.

Olkowski began to bang on the drum, and damn. There I was, in a wet cave, looking at the clouds reflected off an underground lake, stroking a wolf's tail and eating a vegan macaroon. I should really start doing yoga again, I thought, and zoned out.

After our journey, Olkowski turned up the lights and asked us to share. One girl, a regular, raised her hand and talked rabidly about how her "guide" had red eyes. "Have I made a deal with the devil?" she asked frantically. Another woman shared her experience, "I didn't see anything. I just felt totally nauseous." She looked profoundly moved, but that may have been residual queasiness. "I felt this growing nausea here—" she rubbed her stomach, "in my solar plexus."

"Yes," Olkowski nodded. "That's your self worth."

After a ten-minute break, during which women crowded a gift table up front covered with various rocks, we returned to our seats. It was time to get down to business. "Let's talk about ways to attract a mate," Olkowski said. The woman to my right adjusted her butt in her chair and pressed the tip of her pen against her notebook, prepared for some serious shamanic wisdom.

"Bright colors!" Olkowski shouted. "Everybody's wearing black over here!" She swiped her hand across half the room. I looked down at my dark sweatshirt and jeans. "Red makes the bull charge!"

The shaman walked over to a black woman in the front row. "I love this thing they do in the African American community, the women with the thick braids and styles. It's hair Chi!"

Olkowski rushed excitedly to the white board. "You have to try this. Hair Chi. Nine hairdos in three days. They have to be nine different hairdos, or else you have to start all over again. And believe me, that's not fun." This shaman is suggesting that we focus our energy on our hair, I itched to text my fiancé, who'd hardly masked his skepticism. "Once you start paying attention to your hair, you're going to want to do your makeup, you're going to want to wear nice clothes!" Olkowski had spent five years training with a Peruvian shaman. I marveled that this was part of the curriculum.

Then she started to suggest a return to old feminine values. "Have people help you! That's how you can be seen. Have a stranger open the door for you. Stand at the back of the elevator and ask for a man to press the button for your floor." Nauseous solar plexus lady nodded vigorously. "Except you," Olkowski said, pointing at the man beside me, "Your task is to help! Open doors for strangers!"

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Photo courtesy of the author

"Now we're going to get a bit... racy," Olkowski said, returning to the white board. Finally. The shaman drew a sperm shape on the board. "Where does the paisley shape come from?" she asked. "Sperm," I said. "That's right, peacock feathers!" Olkowski drew a peacock feather next to the sperm shape. "And what is this?" she asked, drawing another sperm shape to the right of the feather. Silence.

"It's the yoni. The Indian word for..." Oh, the class collectively saw the vagina, the clitoris. Right.

"One powerful thing you can do—and I'm not sure how you'll do this in New York City, ladies—is shine your yoni at the full moon. To activate your base chakra and... stimulate those energies." The room erupted in cheers: at last, a shaman-ish way for us to bring good loving back into our lives/hearts/privates!

"That's the best piece of advice you've given!" the man beside me bellowed. The women in the crowd had questions, as several hands shot up. "Should I do it sitting down or standing up?" one older lady asked. Olkowski explained her own technique: "Lay down. Spread your legs. Shine it to the moon." Beneath my seat I Googled when the next full moon was coming.

After another shamanic journey—more peaceful meditation; this time I was floating on some sort of tempurpedic cloud—the event finished up, and women rushed to buy rocks en masse from Olkowski's selection. For $8, I bought a hematite stone shaped like a kidney bean, to help with my iron deficiency and "build willpower." The woman with the devil-eyed spirit guide pointed at a bowl of orange crystals with a sign that said "Increase your CASH." "That's crazy," she said, "I bought one of those last week and work hasn't stopped calling!" "That is crazy," I said. "You know, I had a session with her, I only paid for two hours but she did four. She's a kind soul," the woman smiled, before walking over to Olkowski to consult about which rock kit she should buy.

"You look prettier than when I last saw you!" Olkowski exclaimed warmly.

"You always look beautiful," the woman said.

"That's not true," Olkowski frowned. "Only when I put my makeup on."

"Right," the woman nodded. "I put makeup on today too."

Whatever, I thought, pocketing my shiny new stone. I'm just waiting for the full moon.

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