I am a liberal west coast American. Sexuality does not shock me.

Portland has more strip clubs per capita than anywhere in the world...at least, this was true a few years ago. One of my dearest friends used to be a stripper. I am a liberal west coast American. Sexuality does not shock me.

I saw a show last night that made me want to wear a turtleneck sweater and hug my grandmother.

I’ll make a short list of the things I’m not too shocked to remember, and I’m not exaggerating. If anything, I’m downplaying, and keep in mind that all of these...um...tasks...were performed by post-op ladyboys (women who were born men who have been surgically altered into women more beautiful than me).

The list looks something like this:

One woman had a candelabra placed on the floor with about ten candles, lit, surrounding the rim, and one larger candle in the center. She placed a thin tube, which looked a lot like plumbing tube, into her surgically impressive vagina and proceeded to lie on her back and blow out all the candles with her air from...within.
Another duo laid down on the floor of the stage looking out at the audience not with their eyes, but with...you guessed it...their vaginas chock full of ping pong balls.
My English friend Ruth and I got front row seats and we were given a ping pong paddle in case we needed to protect ourselves from any rapidly moving balls. We did.

There were the banana ladies, who lubed up a couple bananas, raised their hind ends in the air, and repeatedly inserted the bananas between the pair of lips you wouldn’t quite expect a banana to go into ("Well, that’s one way to get your potassium" , I told Ruth) and then shot the bananas upwards, catching them in their hands before repeating. At the end of this act, the music (John Denver’s Take Me Home) stopped and a Thai announcer shouted -ONE, TWO, TRRREEEE- into a microphone before both women used their ridiculously strong vaginal muscles to shoot the bananas further out into the crowd, and with more force, than I could have thrown one with my arm.

There was one woman who, not only was a horrifying portrayal of a women, but also an ugly man, emptied an entire glass coke bottle of water into her vagina, waddled across the stage (dribbling only slightly), and positioned herself over another empty coke bottle that had some sort of brown food coloring in the bottom so that when she leaked all the fluid into the second bottle, it looked like actual Coke. No one clapped for that one. No one clapped for the same women later, either, when she came out and pulled about fifty razor blades, tied to a string, out of her vagina. They were sharp, too; she held them up to our faces for us to examine them.

Another woman did the same string thing with needles that were about four inches long, and her facial expressions indicated she might want to see a gynecologist, and pretty soon.

We missed most of the egg act, because we were being hassled to tip, but what I did see of it included a woman lubing up an egg, inserting it, and shooting it out into her hand after contorting herself into different bodily positions. The part we missed was when she cracked it onto the rim of a glass which was sitting on the floor. Ruth was disappointed, "I thought it was hard boiled and she was going to peel it", she complained.

Probably my favorite part was when two cigarettes were lit up and a couple people from the audience were encouraged to take puffs off them before they were used for the act. No one wanted to. The woman laid down on her back, stuck the two lit smokes into her vagina, and...that’s right...she smoked them, blowing rings of smoke forcefully back into the audience. "I wonder what the surgeon general would have to say about this", I said to Ruth.

Surely I’m forgetting some of the acts, and they may have gotten more extreme - Ruth and I decided to leave not long after we realized one of the main girls who was dancing near us was a dead ringer for Mowgli from The Jungle Book...talk about bare necessities, right? There’s something far too disturbing about watching Mowgli pick up a lubricated banana off the floor.

The other thing that encouraged us to leave was that, between acts, the women kept encouraging Ruth and I to come up on the stage and dance with them. Most of the time, I’ve tried to keep an attitude of "Why not? It’ll make a great memory!", but we responded to their efforts with smiles that we hoped said both "There is no way in hell I’m stepping foot on that stage" and "But, please don’t take this to mean I don’t respect the many different uses for common household tools you’ve displayed to us this evening".

Walking out, I kept blinking and shaking my head as we walked through the market towards the taxis. If I looked to the left, I saw ’Super Pussy’ and heard men encouraging us to come see the show there. On the right, there was a stand selling paintings of Buddha. "This is so weird. How....bizarrre." , I kept saying.

We shared a taxi with a Swedish couple on the way back to our hotel. Everyone was chatting amiably for a few minutes, until I asked them if they’d also seen a show. "Yeah", they said, "...Yeah, us too."

No one said much after that. From the looks on all our faces, I think we were all replaying it in our minds. "Did you guys have the razor lady?", I asked.