Our own Andy Horwitz did himself proud Monday night, kicking off SMUT, the spanking new performance series at Galapagos, with an adroit and hilarious monologue about the perils of rimming the obese and hairy, a comic tour-de-force one hopes one’s parents will never, ever hear. Andy on stage, describing his difficulties with simple motor movements and his sexual hang-ups or lack thereof, wrings his hands charmingly and scrunches his eyebrows to the ceiling like a pornographic Woody Allen…wait. Like Woody Allen.

Desiree Burch, a good natured ex-dominatrix, presided over the smutty proceedings, clad in the crisp white shirt and tasteful black slacks of an office temp, amended by a black satin corset accentuating her ample bosom. She performed as well, a masochistic tango (suggesting to me the Tom Lehrer song “The Masochism Tango” : “I long for the taste of your lips, dear/but more for the taste of your whips, dear”) with an inflatable doll called Amy, at one point anally penetrating Amy with a mike stand. Courtney Love, eat your heart out.

Rounding out the evening of ass-play was Toni Bentley, former Balanchine ballerina and author, reading from her book “Surrender” a spiritual exploration of anal sex as apparently, a way to find God. Could it have potential as a textbook in our country’s new “faith-based” sex-education? Peut-etre, cherie!

(keep reading by clicking through. you know you want to!)

She spoke in the nasal, childish voice of a ballet teacher, and as she read her book—a kind of over-intellectualized sexploration packed with interchangeable sentences and hundreds of euphemisms for “orifice” and “penetration” – my eyes wandered to her companion, an older man dressed neatly in khakis and blue blazer who looked as though he’d prefer a cocktail at the Yale Club to being seated in a dark warehouse surrounded by Williamsburg hipsters, and thought with horror — “Him? He’s ass-fucking the ballerina? George Will over there?”

My friend Bj (see Greetings from Ho-Land, Part Eight) accompanied me. I can think of no one fonder of the ballet or of butt-sex than Bj, and his eyes were filled with wonder. I assumed he was in awe, or lost in the mist of his own anal memory, until he leaned over to me and whispered an anecdote about a woman we both know, a woman who apparently, in the throes of labor pain, began to scream uncontrollably “TOUCH MY CLIT! TOUCH MY CLIT!” until finally, her mother reluctantly obliged, and she came as she gave birth.

Onstage, Toni Bentley was saying “Anal sex is really the last taboo.” Um…I beg to differ. I think the last taboo may be your mother bringing you to orgasm as you squeeze out her grandchild.

In closing, I laughed, I cried, I cringed in horror, I am saddled with mental images that I may never be rid of as long as I live. And Andy was really, really funny, and we should all be proud of him.
But again, Tom Lehrer said it best–and if you’re not familiar with him, look him up:

“SMUT!
Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can’t shut
If it’s uncut
And unsubt-
Le.”

The SMUT series—Mondays at Galapagos, 8pm.