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Date Posted: 01:49:59 08/19/09 Wed
Author: SS
Subject: Re: ***********EROSFESTP4PARTIALCOMPLETION*********
In reply to: SS 's message, "Re: ***********EROSFESTP4PARTIALCOMPLETION*********" on 00:45:19 08/19/09 Wed

"It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves."
- André Gide

*

Seemingly out of nowhere, early in the morning, I heard a loud female whisper from the corner of the DreamBox, insisting that it was time to wake up. Having rose and shone, I heard Alexander Sky ask what was happening, and the woman replied "Joe Doherty is going to host a Naked Tantric Yoga class in here at 8 AM. It's 7:25 AM right now."

Well before the festival, when I learned about many of the various planned festivities and workshops amidst my ardent volunteering, the "Naked Tantric Yoga" class intrigued me in that, surely, when we shed our outer garments, we're in essence shedding our judgments of our self and others, along with our inhibitions, so that our bodies become a vehicle for connection rather than THE objectified focus of connection. Joe had indeed been teaching naked tantric yoga for men in Portland for over 6 years, as well as being an Iyengar yoga instructor for 8 years and a life long yogi for over 30 years, so I would feel completely at home in a class like this.

However, I first wanted to pass an eye over the venue to see if anyone was in need of a leg up. Reckoning that it wasn't even yet 8 AM, however, and that the festival didn't necessarily break the ice until 10 AM each day when the first wave of volunteers show up for their scheduled assignments, I accepted that it would likely be another two hours before everything truly picks up. So I considered heading over to the Naked Tantric Yoga workshop at this point, especially after I met Adonis again, who had just came up from across the street at Grendel's Coffee House and said that he was attending that workshop.

As I was standing in the valet parking lot between the Jupiter Hotel and the Doug Fir Lounge contemplating my options, though, that's when I noticed Freddy Zental Weaver waving hello to me from behind a window at the Doug Fir Restaurant. Surprised to see him there, I hurried inside the Doug Fir Lounge and darted toward the north end of the restaurant where he was sitting; also amazed to find that one of the invited artists (and a personal favorite of mine from the Opening Night Exhibition), Nancy Peach (also a children's book illustrator and Interior Decorating professor) was also having a bit of a tea-table talk with him. Both Freddy and Nancy invited me to have a seat and leaf through the menu, though they had already ordered their meals. After ordering a stack of Banana-Hazelnut Pancakes with a side of rosemary potatoes, Freddy asked how I was, and though I had felt quite chipper considering my sleep deprivation and breakdown no more than six hours ago, I spilled the beans about my dilemma from Saturday evening/early Sunday morning to them, where Freddy then asked me "You let it all out, right, all that nervous energy inside of you?" and I nodded, where he followed up saying "Good, that's really good!" as he patted his hand over mine.

It was at this point where Freddy propounded that we arrange a meeting with a Tantric healer for me, so that I could begin to come to terms with a sexual-spiritual connection viscerally. After some meditative rumination, and the sharing of my pancakes with them (they were larger than I expected them to be) Freddy mentioned that he was meeting a local dakini around 9:30 AM in his room, and asked me to please stop by so I can be properly acquainted with her and start to learn from her. I was moved by his offer, but added I may be needed before the festival's main line of events commenced at 10 AM. Freddy insisted however that this was important, and that he believed he spoke for everyone when he claimed I had worked as hard as one could possibly work at ErosFest Northwest every day. Blushing hearing that, I then affirmed I would be there, and Freddy took off, leaving me and Nancy continuing a duologue for over an hour.

Having told Nancy that I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, she nodded and told me that only during the last two months had she been starting to hear a lot about Asperger's Syndrome in the news and it has become an enigma she has been drawn most emotionally to as she has come to know several other people she has met who are also diagnosed with it. She shared a heartfelt reflection on her personal history observing a child diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome slowly but surely growing up and how, in spite of the many times she has been grief-stricken seeing him all caved in alone in his little world and struggling to open up to the world, she couldn't be more proud of him and considered him a genius who is destined to grow and scintillate before the world. She also explained of her determination to raise her kids in an open environment that balances a sex positive mindset with a coupled sense of security, and how often she grapples with deciding how much she should merge her work with her family life, which the dilemma was made especially clear to her when, one day at school, her child declared "This is my mommy, the erotic artist!" Still and all, she said she has felt a paramount volume of reassurance lately in that her daughter regularly says how much she respects and admires all she does! =)

After also conversing about how, in her fifties, Nancy optimistically believes life has only begun for her in many respects and she is living life to the fullest more than she ever had before and that, essentially, age is just a state of mind (I raised something Pablo Picasso famously said in response: "It takes a long time to become young.")...............as well as the inspiration behind Nancy's featured masterpieces at the exhibition, comparisons between San Francisco and Portland and some basic reflections on sexuality............it was then I realized we had chit-chatted for nearly an hour and a half, and it was already about 10 AM. I realized I was late in showing up to Freddy's room as promised, and while I felt a pang of guilt leaving them hanging up on the second floor of the hotel, I was most thankful to have met Nancy Peach in person notwithstanding; no strings attached one of the most sincere, charming, accepting, broad-minded people I've come to know and respect! ^__^

So I bustled, hustled and sallied on over to Room 234, where Freddy and his Tantrika guest were expecting me. By the time I knocked on his door and he answered inviting me to come on in, it was 10:23 AM. Sitting with Freddy was a local dakini who he cordially introduced to me named Sam Bean, who said that she couldn't stay much longer but nonetheless had a little time to properly get acquainted with me. After introducing myself to her, and opening up briefly on my background and sharing a little of myself, Sam then had to go and attend to an obligation, saying later we could exchange contact information and keep in touch, which I happily agreed to. It was then that, given I had spent the night at the Jupiter Hotel and my hair probably looked unkempt to many presently like I had been living under a bridge the past three days, LOL, that Freddy offered me to use his shower and, after getting myself all scrubbed up and rinsed off, I stuck around his room to help him prepare for his 11 AM check-out. While he was still tidying up his belongings, he invited me to listen to his playlist on his Blackberry Pandora: replete with mid-tempo fare spanning from Bob Dylan to Issac Hayes to Bobby McFerren, and even performed a work of progress to me with his bongo drum (I wish I could think of the title, but the theme of the song had something to do with "being at home", which uplifted me deeply to the point I was up on my feet, swaying like a date palm across the floor to the rhythm) Finally, just after 11 AM, he was ready to move his luggage down to the valet parking lot, which I volunteered to give him a hand with it.

After the two of us rendezvoused with Jas, Torch and Mike Kaiser on the lower level, where Freddy promised he would return for the evening festivities despite having to pull out of the Jupiter Hotel, I skipped about the DreamTent with celestial celerity looking for any available volunteer missions I would choose to accept................after providing comfort with Rachel Derby to a fellow volunteer I befriended at the volunteer orientation preceding the event, Katie Penna, who was a hard-working, marvelous accountant as was Rowdy throughout the festival who nonetheless now was having a breakdown of her own and needed comfort and reassurance she was doing an awesome job...............with a head now feeling light and azure blue sky clear with any feelings of sleep deprivation I had earlier in the day brazenly evaporating into thin air.

Fortunately, this would prove to be a fabulously fertile day for keeping productive, for 1) due to the fact that, at the Doug Fir Lounge, they were hosting a family-friendly event called Crafty Wonderland, thus we had to have volunteer liaisons regularly checking to see to it Crafty Wonderland youngsters and more sexually nervous visitants weren't exposed to over-the-top displays of public affection and semi-nudity, and 2) many hotel visitants were, like Freddy, also checking out throughout the course of the day, and that provided impetus to give it all I've got and keep as productive as possible by helping each of the guests with clean-up, as well as the moving of belongings from one room to another. Room by room, I helped place pillows, blankets, sheets and bed linings into piles for the housekeeper to redeem, sorted belongings outside of each room in as orderly and respectful a manner as possible, gathered up trash that ranged from straw wrappers to one third-full bottles of absinthe and carried it over to the dumpsters on the south side of the hotel and straightened up tables, lamps and other furniture to give each room a neat as a pin, picture-perfect appearance hospitable for the next guest(s).

I also spent a lot of time helping Gabriella move all the belongings from what had been designated as the temporary on-site ErosFest Northwest festival office on the second floor to Room 140, just across from the Volunteer Break Room.............enjoying all kinds of friendly chit-chat from Gabriella, Rowdy and other staff members while I was working that kept me in an all-smiles disposition. Then, after briefly watching Serena Doodlbug perform a luring hoop dance right in front of the Main Stage under the DreamTent, I performed some more surveillance duties to make sure families at the Doug Fir Lounge weren't subjected to undesirable matter, I assisted the official ErosFest Northwest Documentarian, Phil Teodorski, in moving his equipment from his own room on the second floor to Room 140 as well.

Time must have flew by faster than Fusaichi Pegasus in the Kentucky Derby, because before I knew it it was going on 4 PM now in literally the blink of an eye. I had known from the start of this year all too well how fast time can transpire when one keeps one's shoulder to the wheel and one's nose to the grindstone, but I was still flabbergasted with how this final of four days at ErosFest Northwest had accelerated in a way the previous three days didn't quite transpose. Even so, I was in highest spirits this day and, between thriving to the first degree on a short day and prudently going about what's expected of me on a longer day, I'd pick the former any day of the week.

By then, it was about time to start preparing for the grand finale at the virgin year of ErosFest Northwest.........the Temple of the Seven Veils Dance Event and Celebration Party. Naturally, the Temple of the Seven Veils abstraction was inspired by ancient goddess worship ceremonies that the Assyrians and Babylonians held at the primeval temples of Ishtar thousands of years ago. Ishtar is known today as the "divine personification of the planet Venus" in the Babylonian pantheon, and is often argued by scholars to be the rough equivalent to Aphrodite in Greek mythology due to accounts suggesting that both goddesses, as voluptuous and irresistible as they were, were also notorious for the cruelty they cursed their lovers with (in fact, in the "Epic of Gilgamesh", Ishtar asks Gilgamesh to marry her, but he refuses citing the fates stricken on her previous lovers including that of Tammuz, which Ishtar then goes to the sun god Anu to demand that she be given the Bull of Heaven, threatening to "break in the doors of hell and smash the bolts" and "bring up the dead to eat food like the living" if he didn't and, upon attempting to attack Gilgamesh with the Bull of Heaven, fails with Gilgamesh successfully killing it and, in a final expression of scorn toward Ishtar and her cruel ways, Gilgamesh's companion Endiku, a wild-man raised by animals and oblivious about all of civilization and society until he had sex with a devotee of Ishtar named Shamhat that prompts him to turn away from his previous life and pledge his allegiance to Gilgamesh and mankind, hurls the right thigh of the slaughtered bull at her face, shouting "If I could lay my hands on you, it is this I should do to you, and lash your entrails to your side.")

So the concept of the Temple of the Seven Veils revolved around (wo)mankind's fascination with worshiping, even deifying, the Divine through the at of dance and ritual. And that's undeviatingly what we were about to prepare for in the DreamBox and DreamTent this evening, with Owl of TantricTutor and Amy of Primal Beginnings collaborating together to allow each and every willing venereal votary to reach deep into their inner Adonis (Adonis, I know you're blushing, fess up! LOL! ;) ), Aphrodite, Qetesh, Lajja Gauri, Tlazolteotl.......whatever, and express their primal instincts on a dance stage complete with a runway and a ten-and-a-half-foot tall golden stripper pole.........with a convenient costume area set up in the corner of the room so anyone can slip into any sort of erotic alter-ego, and a high-definition sound system with an astronomical athenaeum of tunes to select from, ranging from metal (Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher" or Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane" anyone? ;) ) to New Age Trance..........having people fawn and flatter you from all sides of the stage like a comic book convention or Kumoricon gone mad! (twisted grin)

But lest we forget, of course, before anyone could be blandished, beatified and bootlicked beyond belief, you've got to have a temple erected (no pun intended.........or was there? ;) ). So I helped assemble a group of volunteers to help move each of the individual components of the stage design into the DreamTent, as well as an assemblage of wooden blocks to keep the stage panels sturdy and off the ground. Then, because we had the Erotic ReEvolution Party the previous evening, with blacklites hanging all around the DreamTent to highlight the glow-in-the-dark paint applied to all the dancers, we had to move each of the blacklite panels into the DreamTent, and that meant actually manually untying the knots on each of the panels one by one throughout the corners of the DreamTent (it proved easier for me to untie the knots when a fellow volunteer helped lift the panel up for me from the bottom so I didn't have to reach far up and untie blindly, and with one of the four panels I had to use a knife to sever one knot that was too tight) then carrying each panel into the DreamTent and setting them up accordingly..........all while guest erotica author I.G. Frederick, whose most recent publication "Shattered" was rated one of the "Top Ten Erotica Novels Published In 2008" by Preditors & Editors, kept the DreamTent buzzing with an exclusive book signing and reading.

Then, of course, no hedonistic hoopla is complete without some luscious libations to go with it. So me and a few fellow volunteers helped set up the bar in anticipation for the fever-pitched finale. It was shortly after I had finished arranging a dozen Rolling Rock bottles into the cooler and spread out a wide green cloth across one of the bar tables that I glimpsed Sam Bean over in the ThinkTank as I walked over there to provide an additional electric fan for the final scheduled workshop of the festival: "Panel: Exploring Alternative Relationship Models". We exchanged contact information there for future sessions; each of us both blessed to have met each other and having had enjoyed each other's company this morning. It was then that the Temple Of The Seven Veils had more or less initiated, so I skipped on in and began exploring the costume selection laboriously (seriously, I was in there for about half an hour trying dozens of shirts, boots, dresses, robes, lingerie and stockings on, seeing which pieces fit me and which ones complemented me well, LOL! ;) )

Finally, I settled with this shimmering, almost holographic silver mirror ball shirt, worn over a maroonish-brown bustier and, to give my performance a little additional titillating tintinnabulation, I tied a chiffon belly dancing hip scarf around my twenty-eight inch waist. I would have wore a redhead wig, drag queen makeup and 7" black leather spike heel ballet thigh boots if they had such appurtenances available, but these dingbats and doodads would suffice splendidly! ;)

Now all there was left to do was two things: 1) sign a waiver so I would be allowed to use the pole in my dance routine, and 2) select a song from Owl's Infinite Playlist so I can get my Ero-Tune on. Having always been a sucker for Fred Schneider's carousing cowbell, I chose "Dance This Mess Around" by the B-52's as my original number and, after watching about a dozen and a half exquisite performances (including Adonis' take on, you guessed it, "Rock You Like A Hurricane" by the Scorpions and a stunning take on Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" by Shadow) I stormed the stage and just gave the crowd everything I had in an energetic, non-striptease dance number (I purposely decided to make my initial number more of a character dance rather than a striptease because my costume just seemed to synthesize with the music too well). While I was well-aware I might look insanely foolish in my first pole-dancing exertion in that I was that kid growing up in elementary school who could never successfully climb a rope or even cling to the monkey bars for more than ten seconds, I was reminded by something David Grayson said: "We fail more often by timidity than by over-daring." And I did exactly that........over-dare.......and let my intuition take cruise control! And I know it paid off, as I elicited cheers sprinting toward the pole multiple times, leaping up, pivoting my hips to the side and letting my entire body fling around it with zippy zest; graduating from merely trying to hold onto the pole without slipping to tossing some scissor kicks into the mix as part of my saucy schtick.

After a while, when fresh blood stopped percolating into the DreamBox, and thus no one was queued to take command of the stage, Owl would keep playing songs from his playlist at random, and some random participants would rise out of the horseshoe-shaped mosh pit with a get-up-and-go gusto to show the crowd how it's done. Finally, when no one had taken the stage and Liz Phair's "Extraordinary" quavered from the sound speakers (a song I've always felt speaks to me personally as being about someone who may appear ordinary on the surface just taking the trash out and all but, if you really got to know me, you would see I have quite the primitive fix! ;) ) I thrust myself up on the side of the stage like a javelin and started making my mac daddy moves..........serpentining between rotations, attitude heels and front hooks at the pole, peppered with intense hip shaking and slithering shoulder-swinging on the runway, with a gradual shedding of my clothes as the song progressed..........until finally I stripped everything off at the final "Average everyday sane psycho..." refrain, sparking avid applause. It felt so liberating, so vitalizing, letting loose on that stage. Sure, I may not have even had a Pole Dancing For Dummies education, thus couldn't pull out the Hand Spring Splits, Bouncing Boomerangs, Inverted Hip Holds and all that other aerobatic ammunition on that Lil' Mynx Kelly Kayne has long perfected, but for a first stab at it it felt like a titillating tour de force in my book! :D

By the time the worship services at the Temple of the Seven Veils came to an end, it was about 9:30 PM and, outside around the Main Stage, a hilarious erotic puppet show had just wrapped up and the Wanderlust Circus' charismatic carnival barker Noah Mickens took to the stage to offer a glowing, festival-closing remark, followed immediately by closing remarks from Gabriella and Jas, who the crowd and I would then encircle around in a leviathan group hug that could have made the ultimate Gordian Knot............symbolizing the cheerful, capricious camaraderie that unquestionably blossomed here at ErosFest Northwest; dozens of people, of all walks of life, from all different parts of the world, subscribing to different faiths and sexual preferences..........all united under one tent to celebrate sexuality as a beacon of inspiration, meaning and community-building in our lives...........burning brighter than a massive Scandinavian bonfire at the zenith of the summer solstice. And to be tangled..............right in the crux of it............left me with a feeling of wholeness............of abundance............that divine intervention must have inspired.

As each of us slowly weaved out of the monumental hug, I paced across the DreamTent foyer, wondering if there were any final tasks I could attend to prior to take-down the next day. Gabriella gave me a hug, asking me what my plans were for the remainder of the evening. I mentioned that I thought I'd stay after for at least part of the unofficial Romp-like party in the DreamBox: closed off from the general public and reserved only for volunteers, vendors, staff members and entertainers. Gabriella then warned me I might not enjoy it in that it was similar to the Romp, and I nodded in silence understanding she was helping me out.........but I knew I HAD to be there, I HAD to confront my artificial barriers once and for all..........because if I accomplished anything less, then in the end I would have learned nothing, and everything I had experienced this weekend might as well be dismissed as the most phantasmagorical dream I've ever had.

That's when Rowdy found me, giving me a heartfelt hug.........telling me directly how he's blessed to have crossed paths in life with me and emotionally thanking me for all my hard work and devotion to the festival. He also told me how, being in my youth, I have so many promising things still winking at me on the horizon I am bound to be showered in soon, then recommended that I read "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment" by Eckhart Tolle because he said I remind him of so much he illuminates in the text, that I breathe it...............then finally said something that tugged at my heart profoundly, as though for that moment he was speaking on behalf of Destiny.............that there's nothing that compares to living life like there's no tomorrow, and that the most precious, rewarding moments in our lives are defined by the currency of risk-taking..........which had me recalling some of the truest words ever spoken from Soren Kierkegaard's lips: "To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself."

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