Judging from her hilariously dark new memoir Agorafabulous!: Dispatches from My Bedroom (out Feb. 14 from William Morrow), Sara Benincasa will always win the “Who has it worse?” game. Spent a week during college in your apartment, unable to get dressed or leave? Benincasa could barely leave her bed, and took to pissing in cereal bowls rather than dealing with unfriendly bathrooms. Think you’ve got a great, “Kids say the darndest things!” story from that year you spent teaching? Benincasa’s time molding young minds involved Viagra and an adolescent erection. Seriously. We caught up with Benincasa over the phone about having enough confidence to write a memoir, the joys of medication and why she’d love a good heckler during her book tour. 

Because you’re cool, I want to ask: Did you ever have any reticence about writing a memoir when the publishing world is so glutted with them?
I think you either have to have a really original voice or you have to have a story that is insane and has never been told before. Or you have to have both. I would hope I have the combination. What sold it overall, in addition to having a pretty likable, accessible voice, was a story that involved me pissing in bowls. And my advice is if you can work defecation into your story in any way, people will love it. There’s gotta be some kind of a hook, and in my case, agoraphobia and the ways in which I acted out was the hook. It was very strange and specific and weird, and not something that strikes a whole lot of people, although it’s far more common than most folks would think. I tried really hard not to seem self-pitying in the book, but rather to seem kind of amused by my own struggle. Not to undermine anyone else’s pain but to try to find the humor in the really dark shit. I love reading authors who take really dark stuff and make it funny without making light of it.

And you’ve been telling these stories in your stand-up act for a while, right?
I have two different acts. I have the one I do in the comedy club, and that tends to be lighter stuff, sex and relationships and jobs I’ve had. And then, when I’m outside of the club setting, I’ll tell longer form stories and take more risks with stuff that might not be funny but is sad. If I were at Gotham Comedy Club, that would not be the appropriate place to tell these pissing in bowls and suicidal stories. And if I were doing a one-person show at, say, UCB, I would incorporate some of the darker material.

At what point did you decide to make the leap from the stage to writing a book?
My intent was always to use the live show to write a book proposal. Because writing is so lonely sometimes. I had a job at Sirius XM Radio and I would use all my vacation time to go to theaters around the country, and I would have a list of bullet points of stories I wanted to tell and I would experiment with different ways of telling them. And through that I was able to put together a book proposal. And I started in spring 2009 with the show and we sold the proposal in spring 2010 and we got a final version of the book ready to go in October or November of 2011. And now it’s being published in February 2012!

I found during the course of writing it I gained a real sense of confidence, but also a sense of over-confidence. I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve traveled all over the place telling these stories and I’ve been holding down a job and doing all these things a stable adult does. And maybe I don’t need meds or therapy anymore.’ So I weaned myself off them and it worked really well for four months. And then there was a trigger. I was in a relationship and he moved to another continent, basically, and then having to finish and turn in this thing triggered a really deep depression. And finishing up this project meant that I couldn’t distract myself from these huge problems in my life that I hadn’t dealt with. But I had an amazing editor and agent who gave me some extra time while I finished this up at my parents’ house. And now I’m back on the medication. Tastes like freedom!

You’re touring with the book, too, right?
I am doing a nine-city tour—if you count Manhattan and Brooklyn as two. Which I will do. At each place I’ll have one other comedian there to do some comedy and I’ll do a combination of standup and stuff from the book. I love reading, but I’m not such a big fan of hearing someone read.

I was sure you were going to say the other comedian would be there to heckle you.
I would love that, if someone screamed during a really sad part, “You suck!” I’m Sicilian and I’m from New Jersey. I love a fight!

Meet Sara Benincasa at Housing Works (126 Crosby St.), 7 p.m., Feb. 16, with an open bar from 7–8 p.m. Do not heckle her.

By Angela Barbuti

Tucked away on West 72nd Street between Broadway and Columbus Avenue is the 130-seat Triad Theater. Inside, actors make their Off-Broadway debuts, celebrities take the stage with friends and audiences are always entertained by an eclectic variety of shows, from Erotic Broadway to the smash hit Celebrity Autobiography. We spoke to owner Peter Martin about what to expect there.

West Side Spirit: How did you get started at the Triad?
Peter Martin: I was the company manager of a show called Forever Plaid at the theater; it went on to become one of the five most successful shows Off-Broadway—the producer put in $135,000 and it grossed $300 million worldwide. It seemed like a great business. In 1995, when I was 30, I had the opportunity to buy the theater. I was able to get in at the right time.

The theater was a black box originally. About four years ago, I redesigned it based on 1930s movie palaces. I love those kinds of theaters and did a lot of research. I recreated the bathrooms, added a VIP performer lounge. People tell me, “I’ve seen this in Europe.”

What is the history of the theater?
It started in the early ’80s with Forbidden Broadway. It wasn’t even a theater back then; it was a bar/restaurant called Palsson’s Supper Club. Actor Gerard Alessandrini started writing spoofs of Broadway shows and they were performed there on weekends.

What is your favorite show at the theater currently?
Celebrity Autobiography. Celebrities read from other celebrities’ memoirs in a comedic tone. You’ll have Matthew Broderick reading from Tommy Lee’s autobiography. On another night, you’ll see Kristen Wiig reciting the poetry of Suzanne Somers. We’ve probably had more famous people in it than any show on Broadway.

Have there been any memorable mishaps?
There were two sold-out shows one New Year’s Eve and the coat check girl misplaced all the numbers. People were trying to get their coats out from the first show while others were coming up the stairs for the midnight show. It was a disaster. Another time, John Simon, a well-known theater critic, came in to review Forbidden Broadway. He checked his umbrella and somehow it got lost. A couple of days later, he sent us a bill for $300.

To what do you attribute your success?
Times have changed Off-Broadway. In the last 10 years, tons of theaters have closed. I’ve really had to adapt by instating a new booking policy. In the course of a month, we can have 30 different shows. I’m always thinking of how I can improve the theater and what’s going on in the entertainment industry. On Broadway, a musical costs about $15 million.

Off-Broadway, you can experiment more. Things get started Off-Broadway then move to Broadway. For instance, there’s a new musical in the works about [’50s teen idol] Dion called The Wanderer. The first reading was at The Triad six weeks ago.

Beaton’s New York years revived

By Marsha McCreadie

One high aesthetic compliment is to call an artist ahead of his time. Yet, the real trick is to be both of your time and ahead of it. Cecil Beaton—photographer, illustrator, set and costume designer, even author—turned that trick, and nicely, too.

The fabulous results and even a hint at his motivation are currently exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.
Why there, why now? Well, it’s Beaton’s “New York Years,” the 1920s through the 1960s—the fun decades, at least for him and his crowd. Beaton was a soigné mover in the top artistic and social tiers in both his native England and his semipermanent residence of elegant Manhattan hotel suites.

There’s already something gemülichkeit about the approachable museum portico, so the “Beaton Rose,” his cozy 1940s fabric design papering the entrance hall, is a needed transition into a glittery world presented with a clever structure, both chronological and thematic. Let’s face it: We don’t really go to this exhibit to get a career history, though it’s there if you want it—from his early surprisingly “romantic” painting and drawing through his magazine photography years and costumes for the Metropolitan Opera.

Subsections are devoted to his pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Wallis Simpson, Greta Garbo (one of Beaton’s heartfelt but rare heterosexual love quests and the only “candid” image of her laughing I’ve ever seen), Elsie de Wolfe, Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. Also view a sweet-looking young Marlon Brando and a cheery Mick Jagger; both Hepburns—Kate and Audrey, separately; and a sprinkling of socialites.

Decorator de Wolfe got Beaton social access and he flattered, cunningly: “I only photograph those I like and admire.” (Summation-type Beaton quotes are posted throughout.) From a wealthy but not aristocratic background, he was clearly more comfortable in a Manhattan filled with other arrivistes than in class-fixed old England.

When the stylistic tide turned against his lush Vogue and Vanity Fair painterly tableaux, shifting to the informal action photography of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, Beaton didn’t wail, he moved on—to sets and costumes for Broadway and Hollywood, though he resented time spent in L.A.

The show highlights details of the Ascot Race set from My Fair Lady, famously imitated by Truman Capote’s Plaza Hotel Black and White Ball.

Peek at Beaton’s letters and other writing for an ironic self-view. See a handsome-looking woman in a shiny dress and bob, shot from behind, glancing over her shoulder. It’s Beaton in drag, clever enough to omit pearls thrown carelessly down the back to tip you off.

Is there a discernable Beaton style? Was he the Picasso of the photography and design world—with a clear signature, even when using multiple modes? No and no. Who cares? He caught various zeitgeists and their emblematic people, made viewers want to look and dress like them and unapologetically took bits and pieces from every genre. You could call it artistic shoplifting (some did)—or, eventually, homage.

Cecil Beaton: The New York Years
Through Feb. 20, Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Ave., 212-534-1672, www.mcny.org.

By Anam Baig

Ronni Thomas, a filmmaker and oddity enthusiast, has created a new web series documenting the darkness, eccentricity and mystery of the uncharted and unimaginable happenings of New York City.

Fittingly named The Midnight Archive, these videos boast an eclectic class of characters such as Sue Jeiven, a tattoo artist at East River Tattoo, and Madame Cagliastro of Brooklyn. Jeiven, who is featured in episode three, specializes in anthropomorphic taxidermy, creating lifelike tableaux from dead animals that she guts, stuffs and lovingly clothes in vintage human attire. Madame Cagliastro also deals with animals, performing mummification for pets weighing 20 pounds or less—she mummifies a dead toad in the first episode.

Episode eight, the latest on the Midnight Archive website, is entitled “Wax.” Sigrid Sarda, an artist who started making hauntingly human wax sculptures after the death of her father, hosts with her spooky collection of wax figures that line every inch of her house.

Other members of the odd ensemble who work on the series include Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult New York; Jere Ryder, conservator for the Guiness Automata collection at the Morris Museum in New Jersey; and professor Paul Koudounaris, who traveled the world photographing ossuaries and charnel houses, places constructed of human bones.
In his IKA Collective office at 15 E. 32rd St. in Midtown, Thomas sits among a giant Grim Reaper, scary child dolls and other spine-chilling items as he edits a new episode of the show.

The episode features Thomas himself discussing his collection of stereoviews, a late 19th century entertainment consisting of 3-D images projected through a stereoscope—a much older and intricate ancestor of 3-D View-Masters.
“The lecture was on my collection of macabre stereoviews, in particular my set of diableries, which are French stereo tissues from the 1860s that depict Satan’s daily life in hell. I always kind of sat on these macabre demented things, these private fetishes. When I saw the variety of people who showed up for my lecture, from Harvard professors to gutter punks to people I didn’t even know from my old high school, I decided, let’s make a film out of this stuff.”

Many of the eclectics filmed for The Midnight Archive are lecturers at the Brooklyn Observatory, an event space at 543 Union St. in Brooklyn that serves as a multipurpose room for artists. That’s where Thomas met Joanna Ebenstein, the curator of Morbid Anatomy at the Observatory and now the producer of the series.

Thomas said that after the first episode, TV networks were offering to air the show, but it would have meant less creative control for Thomas and the guys at IKA Collective, whom he says have “fostered a very artistic environment” for him to pursue his work. Television might also “exploit these people or make them look stupid,” and even though the money would be good, Thomas remains speculative about selling out his perverse brainchild.

“I want people to see these everyday people doing extraordinary things, and I wanted to give them a view from an insider, myself, who has had a lifelong fascination and respect for these things. There is a dark underside to all things, and I want to open up that side to those who are outwardly interested and to those who live two lives,” he said.

To watch, visit themidnightarchive.com.

By Joe Bendik

Daniele Marin’s current exhibition, Ground Line, at Noho Gallery explores how women in art and society have evolved over time. By using iconic imagery along with the mundane, Marin recontextualizes these images to create nonlinear narratives. Doing this makes the historical information seem fresh. Marin also uses fabric in the acrylic paintings, creating texture and delineating space.

As Marin said, “The incorporation of fabric shifts the expectation about traditional feminine arts.” It also serves as an anchor point for the eye, a place of return.

Marin considers the painting surface a stage where different techniques communicate with each other. In fact, the paintings themselves seem to speak to each other. The color of each painting works within the bigger concept of the show. Marin is particularly interested in “the ground line,” the foundation for this exhibit, which is the horizontal plane on which objects sit. She weaves this into all of the works, establishing unity while referencing “still” images from the past, thereby reclaiming and redefining their roles as ‘feminine.’ The result is a new way of viewing traditional materials.

Marin was born in Paris but lives in the United States. She has an MFA from the Pratt Institute and has won two painting awards from the Visual Arts Center in New Jersey. She has been featured in Art in America and Woman’s Art Journal (Rutgers), among other publications. Some of her works are in the collection of the Newark Museum, the Montclair museum and Merrill Lynch, as well as private collections.

This show runs through Feb. 4. While visiting the exhibition, I had the eerie feeling of walking through a different state of being; somehow becoming a part of the ground line myself, as if I was inside the paintings.

Daniele Marvin: Ground Line
Noho Gallery, 530 W. 25th St., 4th Fl., 212-367-7063, www.danielemarin.com.
Tuesday–Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

I went out to Queens to take my Great-Aunt Doris to the doctor. I took the G train all the way from where I live in downtown Brooklyn to her neighborhood, Rego Park, which is right next to Forest Hills, which must be right next to Long Island. I always forget the exact geography, but it’s way out there. I was on the subway a good 50 minutes, about 23 stops. I drank a coffee and read the whole paper.

I got off at 63rd Dr. and started walking the several blocks to my great-aunt’s building. I was a little hungry and I remembered that in my backpack was a bagel with cream cheese I had bought with my coffee, but had forgotten about. It was almost 1 p.m. and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. So I started in on the bagel, especially because I knew I’d need strength to get my great-aunt to the doctor’s. My blood sugar is all nutty and if it dipped while I was with her I’d be in trouble. She’s three-quarters deaf, and when she walks she teeters and careens, even with her cane, and she makes everything worse by being stubborn.

So I chewed that life-saving bagel and I was thinking about my great-aunt, how she’s prideful and brave, but her body is falling apart, getting weaker, and, as I often do, I wondered how much longer she could live alone. She won’t wear one of those alarm bracelets and every time I call and she doesn’t answer, I fear that she’s dead.

The city sends her a woman now who comes Monday through Friday, from 9 to 1, which leaves my great-aunt alone on the weekends, and so she hardly goes out of her tiny one-room apartment until the woman, Mary, shows up again Monday morning. Then maybe together they’ll walk to the library or to a bench or to the market. Mary, who is a sweet Haitian woman in her early 40s, has been coming for about a month. My great-aunt needs her very much, but pretends that the city has sent Mary only to help with the housekeeping, that she’s a cleaning lady of some sort.

Then, as I kept walking, I wondered who will take care of me if I manage to get old. My son whom I’ve been a part-time dad for? He loves me now, but what if that ends? And why should he help me? It’s like that Harry Chapin song–and it’s terrible when songs are true–but I haven’t always had time for my son, and so maybe later he won’t have time for me. So will there be anybody who loves me enough to look after me? And if not, will I be able to pay for someone to take care of me? I have no money at 36, how much will I have at 76?

And so my morbid, self-pitying thinking went, and I was licking the cream cheese, with its fat and its fake white color, out of the corner of my mouth, and just a few bites before this bagel was saving my life, my sugar, but now I thought of it clogging my heart and how I’d pay later for this bagel-with-cream-cheese when I was old and deteriorating and in pain. I saw myself lying on the floor in an apartment in Queens–inherited from my great-aunt? All that I’ll be able to afford, her subsidized rent?–paralyzed by a stroke, an aneurysm, a something, just lying there, a thousand bagels-with-cream-cheese my undoing, and I’d pass the time on the floor by thinking how once I could chase girls–I could!–and all the while, too, I’d be hoping that someone would come save me, knock on the door, remember the old man in 6V.

Well, I still ate the whole bagel–the folly of youth. And I passed a lot of old people on the sidewalk. Queens is like one big nursing home. But I was defiant. I ate that bagel! I won’t get old! I’ll be healthy up until the moment I die!

I rang her buzzer, 6V. The door clicked open. I took the elevator–which often is broken, further trapping my great-aunt in her crowded, antique-filled apartment–to the sixth floor. Mary opened the door. She’s a handsome, kind woman. We had met once before.

“I’m glad you could come,” she said. “I don’t like the way she looks. She’s not herself today.”

My great-aunt came out of the bathroom. She’s tiny, a little less than 5 feet now, having lost a few inches over the years. I hugged her to my chest as I always do and stroked her reddish-white hair. We parted and she said, repeating the symptoms she had told me over the phone, “I have knitting needles every couple of minutes running from neck, up my head and into my face. Knitting needles. I haven’t slept for three days.”

“Sounds terrible. We’ll see what the doctor thinks,” I said.

“What?”

I shouted this time and she caught it. I had called the doctor that morning and got her an appointment by convincing the nurse to let us come in, even though there wasn’t an opening until the next day.

Mary had to leave and she and my great-aunt hugged goodbye. “She’s sugar,” said my great-aunt. I called a taxi. I helped my great-aunt on with her sweater-jacket, and her fingers were too shaky to manage the buttons, so I leaned over her from behind to button it, the way I used to help my son with his jackets when he was very little. We got in the elevator and she almost tripped on the way out–the elevator hadn’t stopped even with the floor. It was dangerous, and my vigilance had been lacking, I didn’t have her arm.

“I almost fell,” she said, nervously. A few years ago, she broke her ankle and she worries about falling again.

We got in the waiting taxi without incident. The doctor was over in Forest Hills, about eight blocks away. It was a quick ride. While I paid the driver–a man with an odd orange-ish wig, I only saw the back of his head–my great-aunt opened her door and started getting out. “Wait for me,” I said.

“I can manage,” she said, obstinate.

“Famous last words,” said the bewigged cabbie.

I got the change, raced out my door and around the cab, and sure enough she was out; she had managed. Disaster averted. I helped her up the curb. “How much did you tip him?” she asked.

“A dollar,” I shouted. It had been a four-dollar fare.

“Too much,” she said. “A quarter would have been enough. Are you rich?”

I piloted her into the small, shabby and quaint office of her doctor.

“I have knitting needles in my head,” said my great-aunt to the receptionist.

“Just have a seat, Mrs. Klein,” said the woman, using my great-aunt’s married name from the early 60s. She was divorced twice, the first one when her husband came back loony from World War II. Besides her two marriages, she also had many “gentleman-friends” leave their shoes under her bed, as she likes to say. For a long time, she was a manicurist in a barbershop in one of the old men’s clubs off of Park Ave.

We sat down in the waiting room for a few minutes. Two other patients came in–first, an ancient Jewish man wearing a yarmulke, a stained yellow shirt and a wide black tie, and then an old Russian woman, doubled over with osteoporosis.

The receptionist, who was also the nurse, led us into the one consulting room, which had a little closet-like changing area attached to it. I helped my great-aunt with her sweater and shirt and with her back to me she removed her lopsided bra: one cup is filled with foam padding to compensate for the breast lost to cancer 15 years ago. She put on a blue paper smock and then the nurse and I helped her onto the examining table. It seemed like she would slide off and break something before the doctor got there, but she held on.

The nurse left and I sat on a stool and looked around; the little room was crowded with boxes of insurance forms and there was dust everywhere, the look of neglect. Then the doctor came in: a man in his 60s with a weak chin and bald head, but clear, smart eyes, though tired. He examined my great-aunt and he told her things, most of which she didn’t hear, so I’d repeat crucial phrases for her; she seems to hear me when she can’t hear others. “It’s most likely a pinched nerve, probably caused by arthritis,” he said.

“What? Did you say a pinched nerve?”

“Yes, a pinched nerve!” I shouted. The doctor looked at me appreciatively. He checked her lungs, holding the stethoscope to her back and all over her were little things, brown and dry–how uncomfortable her skin looked. And I admired this doctor, tending to the old, tending to my great-aunt. He wrote her a prescription for anti-inflammatory pills and gave us a sample box as well, enough for two days. He had her take one of the pills with water. “I know she lives alone,” he said to me, and she didn’t catch a word. “So don’t worry, these won’t make her drowsy or groggy. She won’t fall down because of them.” Then he patted her on the back and left the room.

“A nice man,” she said.

She went to get dressed, and called me into the little closet space to hook her bra. Then I buttoned her shirt and helped her with her sweater. “What would I do without you,” she said and kissed me.

We left the office and she insisted on walking to a restaurant where she’d treat me for lunch. She refused to let me get a cab. As we walked, about 10 minutes per block, she practiced her Christian Science, as she likes to call it, even though she’s Jewish. “I don’t have a problem. I don’t have a problem,” she said, and she walked a couple of steps, feeling proud of herself. “It works!” she said. But then she had an attack of the shooting pains and was flinching on the street, we had to stop our slow walk, and she muttered, “Damn, knitting needles,” and then she conceded, “Well, I have a pinched nerve. But at least I don’t have arthritis. That’s one good thing.” I thought it was best not to tell her what she had missed of the doctor’s diagnosis.

It took us about 40 minutes, but we made it to a diner on 108th St.–Rego Park’s main thoroughfare, which my great-aunt calls “Little Moscow.” In addition to being a giant nursing home, Queens is also amazing for its United Nations diversity: on 108th St., you see the greatest panoply of ethnicities anywhere in New York, it’s like an Olympic village, though Russians do predominate.

So we got a booth in the diner and she ordered a Coke and a hamburger with raw onion. She ate the whole thing. Thinking of my heart and the cream-cheese bagel, I had tunafish salad and lentil soup. We were there a while, she’s a slow eater, but finally the meal was over. We hadn’t talked much since I’d have to shout, which isn’t so good in a restaurant, but I did ask her at one point, “Who are you going to vote for for president?”

“Democrat,” she said. “What’s his name?”

“Gore.”

“Yes, I’ll vote for Gore.”

She gave me money to pay and told me to leave a one-dollar tip. It was a 13-dollar bill. I let her amble out on her own for a few steps and threw another dollar-fifty on the table, then caught up to her. We have this problem with tipping whenever we go out. She still tips taxis a quarter and for all meals she leaves a dollar. Her tipping hasn’t kept up with inflation.

We went to a pharmacy and filled her prescription. The beautiful Russian woman behind the counter asked my great-aunt her birthday for the insurance form, and my great-aunt said, “February 22nd, 1919.” I know she was born in 1912; for most of her adult life she’s been subtracting a number of years. Even now I guess she prefers people to think her 81 instead of 88, which is not unreasonable.

It took us another 30 minutes to get to her building, about four blocks away, and again she refused to let me get a cab. “Don’t make me an old lady!” she said. We stopped on a bench halfway there, so she could rest. She kept getting the knitting needles. I rubbed her neck and watched some 12-year-old kids play handball in a schoolyard. They were all calling each other “nigger” and “bitch.” My great-aunt heard nothing.

We got to her apartment and she was exhausted, trembling. Too much walking. I helped her undress and she got into her narrow bed, which is also her couch. I put the phone on her little night table, but even with the extra-loud ringer, she doesn’t always hear it. And then next to the phone, I put a glass of water and the pills the doctor prescribed. Then I kissed her on the cheek and I said, “I love you.”

“I love you more than that,” she said. And then I left the apartment–I had an appointment in the city–and I pulled the door locked behind me. It always feels cruel to leave her. To her and to me. What if I never get to see her again? I always think that maybe this time is the last time. But I steeled myself–you have to walk away from the people you love–and I pushed the button for the elevator so that I could go.

In the late 80s and early 90s I was obsessed with women’s breasts to an appalling degree. Every woman I saw I wanted to nurse on. This obsessive state of mind, which I’ve since outgrown (now I want to go down on all women–much healthier, I think), was very painful. The world was filled with boobs I couldn’t have! I was like that desolate baby chick from the children’s book, who, accidentally ejected from his nest, staggers about in a Beckettian landscape looking for his mommy.

I was living in Princeton during this difficult period and had a lovely girlfriend, but her breasts–for the idiot I was at that time–were too small. The poor girl, a wonderful artist, sensed intuitively my condition–I had the decency never to say anything about it, but women are emotional tuning forks; they pick up everything–and she painted this large canvas of a stupendously endowed woman rising out of the sea. She hung it over my bed, perhaps for me to look at while I mounted her, which now that I think of it is like the remedy that Dr. Hammond, a colleague of the famous 19th-century German psychiatrist Dr. Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, recommended for a shoe fetishist: his wife’s high heel was to be nailed to the wall over their conjugal bed so that he could peer at it and be aroused sufficiently to perform his marital duties.

I didn’t like my condition, and I thought of contacting the Kinsey Institute and asking to be allowed to nurse on 100 women lined up in a gymnasium. I thought that might heal me once and for all; the idea being to demystify the breast, to get my fill. Later, I did attempt such a cure on my own when I moved to New York in 1992 and frequented the suckling booths of a peepshow on 43rd St., though I was often concerned about getting TB from the nipples of those women. They didn’t seem to wash their boobs between clients, but I never developed a bad cough, and I think the cure worked on my breast problem–by 1993, after just a few months of steady nursing, I was interested in all parts of the female anatomy–including the penis. Turns out that right next to the peepshow on 43rd St. was a legendary trannie bar, Sally’s. So I cured myself of my bosom condition, and then right next door I developed another problem, which took me years to get over. But this is one of the strengths of my character: when it comes to sexual fetishes, I can’t be pigeonholed! I’m always changing, always growing!

Anyway, I’ve digressed; let me go back in time to late October of 1990, when I was still that wandering chick look for the perfect nipple. I was flying back from Los Angeles and a friend picked me up at the airport in Philadelphia. It was around 10 p.m. and I was tired, but on our way back to Princeton my friend, an older man, wanted to stop at a gay bar in New Hope, PA–the Provincetown of the Keystone State. So into this gay bar called the Cartwheel we ventured. Being straightish, I didn’t feel entirely at ease as we penetrated the establishment, which is often my reaction to gay bars. It’s like how I, as a Conservative Jew, feel in Orthodox synagogues–I almost belong, but not quite. So I was very pleased when immediately on approaching the large, circular, cartwheelish bar, a gorgeous, older blonde woman said to me, “Where have you been my whole life, baby? Look at those blond eyelashes!”

She was sitting on a barstool, and right away gathered me into her arms–she was a big woman, about 6 feet tall, in a low-cut blouse and stylish skirt–and she began to make love to me, in the old-fashioned sense that is. She looked to be in her late 40s, had a beautiful smile, bedroom eyes that ate you up, glamorous long legs, and, very important to the 26-year-old Jonathan–an ample, delicious bosom. Her breasts were as big as the ones my girlfriend had put in that painting!

It was just about the quickest pick-up of my life. She held me against her lovely, comforting chest, and we chatted happily and spontaneously. We were kindred spirits: she wanted to mother and I wanted to be mothered.

Well, our bar-side lovemaking went on for about an hour and then my friend, who brought me there, wanted to get back to Princeton. I kissed my new ladyfriend goodbye and she gave me her number, written on a Cartwheel napkin, and we promised each other that we would get together–a promise tinged with erotic possibility.

During the car ride home, my friend expressed his wonderment at my ability to pick up–or rather to be picked up by–the only woman in the bar. I was also impressed with myself, but guilty, too–my girlfriend the artist was waiting for me at home! I was a cad. But how could I have resisted?

Over the next two weeks, this older woman and I had two or three quasi-erotic phone conversations. She lived a few towns away from Princeton and was acting in a local theater company–she had gone to the bar with some gay members of her troupe. We talked about getting together, but I kept postponing this: I was scared about cheating on my girlfriend.

I felt unfaithful, though, just by possessing that Cartwheel napkin–it seemed to burn inside my desk drawer where I had it hidden beneath unpaid bills. I would often look at that napkin, with its hastily scribbled name and phone number, and become guiltily excited–should I call or not call? Should I arrange an encounter? But then, in what felt like an heroic moment after a therapy session, I threw the number away! For all my faults, I loved my artist girl, and I never again saw or spoke again to the woman from the bar.

Now let’s fast-forward. The girl and I broke up two years later and I moved to New York, as I said, in 1992. I took my cure at the peep show and picked up my new fetish condition at Sally’s. Over the next several years, I wrote a novel, which was very much inspired by my tenure as a Sally’s barfly. The book, The Extra Man, came out in 1998, and since that time, I’ve often been solicited to provide blurbs for books with sexual content. For example, a few months ago I was contacted, via e-mail, by a publicist for Temple University Press, who was hoping that I might read and blurb one of Temple’s forthcoming books–the memoir of a transsexual. I happily assented, and the book, in galley form, was sent to me–The Woman I Was Not Born to Be: A Transsexual Journey, by Aleshia Brevard (272 pages, $24.05 paper).

I loved the book and found it absolutely fascinating; it inspired me to read several other transsexual memoirs. These personal histories, like Brevard’s, are very similar in structure to that classic literary model–the bildungsroman, the coming-of-age novel. In fact, there is such a wealth now of transsexual memoirs that they are deserving of their own category, maybe “transhistory” or “transromance” or “genitomemoir.” Well, I’ll leave it to the PhDs, but I think I will go with my first suggestion.

The basic outline of the “transhistory” is as follows: a boy or girl very early on in life feels terribly uncomfortable in their gender role and there is a sense that some terrible mistake has occurred, that they were meant to be the other sex. Attempts are made–by parents or society–to reform them, and they learn to repress, as much as possible, their instincts. Eventually–like the protagonist of the bildungsroman–they leave the home, their small world, and venture out, usually to a big city. There they begin to privately or publicly masquerade as the other sex, until eventually the masquerade goes beyond costume and posture and becomes permanent–especially in the latter part of the 20th century with the advent of synthetic hormones and plastic and sex-change surgeries.

The third act is the aftermath of the sex-change. In most of the books I’ve read, whether it be female-to-male or male-to-female, the writer will not proclaim that great happiness has been found or that all their problems are solved, but they all do seem to express this feeling that they’ve done all they can (penises removed, breasts implanted; penises constructed, breasts removed; myriad other surgeries; great physical and psychological suffering) and they have come, finally, to a place of self-acceptance and peace. These are the success stories, though, and it takes a lot of courage to write them. But what of the transsexuals for whom gender reassignment doesn’t work?

Aleshia Brevard’s memoir follows this basic transhistory model, and I’m happy to say that her tale is one of the success stories. It is one of the most amazing memoirs–transsexual or otherwise–I’ve ever read. Here’s the Hollywood plot summary: Born in the late 30s on a farm in the south as Alfred Brevard Crenshaw, but called Buddy; quits the farm and runs away to the West Coast, landing eventually in San Francisco, where he becomes a drag queen at the famous Finocchio’s; performing as Lee Shaw in the late 50s, Buddy is perhaps the first Marilyn Monroe impersonator and achieves such a level of fame that MM herself comes to his show; during this time he meets the love of his life, a man named Hank, and so that they may be married, Buddy undergoes, in 1962, at age 23, a sex-change operation; as Aleshia the relationship with Hank sadly falls apart, but she goes to college, studies drama and is twice voted “Actress of the Year”; after college there’s a brief marriage, then a move to Los Angeles and a career as a B-movie and soap-opera actress and Playboy bunny–becoming the first transsexual Hollywood starlet, but all the while never revealing to Tinseltown her previous life as Buddy Crenshaw; there’s also a second marriage and the role of mother to three stepsons.

This life story, which I’ve summarized with the barest-bone details, is told with incredible wit and grace and feeling. Especially moving is her portrait of her mother, Mozelle, this Southern woman who never stopped loving and supporting her child. Here’s an incredible example of her mother’s devotion (the day after the surgery):

“I was curious about the appearance of my vagina. I’d never seen one–and now I had my own. In fact, I had a brand-new one! I’d bought the darn thing sight unseen. I wanted to see exactly what it looked like.

“The day after surgery, I asked for a hand mirror and tenderly positioned myself for my first peek at a vagina.

“‘Good God!’ I shrieked, ‘What have they done to me? This looks like something you’d hang in your smokehouse…after a hog killing.’

“I’d never seen anything so gross. It was swollen, red and wrinkled… This thing needed to be ironed… I started to cry, which only made matters worse.

“Mother rang for the nurse.

“‘You’re perfectly normal,’ they both reassured me. ‘That’s how you’re supposed to look.’

“Who did they think they were fooling? I was having none of it.

“‘Like this?’ I keened… This thing had folds! I was suddenly reminded of that unattractive rear view as I herded home the cows.

“I was truly upset.

“‘We’ll show you,’ my mother volunteered.

“My mother and the Westlake Clinic’s charge nurse both lifted their skirts, presenting me a view of not one but two naturally born vaginas. By golly, they did have folds. There were four outer labial folds on each vagina. Satisfied that I was normal, I drifted off to sleep.”

Well, I absolutely adored this book, and all the while as I read it I kept wondering why the name Aleshia Brevard was so familiar to me. I had this vague feeling that maybe I had spoken to Aleshia on a phone-sex line or something; it was kind of haunting. And I kept looking at her sexy pictures in the middle of the book and I found her, as Hollywood casting agents had, very beautiful–that’s the other aspect of transhistories: incredible before-and-after photos. Then I got to the end of the memoir and there was a brief mention of having been in a small theater company in Princeton.

She was the woman–though I couldn’t quite recall the name, was it Aleshia Brevard?–whom I had met at the Cartwheel! I promptly e-mailed the publicist at Temple University Press: “I love the book and will happily give it a blurb. But there’s something curious going on–I think I’ve met Aleshia. Can you ask her if she remembers meeting me at a bar in New Hope, PA, 10 years ago?”

A few hours later the publicist forwarded an e-mail to me from Aleshia Brevard. It was one line long: “Where have you been, baby?”