click to enlarge (heh)

Every year, my friendly neighborhood bondage shop decorates it’s storefront window with a patriotic theme on Independence Day. Last year’s window was much better than this year’s, but I still wanted to get a shot of it after work. The shop happens to be on a particularly horrid corner and I was a little scared of going there alone at night with the camera equipment, so a coworker volunteered to come with me before we went to meet up with our coworkers for drinks at the Pub. Once we were at the Pub, this coworker recounted to us how, many years before, he was a frequent patron of this particular bondage shop. Trust me, he is not some big pervert or anything like that. He was just innocently going into this shop to buy great big giant dildos.

Years ago, this he used to have an art restoration business, and part of his job was restoring antique frames. This involved buying large quantities of high grade latex to make molds of the frames. Art supply shops sold this latex at a ridiculously high price, and a friend of his told him that dildos were made out of the same kind of latex and sold at a far more reasonable cost. So this coworker started going to this bondage shop, purchasing these insanely large double ended monstrosities, sling them over his shoulder, drag them out the store’s front door, hoist them onto his pick-up’s flat bed, take them home, chop them up, melt them down, and form molds for his antique frames on a regular basis.

In the middle of his story, one of my coworkers interrupted, “Oh my God. A friend of mine is an archeologist, and has to make molds for artifacts, and he does the exact same thing.” Apparently, this isn’t an odd thing to do.

Every week or so, my friend would run out of latex and return to the shop for more dildos. After doing this for several months the shop keeper said to him, “Excuse me sir, I’m terribly sorry for asking you this. But I’ve been wondering, and my employees have been wondering for some time, what exactly it is you’re doing with all of these dildos?” My friend chuckled and explained to them what it was exactly that he was doing. After wincing at the idea of him chopping up their merchandise, they all nodded in understanding and the shop keeper said to him, “Oh, you should have told us earlier, because we keep the really big ones in the back.”

As he was telling us this story, I couldn’t help but remember my father’s tale about his trip to New Orleans for a business convention when I was in High School. One morning he was strolling around the French Quarter and saw a shop window with an interesting name that I can’t remember. He walked up to the window, squinted his eyes and peered inside. It turned out to be a bondage shop and the store was full of enthusiastic patrons trying on zippered leather masks, chaps, stap-ons and other assorted bondage gear as they were admiring themselves in the the shop’s mirrors. My father very quickly averted his eyes and nervously walked away as quickly as he could.

When he returned, at the dinner table, we all asked him how was his trip to New Orleans. His eyes glazed over, a nostalgic curtain descended over his face and he replied, “Oh, New Orleans was wonderful. How can I describe it? It’s hot, sticky, smelly, beguiling and somehow permeated with a sense of evil. It was like a, it was like a,” he struggled for the perfect expression to describe the city to us, “It was like a great big giant vagina!”

Dad was awesome like that.

See you all July 8th.