And that’s how I found myself standing mostly naked in a mirrored 12 x 6 room with three other mostly naked women.

This was the ‘technical’ part of the interview. The verbal part – which took place over the phone – consisted of five easy-to-answer questions:

1-How old are you?
2-How tall are you?
3-How much do you weigh?
4-Have you ever “performed” before? And,
5-What is your race?

I knew I should be uncomfortable with the last question, but decided there was a different set of rules in play on that side of the morality divide and that I’d better adapt if I was going to go through with this.

“Cauc… er, white,” I answered.

“OK. You understand we have to ask that question,” Celeste the interviewer said with a brand of politic I’d come to recognize as particular to San Francisco. By way of explanation she added, “We like to keep a nice balance.”

“I understand,” I said, unsure whether being white worked in my favor and wishing I could claim a mixed race complexion.

Celeste was now sitting with clipboard and pen in one of eight booths encircling the stage, her reactions obscured by a two-way mirror.

‘Just do what comes natural,’ she instructed, ‘and have fun.’

I doubt the frozen grin on my face evoked a sense of fun so much as mortification, but I couldn’t make it dissolve. Every time I caught a glimpse of my bare breasted reflection, my mouth stretched tighter and wider, which only deepened my embarrassment.

This was not the same girl who -- 14 years earlier, in an offhand moment of puritanical posturing -- tattled on Grizelda Buttes for pulling down her pants in front of the boys on the Riverview Elementary School playground. This was a girl who might have headlined such a show by dropping her own Sears Toughskins and shouting, “Your milk money for a peek!”

Not that I was overly prudish. I’d been raised by openhearted, if dysfunctional, Democrats in the time and place of Hubert Humphrey, Robert Pirsig and Mary Richards. From my untested worldview there was little about the human experience that couldn’t be parsed or pardoned.

I was just shy. Not unlike Grizelda, I wanted the kids on the playground to take an interest in me.

Grizelda’s misguided strategy to get the kids to look past her unfortunate name and notice her inner Karen (Sue or Kim) had backfired. It earned her a permanent seat at the untouchable’s lunch table.

Would my attempt to showcase my inner Gypsy Rose Lee end similarly?

Also, there was the pesky question of family dysfunction. What did this brand of attention-seeking behavior say about the emotional health of my relationship with my parents… especially with my dad?

But these were questions best left until my 30’s – once I had several more disappointing relationships and at least one 30-day program under my belt. Right now they would only repress the sense of bawdy fun I was supposed to be projecting.

I would conquer this.

Well… the technical, at least. We’d see after that.

To be continued....