Girl Walks Into a Bar
if I were in a sci-fi movie, I frantically struggled to pull up my pants, getting pee all over myself in the process. Besides having the social instinct to not be caught with my pants down, for a second I was consumed with the primal fear that this robot was going to fix its metal eye on me, lean in, pick me up, and fling me across the desert.

    A sculpture of a fifty-foot woman in the middle of the desert—just another day at Burning Man.
    A lot of people walk around naked at Burning Man, as I said. There’s no pressure to be naked—there are plenty of clothed people, myself being one of them. But I expected a sort of hippie vibe about the nudity—grit and grime and drum circles and chicks with hairy armpits. I didn’t expect the Sexy Cat Syndrome to be alive and well in the middle of the desert. I can report to you that at Burning Man, Sexy Cat Syndrome is in full effect. By that I mean that there are plenty of women there who would never dress up as a witch or ghost on Halloween. Even though they were San Fran Nature Girls, come Halloween they’d be Sexy Cats as much as any Bridge and Tunnel chick who comes into NYC on the weekends. Or maybe instead they’d say, “I’m a space fairy!” but still find a way to wear just a G-string and some wings. These chicks had supermodel bodies and were traipsing around the desert in nothing but silver Grace Jones boots and body paint. Where were the old ladies with long gray hair and low-hangers? I’d come to the middle of the desert expecting a spiritual experience, only to feel the kind of physical inadequacy usually reserved for seeing a Victoria’s Secret ad. Fantastic. Although I saw plenty of these hot chicks with impossibly high boobs and long legs, the men who seemed inclined to disrobe, much fewer in number, were all Haight-Ashbury throwbacks over the age of seventy with long beards and leathery skin. Where was the equity?
    Through all the desert madness at Burning Man, I did meet this character Henry. Though he is a Stanford businessman in real life, at the time I met him at our “camp” in Black Rock City, Nevada, he was wearing black nail polish and a man-skirt. He lived near me in New York, which brings meback to my search for love and Henry’s Christmas party. The good thing about Henry’s party was that Henry isn’t an actor. Because he’s in business, there would be a whole new crop of people for me to meet. I even turned down my friend Chris when he offered me a free ticket to Billy Elliot on the same night, thinking to myself, “No, Rachel! You cannot go to the Broadway musical with your gay friend. You must ‘get out there.’” It was a whole new me.
    So, on a December evening, I went by myself to Henry’s party, where I barely knew anyone. My friend Daisy agreed to meet me there, but she was late, so I was going to have to— gasp —talk to strangers. I was over by the bar and food table, as I am wont to be, and right away, as if it were predestined, a man appeared. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call him Steve. But his real name was Brent.
    “Hi!” I said. There was an odd-looking appetizer on a plate, and I turned to him and boldly continued, “What do you think those are?” It’s highly uncharacteristic of me to just say hi to someone I don’t know out of the blue, but here I was, chatting up a stranger, a cute, clean-cut, businessman-looking stranger.
    At this point, I must interject and say that, in retrospect, I think I had been subconsciously emboldened by a cheesy reality show I had been watching at the time: The Pickup Artist . If you’ve never had the pleasure of seeing this program, the basic premise is this: A guy named Mystery, who is, in actuality, a total tool, teaches über-nerds how to pick up chicks. He wears fur hats and nail polish, and dresses like a wannabe rock star attending a Renaissance Faire. It is reality television at its finest. One of Mystery’s main theses is that it doesn’t really matterWHAT

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