Pleasant episodes unfold and welcome on the GV path, Month #1.

The intro to and discovery of a benevolent culture and its truisms, its queens, kings, characters and creatures. Reading about, asking about the history, the mission, the values and finding who would be the carriers of institutional knowledge here. Thirty years of it, no less.

Exploring community and modes of interaction. Finding what it’s like to sit in a purely mundane business conversation, when, as colleague-down-the-hall recounted, you realize a translucent dildo reclines gracefully atop the monitor of a workstation nearby.

Perfectly expected, talking about sex, a necessary part of the workplace, not like any other where I’ve been. Those beloved news buildings, with their editorial floors and behemoth presses in the basement, and before that, the schools and university classrooms.

What planet did you say we’re on?

Time is warped, wormholes lurk and sometimes odd, sometimes artful, always functional, usually fascinating items appear in every package. A world of aisles lined with state-of-the art toys, strap-ons and articulate guides (SESAs or Sex Educator Sales Associates) who welcome all to clean, well-lighted stores.

The universe Sex Positive. Pleasure is good, and GV Land’s an antithesis of Jonathan Edwards’ fire and brimstone cavern all 11th graders know and shudder, least they too meet the hands of an angry god. There is no angry god in GV Land.

Dorothy, it’s not Kansas, nor, Betty, is it . . . just where are you from? Vicksburg? Vicksburg is where?

Norms there are to understand and practices to realize. Three decades of precedence to celebrate and also, overcome. Yes, I said it . . . overcome. A future to build and new horizons, new colors and images and gadgets and joys to behold . . . not even yet conceptualized.

What the hell is she talking about?

Not only have I survived, I have thrived this first month, and the easy silence settles, if only for little a while. For SESA training awaits and who knows? No one knows what concepts, tools, jells, candies, edible panties or other fare are there, waiting to acquaint me, the innocent, with knowings I don’t even know I need to know.

Not yet. So, patiently await the passage into and through Month #2 . . . on the GV path.

Won’t you come along, and . . . we’ll be two?

Could it be I’m falling in love . . . with my duckie? Could it be I’m falling in l-o-v-e with you?

Ahem, another, a song, please! Elvis? Ye-ah-ah, Baby! I can’t help it!

READ “How I Got My Sore Ribcage” in The Betty Blog

Photo: Theresa Sparks, GV President & CEO, with a duckie, gives a tour of the Berkeley store on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, 2007.

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