Well, I’m back from the madness of the Exxxotica Miami Beach convention with the WHACK! Magazine crew! I won’t go into exhaustive detail here about the goings-on, since WHACK! is scheduled to have a full week of coverage, from editorial writeups to picture galleries to video interviews (some done by yours truly and some by the beautiful Lexi Love) with many of the performers in attendance!
Suffice it to say, I had a LOT of fun. For some reason, I had it in my head that I wouldn’t like Miami. My only experience with it came from TV, movies, and one really lame layover in the tiny international terminal at the airport, where I wasn’t allowed to by duty-free since I was returning to the US, and the only food options were Starbucks and bad hot dogs. I had an image in my head of a New York, just plopped on the beach and coated in sleaze, and for some reason, this didn’t appeal to me. Until I got to said beach. I had a blast! Beautiful people walking around in skimpy clothing night and day, on the beach and at the convention center, a whole lot of fun porn people to hang out with, and a booth of our own for the WHACK! crew to call home made the weekend fun, and if there’s one person in this world who can deal with heat and humidity, it’s me. I can honestly say I wasn’t cold once all weekend, which is a rarity for me.
Unfortunately, I had a little too much fun, it seems; after three nights of 3-4 hours sleep and much substance abuse (hey man, cigarettes are only $4 down there! what was I SUPPOSED to do?), I woke up on Sunday with a throat so terribly sore I couldn’t go back to sleep after 7:00 am and absolutely NADA going on in the voicebox. This was majorly problematic. I felt a little sick overall, probably as a result of dehydration and exhaustion, but aside from my inability to speak, there was nothing really WRONG with me, so I couldn’t get out of going to the convention center for the day. However, all the interviews I’d been scheduled to do (Teagan Presley, Keni Styles, Inari Vachs, Adrennalyn, Kirsten Price…) were null. (As was my hawking of the WHACK! booth’s hilariously irreverent game, “Toss Your Load.” The deal was this: for $1, you got three sperm-shaped beanbags, which you attempted to toss through a hole cut out of Lexi Love‘s mouth in a large photo. Lexi sat next to it at her signing table and signed a free photo for anyone who got a beanbag in, thank goodness. If she hadn’t been there I’d have been too afraid of being labeled a horrible misogynist for yelling things like, “Toss your load all over Lexi Love’s face!” “Cram your sack into Lexi Love’s mouth!” and so on, but everyone, including Lexi, found this hilarious.) Hey, I may be all about equal rights and representation, feminism, and turning tired stereotypes on their heads, but there are some things that are just endlessly hilarious, and sex jokes are pretty much the top of the bunch. Sadly, without a voice, I couldn’t keep up my startlingly long list of ways to make the game sound funny to passers-by, much less my string of interviews.
Thankfully, Lexi came to my rescue and did a lot of interviews for me, which was great since she knew most of the people there far better than I do, and I got to sit at her signing table sipping tea and pretending I was her, very unconvincingly.
It’s now Tuesday, I’m back in NYC catching up on mucho work, and my voice is ALMOST back. I CAN talk now, but have decided to write and e-mail all day and not leave the house to avoid over-stressing the old pipes and going back to square one. This is working out beautifully, actually. I think more frequent days of no-talking could be a beautiful, very productive thing.
I’ll be blogging some ponderings and musings that have been going on in my head in response to the Miami convention over the next few days, but in the meantime, I’ll just tell you the most major development from the weekend, aside from my laryngitis: I have officially gotten my first huge male pornstar crush! It’s not much of a secret that I have a gigantic girl-boner for April Flores, Jiz Lee, and several other female-bodied performers. And while I like a whole lot of male-bodied performers a whole lot and have almost given in to some of their wheedling and hopped into bed with a select few, I never went home sighing about how dreamy any of them were… before now! I feel like a total geek admitting my susceptibility to masculine beauty and a British accent, but Keni Styles got me going first in his films, then in charming person, then at LIV at Fontainbleu during Jenna Haze’s big party Friday night… And I haven’t stopped yet. He’s sweet, charming, laid-back, and seems very smart, to boot. Interview coming up? Definitely. One for WHACK! and the mainstream crowd? For sure. One for the blog here, where we can talk more intimately? I’m thinking yes. I’ll keep y’all posted!